Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body Motion Communication
(Conduct and Communication)
by Ray L. Birdwhistell
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First published 1970
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
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Ray Birdwhistell’s Kinesics and Context was an important
contribution to the field of NVC. Building upon two decades of his work, this study of human body motion advances the
theory that human communication needs and uses all the senses, that the
information conveyed by human gestures and movements is coded and patterned
differently in various cultures, and that these codes can be discovered by
skilled scrutiny of particular movements within a social context. Birdwhistell
was an anthropological pioneer with ideas that he developed. Kinesics is now part
of a systematic anthropological investigation, and it was the author that
coined the term to mean human body motion. Birdwhistell was in the school that understood
body movements to be culturally patterned rather than universal.