Gesture, Race and Culture Book Review

Gesture, Race and Culture Book Review

Gestures are unique forms of non-verbal communication, which have been studied, both out of context and within culture and race. In 1942, Dr. David Efron wrote the book, Gesture and Environment, which was a summary of Efron’s research of the claims of the Nazi scientists that “differences in gestures were due solely to racial inheritance” (Ekman, 7). He compared groups of immigrant Southern Italians and Eastern Jews, living in New York City, by using direct observation and recording the outward gestures of this collection of people. These observations were then evaluated and studied to determine whether there were group differences between them. Efron went even further to research whether there were differences between the traditional Eastern Jews and “Americanized” Jews with the same background; and between the traditional Southern Italians and the “Americanized” Southern Italians. He even went so far as to include sketches of gestural patterns of these groups and other appropriate illustrations, drawn by Stuyvesant Van Veen, an artist from New York City. Efron’s research was so unique and diverse that his book was re-published in 1972 under the name, Gesture, Race and Culture.

The first part of David Efron’s book includes summaries of the theories of gesticulation that had been explored at that time. These theories provided the base upon which Efron built his research. Summaries of a few of these claims are included in the following paragraphs.

The most emphatic theory was written by Hans Gunther, who was one of the top people in the Third Reich. Gunther claimed that mankind “is composed of four distinct ‘races’ (the Nordic, the Western, the Eastern and the Dinaric), each having ...

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...late more discussion on the “roots” of the gestures we use daily.

From the text, Nonverbal Communication in Human Interaction, Knapp and Hall define gestures as “any movements made by the body or some part of it”. Both readings have great information about gestures along with other factors that play a role when communicating nonverbally. Gesture, Race and Culture, was a pretty straight forward read. It did have a lot of interesting and valuable information that I could relate to situations that I interact with in my life and am more aware of certain gestures people make.

I do agree with Efron, that a person’s culture and background has an effect on their gestures. I also agree that if a person relocates and moves, given time, their gestures will slightly change also. A person’s environment has a great influence on how they communicate and gesture nonverbally.