Gesturecraft

“Where others would segregate, Streeck integrates, and this is only one of the valuable insights that readers will glean from Gesturecraft.”

“Streeck's book is an erudite, thoughtful, and richly matured world. The field of gesture research needs Gesturecraft and more books like it.”

“[The author argues] that the manual aspects of most important gestures often are neglected, even though treatises on language and linguistics rarely dismiss the vocal apparatus, considering it an essential feature of the communication equation. He promises to undo this neglect in this volume, and, for 200-plus pages of clear and persuasive prose, he does.”

“This is one of the most original and important books on gesture to appear in recent years. It offers a radically new analytic point of departure for thinking about gesture, one that moves away from a picture of gesture as the visual representation of internal mental life, to investigate the actions of skilled, cognitively rich bodies as they make sense out of the worlds they inhabit with others through practical work with their hands. The book includes a detailed investigation of the hand as a complex cognitive organ, one that finds its natural home in mundane work settings such as an auto repair shop, as well as a comparison of gestural practices in a variety of languages and cultures. It is essential reading for anyone interested how human action, communication and cognition emerge from embodied practice.”

“Streeck provides the reader with his ideas in a concise but richly illustrated way. It offers a valuable overview on how human hands are used that might play a role in our understanding of why humans gesture and what impact gesturing can have on human interaction, communication, and thinking.”

“Gesturecraft is a rich and thought-provoking book, always elegantly and eruditely written, whose main argument — that the body and especially the hands are central, shared parts in human technologies of knowledge; and that as a result of their semiotic virtues and visibility, they can become primary and, indeed, insistent visible articulators of that knowledge — I have found equally useful for understanding the role of the hands in wider human processes of utterance, and their special power in the realization of human communicative potential.”