Cover not available

Article published In: Anthropology of Gesture
Edited by Heather Brookes and Olivier Le Guen
[Gesture 18:2/3] 2019
► pp. 281–304

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Body-directed gesture and expressions of social difference in Chachi and Afro-Ecuadorian discourse

 | Universidad San Francisco de Quito
Published online: 17 February 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.19034.flo
Abstract
This paper presents an analysis of a data set consisting of instances of body-directed gesture that occurred in racializing expressions of social difference during ethnographic interviews with two neighboring peoples of Ecuador: the indigenous Chachi, speakers of the Cha’palaa language, and Afro-Descendant people, who speak a variety of Spanish. When talking about differences among social groups and categories, a particular sub-type of body-directed gestural practice was salient: using indexical-iconic self-directed gestures as a way to describe other people’s physical bodies or appearances, including references to skin color, hair texture, clothing and ornamentation, and embodiments of carrying objects close to the body. The paper describes the trends seen in the forms and meanings of these gestures in their role here as part of socially categorizing and racializing discourses in the Latin American socio-historical context.
Article outline
  • Multimodality in the Latin American socio-historical context
  • Multimodality in racializing discourse
  • Self-directed indexicality in discourse of social categorization
  • Inter-group relationships and linguistic categorization in Esmeraldas, Ecuador
  • Body-directed gesture in racializing discourse
  • Discussion: Talking about bodies with bodies
  • Notes
  • References
References (80)
References
AAA statement on race. (1998). American Anthropologist, 100 (3), 712–713. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Alcoff, L. M. (1999). Towards a phenomenology of racial embodiment. Radical Philosophy, 951, 15–26.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Añapa Cimarrón, J. B. (2003). Chachi (1ra. ed.). Quito: The Black Rider, Editores.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anti-Defamation League. (2019). Okay hand gesture. [URL]
Ayobade, O. (2015). Fela’s clenched fists: The double “Black Power” salute and political ideology. In A. Agwuele (Ed.), Body talk and cultural identity in the African world (pp. 37–57). Sheffield: Equinox Publishing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barrett, S. A. (1925). The Cayapa Indians of Ecuador. New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barth, F. (1969). Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of culture difference. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bashkow, I. (2017). The meaning of whitemen: Race and modernity in the Orokaiva cultural world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Basso, K. H. & Hymes, D. (1979). Portraits of “The whiteman”: Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols Among the Western Apache (First Paperback Edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bavelas, J. B. & Chovil, N. (2000). Visible acts of meaning: An integrated message model of language in face-to-face dialogue. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 19 (2), 163–194. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2005). What gestures do: Some communicative functions of quotable gestures in conversations among Black urban South Africans. Journal of Pragmatics, 37 (12), 2044–2085. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bucholtz, M. (2010). White kids: Language, race, and styles of youth identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bucholtz, M., Casillas, D. I., & Lee, J. S. (2018). Feeling it: Language, race, and affect in Latinx youth learning. London: Taylor and Francis. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Casagrande, J. B. (1981). Strategies for survival: The Indians of highland Ecuador. In Norman E. Whitten (Ed.), Cultural transformations and ethnicity in modern Ecuador (pp. 260–277). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chun, E. W. (2010). Ideologies of legitimate mockery: Margaret Cho’s revoicings of Mock Asian. Pragmatics, 14 (2/3), 263–289.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chun, E. W. & Lo, A. (2015). Language and racialization. In Nancy Bonvillain (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of linguistic anthropology (pp. 220–232). New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Collins, P. H. (2000). Gender, Black feminism, and Black political economy. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 568 (1), 41–53. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cooperrider, K. (2014). Body-directed gestures: Pointing to the self and beyond. Journal of Pragmatics, 711, 1–16. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Corbett, G. G. (2000). Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Covington-Ward, Y. (2016). Gesture and power: Religion, nationalism, and everyday performance in Congo. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Curnow, T. & Liddicoat, A. J. (1998). The Barbacoan languages of Colombia and Ecuador. Anthropological Linguistics, 40 (3), 384–408.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
DeBoer, W. & Blitz, J. H. (1991). Ceremonial centers of the Chachi. Expedition, 331, 53–62.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dick, H. & Wirtz, K. (2011). Racializing discourses. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 211, E2–E10. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Efron, D. (1972 [1941]). Gesture, race and culture: A tentative study of the spatio-temporal and “linguistic” aspects of the gestural behavior of Eastern Jews and Southern Italians in New York City, living under similar as well as different environmental conditions. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Enfield, N. J. (2009). The anatomy of meaning: Speech, gesture, and composite utterances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fabian, J. (1990). Presence and representation: The other and anthropological writing. Critical Inquiry, 16 (4), 753–772. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2006). The other revisited: Critical afterthoughts. Anthropological Theory, 6 (2), 139–152. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fassin, D. (2011). Racialization. In Frances E. Mascia-Lees (Ed.), A companion to the anthropology of the body and embodiment (pp. 419–434). New York & Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley & Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Floyd, S. (2010). Discourse forms and social categorization in Cha’palaa. PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2014). ‘We’ as social categorization in Cha’palaa, a language of Ecuador. In T.-S. Pavlidou (Ed.), Constructing collectivity: “We” across languages and contexts (pp. 135–158). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2018). Chapter 9. Egophoricity and argument structure in Cha’palaa. In S. Floyd, E. Norcliffe, & L. San Roque (Eds.), Typological studies in language (pp. 269–304). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32 (10), 1489–1522. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2011). Building action in public environments with diverse semiotic resources. Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici, 112–1131, 169–182.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gotkowitz, L. (Ed.). (2011a). Histories of race and racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from colonial times to the present. Durham: Duke University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2011b). Introduction: Racisms of the present and the past in Latin America. In L. Gotkowitz (Ed.), Histories of race and racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from colonial times to the present (pp. 1–56). Durham: Duke University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hale, C. R. (2006). Más que un indio = More than an Indian: Racial ambivalence and neoliberal multiculturalism in Guatemala. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hall, K., Goldstein, D. M., & Ingram, M. B. (2016). The hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, gesture, spectacle. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6 (2), 71–100. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hall, S. (1996). Race: The floating signifier. Video, Media Education Foundation.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hammonds, E. M. & Herzig, R. M. (Eds.). (2009). The nature of difference: Sciences of race in the United States from Jefferson to genomics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hartigan, J. (2005). The end of social construction: What comes next? Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 49 (2), 205–212. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hill, J. H. (2009). The everyday language of white racism. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ifekwunigwe, J. O., Wagner, J. K., Yu, J.-H., Harrell, T. M., Bamshad, M. J., & Royal, C. D. (2017). A qualitative analysis of how anthropologists interpret the race construct. American Anthropologist, 119 (3), 422–434. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jijón y Caamaño, J. (1914). Los aborígenes de la provincia de Imbabura. Los Cayapas en Imbabura. Madrid: Blass y Cía., Impresores.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kendon, A. (1997). Gesture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 26 (1), 109–128. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kita, S. (Ed.). (2003). Pointing: Where language, culture, and cognition meet. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lane, K. E. (2002). Quito 1599: City and colony in transition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levinson, S. C. (2003). Space in language and cognition: Explorations in cognitive diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lipski, J. M. (2008). Afro-Choteño speech: Towards the (re)creation of a “Black Spanish”. Negritud, 11, 99–120.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Losonczy, A.-M. (2015). La trama interétnica: Ritual, sociedad y figuras de intercambio entre los grupos negros y Emberá del Chocó. Bogotá: Institut français d’études andines.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Macey, D. (1999). Fanon, phenomenology, race. Radical Philosophy, 951, 8–14.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mahendran, D. (2007). The facticity of blackness: A non-conceptual approach to the study of race and racism in Fanon’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 5 (3), 191–204. [URL]
Mallon, F. E. (2011). A postcolonial palimpsest: The Work Race Does in Latin America. In L. Gotkowitz (Ed.), Histories of race and racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from colonial times to the present (pp. 321–336). Durham: Duke University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2010). Phenomenology of perception (trans. D. A. Landes). London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ortiz, A. (1957). Juyungo: Historia de un negro, una isla y otros negros. Quito: Editorial Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ortner, S. B. (2016). Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6 (1), 47–73. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Restall, M. (Ed.). (2005). Beyond black and red: African-Native relations in colonial Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reyes, A. & Lo, A. (Eds.). (2009). Beyond yellow English: Toward a linguistic anthropology of Asian Pacific America. New York: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Roback, A. A. (1944). “A” dictionary of international slurs (ethnophaulisms): With a supplementary essay on aspects of ethnic prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Sci-Art Publ.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Robinson, C. L. (2011). Hair as race: Why “good hair” may be bad for black females. Howard Journal of Communications, 22 (4), 358–376. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schwartz, S. B. (1995). Colonial identities and the sociedad de castas. Colonial Latin American Review, 4 (1), 185–201. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sherzer, J. (1991). The Brazilian thumbs-up gesture. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 1 (2), 189–197. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stocking, Jr., G. W. (1982). Race, culture, and evolution: Essays in the history of anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stutzman, R. (1981). El mestizaje: An all-inclusive ideology of exclusion. In Norman E. Whitten (Ed.), Cultural transformations and ethnicity in modern Ecuador (pp. 45–94). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Taussig, M. T. (1993). Mimesis and alterity: A particular history of the senses. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Urciuoli, B. (1996). Exposing prejudice: Puerto Rican experiences of language, race, and class. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wade, P. (1997). Race and ethnicity in Latin America. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2005). Rethinking “mestizaje”: Ideology and lived experience. Journal of Latin American Studies, 37 (2), 239–257. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2017). Racism and race mixture in Latin America. Latin American Research Review, 52 (3), 477–485. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wagner, J. K., Yu, J.-H., Ifekwunigwe, J. O., Harrell, T. M., Bamshad, M. J., & Royal, C. D. (2017). Anthropologists’ views on race, ancestry, and genetics. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 162 (2), 318–327. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Weismantel, M. (2001). Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of race and sex in the Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Whitney, S. (2015). The affective forces of racialization: Affects and body schemas in Fanon and Lorde. Knowledge Cultures, 3 (01), 45–64.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Whitten, N. E. (1965). Class, kinship, and power in an Ecuadorian town: The negroes of San Lorenzo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1974). Black frontiersmen: A South American case. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2007). The longue durée of racial fixity and the transformative conjunctures of racial blending. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 12 (2), 356–383. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Floyd, Simeon
2025. Multimodal Existential Negation in Ecuadorian Highland Kichwa. Languages 10:6 ► pp. 138 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue