MacDonald Critchley b. 1900
MacDonald Critchley used his observations of a deaf mute’s
inability to understand (or produce) speech, to write about the nature and
language of gestures. Critchley noticed that there were similarities between
the systems of gestures used by the deaf mute, with the hand signing of some
aboriginal communities. Dividing gestures into two main areas - those of
obvious interpretation, and those which have a specific or artificial meaning -
he saw gesture as being full of eloquence to the judging onlooker who holds the
key to its interpretation knowing how and what to observe. The Language of
Gesture’s publication coincided with the outbreak of WW2, rendering it largely
ignored, so he updated his theories in a second book on gestures, Silent
Language (1975). Critchley thought of gesture as the precursor to speech with
them then co-developing. Our instinctive gestures, he described, were more
primitive than the symbolic gestures.
Read The Language of Gesture (1939) Edward Arnold
& Co.