Books like Gestures by Desmond Morris

This world guide is the first attempt ever made to bring together in a single volume, human gestures from all around the world. More than 600 common gestures are illustrated, described, and explained. We all use gestures. They are the extra language we employ when words fail. We cross our fingers for luck, give the V sign, or offer a cheerful thumbs-up. In our own country we know exactly what these signs mean and we rarely use them inappropriately or mistake their meaning. In foreign countries, however, they may have different meanings, or we may encounter new gestures that we cannot understand. For the traveler this guide is indispensable. But it also has special appeal for anyone interested in human communication. And for the casual browser it contains hundreds of amusing examples of ways in which, almost without thinking, we use our hands, faces, and occasionally other body parts to insult, to threaten, to praise, to implore, and generally to communicate on a level deeper than the realm of spoken language.

A comprehensive guide to the 200 most common gestures, signals, and body‑language cues across cultures, with practical country‑by‑country explanations and new sections on sign language, Tai Chi, flirting, and more.

David McNeill, a pioneer in the ongoing study of the relationship between gesture and language, here argues that gestures are active participants in both speaking and thinking. He posits that gestures are key ingredients in an "imagery-language dialectic" that fuels speech and thought. The smallest unit of this dialectic is the growth point, a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage.In Gesture and Thought, the central growth point comes from a Tweety Bird cartoon. Over the course of twenty-five years, the McNeill Lab showed this cartoon to numerous subjects who spoke a variety of languages, and a fascinating pattern emerged. The shape and timing of gestures depends not only on what speakers see but on what they take to be distinctive; this, in turn, depends on the context. Those who remembered the same context saw the same distinctions and used similar gestures; those who forgot the context understood something different and changed gestures or used none at all. Thus, the gesture becomes part of the growth point—the building block of language and thought.Gesture and Thought is an ambitious project in the ongoing study of how we communicate and how language is connected to thought.