Conventional gestures are those movements we make, such as waving hello and shaking hands, that are part of a learned, shared, symbolic system. In this book Richard L. Epstein working with the illustrator Alex Raffi examines how such gestures mean and how we can study them. Drawing on their collection of over 400 American gestures, available on the Advanced Reasoning Forum website, they examine problems of methodology and the nature of gestures in relation to the work of others who have studied and collected gestures from various cultures. An extensive annotated bibliography describes and comments on virtually all known collections of conventional gestures.

I Gestures and Communications II The Methodology of Identifying Gestures III The Meaning of a Gesture IV A Grammar of American Conventional Gestures? V Some Classifications of Conventional Gestures VI Are There Universal Conventional Gestures? VII The Evolution of Gestures VIII Describing and Organizing Gestures in a Gestuary An Annotated Bibliography of Collections of Conventional Gestures Bibliography Index