In memoriam
Obituary: Adam Kendon 1934-2022
Cornelia Müller
“You know, I am not going to last forever”, Adam reminded me over and again, years ago, discussing issues of the GESTURE journal, a submission to the book series ‘Gesture studies’ or some fascinating examples of gesture usages he had just discovered. I used to laugh and not take him seriously. It felt like Adam had always been there and would always be here with us, always ready to share his deep knowledge, his experience and his sharp analytical eye on the body as a means of communication and expression in face-to-face interaction. Always ready to discuss, challenge and contribute to recent developments in gesture studies or in signed languages, or in language evolution–be it over the phone, Skype, a glass of red wine or a cup of tea. He was always there.
But Adam was 88, and he had been in ill health for some time. On 14th September 2022, the pioneer of modern gesture studies passed away. After a scholarly career that lasted almost 60 years, the Honorary President of the International Society for Gesture Studies, editor of the journal GESTURE, and the book series ‘Gesture Studies’, author of six books and of over a hundred articles is no longer here. Until his very last moments he made adjustments to a book manuscript which will be published posthumously (Kendon, 2023). His body was tired, but his mind remained as crisp, clear and as dedicated to science as it had always been.
Adam was the most accomplished and knowledgeable researcher of embodied communication today. He incarnated the ideal of a widely-read scholar – a man of letters in the old sense. His work seamlessly continued in the tradition of gesture scholars from classical times to the present that he knew so very well.
Born In London 1934, Adam grew up near the city. Early on he developed an interest in natural history, specifically in observing the social behavior of birds and later also humans. He attended St. Johns College, Cambridge where he read Botany, Zoology and Human Physiology, as well as Experimental Psychology for the Natural Sciences Tripos. In 1956 he moved to Balliol College, Oxford where he became an Advanced Student at the Institute for Experimental Psychology (supported by a grant from the Medical Research Council). There he worked on the temporal organization of utterances in conversation, using the ‘methods of interaction chronography’ developed by the American anthropologist Eliot Chapple (Chapple, 1939; Chapple & Arensberg, 1940; Chapple & Coon, 1942). After three years at Oxford, Adam was awarded an English Speaking Union scholarship to study at Cornell University, Ithaca, upstate New York. During this time, he was able to work with Chapple who had a laboratory at Rockland State Hospital. This work was put together in his dissertation Temporal aspects of the social performance in two-person encounters. He was awarded the degree of D. Phil. from Oxford University in 1963.
Also during that time at Oxford, Adam encountered the work of Albert Scheflen (see Scheflen, 1964, 1973) and Ray Birdwhistell (see Birdwhistell, 1970), two further important sources of inspiration for him, which eventually led him to move to the United States. Their work convinced him that undertaking detailed studies of all aspects of observable behavior in interaction was necessary for any advance in understanding how interaction is accomplished and he felt that the systematic observational methods that Birdwhistell and Scheflen were developing within a framework inspired by the methods of structural linguistics, provided a sound basis upon which to proceed.
After his D. Phil., Adam became a member of the Institute (later Department) of Experimental Psychology at Oxford. There he joined a research group on social skills, headed by E.R.W.F. Crossmann and Michael Argyle. The goal of this group was to extend the approach to the study of perceptuo-motor skills developed at Cambridge under Frederick Bartlett (among others) to the analysis of social interaction (see Saito, 1999 for an overview of Bartlett’s work). At this point in his career Adam came into contact with the work of Erving Goffman, whose work became a continuing source of inspiration. Adam wanted to underline with his own empirical work what Goffman had shown in ‘Alienation from interaction’ (Goffman, 1957) and ‘On face work’ (Goffman, 1955), namely, how occasions of interaction could be studied as behavioral systems, maintained through the sustained and skillful performances of the participants. The research he undertook as a member of this research group was published in 1967 as ‘Some functions of gaze direction in social interaction (Kendon, 1967). In this paper, he uncovered consistencies between gaze and the coordination of turns at talk, suggesting that gaze in interactions serves monitoring and signaling functions. This paper earned the status of a ‘Citation Classic’ in Current Contents in 1981.
In 1965 Adam was able to visit Scheflen in Philadelphia. Subsequently, Scheflen arranged for him an appointment as a Research Associate under Henry Brosin at the Western Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute in Pittsburgh. Here he worked closely with William Condon, learning his methods of micro-kinesic linguistic analysis (see Condon 1976; Condon & Ogston, 1967). While there, he also met Ray Birdwhistell. In 1967 Adam went to Cornell University for one year as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Psychology and Sociology, but he then joined Albert Scheflen’s Project on Human Communication, established at Bronx State Hospital in New York with funds from the National Institute of Health. Adam worked with Scheflen on the study of the spatial ecology of everyday life in urban homes. In collaboration with Andrew Ferber, he undertook a detailed study of the structure of human greetings, among other things (Kendon & Ferber, 1973). During this time, he also met his later wife, Margret Rhoads.
Christian Heath described this collection of papers as “a landmark in the development of naturalistic research on social interaction. It powerfully demonstrates the analytic rewards of utilizing film and video to explicate the fine details of in situ human conduct, and provides a distinctive methodological orientation for an anthropology of social interaction” (Heath, 1992: 705). Heath points out that although Adam had clearly been guided by the methodological and theoretical frameworks of Goffman, Scheflen and Birdwhistell, he nevertheless developed “a unique analytic orientation to the study of social interaction.” Heath continues: “The detailed studies of interactional organization found in this collection beautifully reveal the emergence of [Kendon’s] framework, and demonstrate its ability to explicate the systematics that underly the fine, yet fundamental, details of human sociability” (Heath, 1992: 705).
The articles from this period, together with the work done at Oxford, were published together as a book in a revised and updated form in 1990 under the title Conducting interaction (Kendon, 1990). Besides re-printing Adam’s seminal papers on gaze direction in interaction and interactional synchrony, this book also includes the study of greetings, a study of a human courtship interaction and a study of the spatial-orientational arrangements that can be observed in conversational interaction. In this work Adam offered his concept of the ‘F-formation’ which suggests that the way in which participants in interaction dispose themselves in space and orient to one another is the ‘behavioral material’ for the processes by which what Goffman (1963) termed the ‘working consensus’ of occasions of focused interaction is established and maintained.
The paper that Adam published on human greetings was informed by ethology (thereby reflecting his continuing biological and natural history orientation). It attracted the attention of Derek Freeman at Australian National University. Freeman was head of the Department of Anthropology in the Research School of Pacific Studies at Australian National University. He was interested in establishing a human ethology laboratory in his Department and invited Adam to apply for a Research Fellowship there, which would make this possible. Accordingly, in 1974, Adam and his family left for Australia.
As part of his work in the Department in Canberra, Adam went on an expedition to the Enga community in the highlands of New Guinea, with a view to filming various aspects of their social behavior, including greetings. While there he had the opportunity to make some films of a young deaf woman who used a sign language. This sign language, prevalent in the Enga valley where Adam was working, is an example of an ‘isolated’ or ‘natural’ sign language. Apparently it had arisen following an epidemic of meningitis that left many children deaf. Thanks to the help of a hearing Enga assistant fluent in this sign language, Adam undertook a detailed analysis of it, published in a series of three papers in the journal Semiotica (Kendon, 1980a), published in one monograph in a revised form accompanied by two new essays (Kendon, 2020).
The Human Ethology Laboratory that Adam helped organize was later joined by the ethnographic film makers Timothy and Patsy Asch, and the laboratory came to be known as the Human Ethology and Iconic Recording Laboratory, reflecting the emphasis on film documentation that it came to have. In his own work, however, Adam turned, increasingly, to the study of gesture. He came to regard this as a coherent domain of human visible action, closely involved with, and sometimes functioning in place of, linguistic action. Adam had been impressed by the observations that Birdwhistell had summarized on kinesics (see Kendon, 1972b for an exposition of Birdwhistell’s kinesic project) and had, while at Cornell University, undertaken a micro-analytic study of the organization of the flow of body motion in a single speaker. This demonstrated how speech and bodily action were coordinated. The paper that resulted, ‘Some relationships between body-motion and speech’ (Kendon, 1972a), was later described by David McNeill as the true starting point for the recognition that gestures “are integral parts of the processes of language and its use” (McNeill 2005: 13). Adam expressed this point of view again with great clarity in a paper published in 1980 under the title ‘Gesture and speech: two aspects of the process of utterance’ (Kendon, 1980b). He came to see that the study of ‘gesture’, as a distinguishable domain of action intimately involved in utterance, could merit development as a field of study in its own right (Kendon, 1986). From 1980 onwards ‘gesture’ became his main preoccupation.
Following this, Adam was prompted to explore the sign languages that were said to be in use among Australian Aboriginals. He discovered that these sign languages, which have been elaborated not because of deafness but because of ritual speech-avoidance under certain circumstances and which belong, thus, to the class of what may be called alternate sign languages, had received almost no scientific attention. He proceeded to take up their study and obtained research support from various sources (including the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Australian Institute for Torres Straits Islander and Aboriginal Studies and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation) and, over the course of the following ten years, examined almost every aspect of these sign languages which were still in active use among the central desert Aboriginal populations, including the Warlpiri, among other groups. In 1988 he published a book (Kendon, 1988) which remains, to this day, the only full-scale study of Australian Aboriginal sign languages.
At the same time (with help from the Istituto Italiano per Gli Studi Filosofici), Adam undertook a deep study of the work of Andrea de Iorio, a priest and pioneer of Italian archaeology who, in 1832, had published a book on Neapolitan gesture. De Iorio wrote this book as a kind of handbook for the interpretation of the images on the ancient vases, frescoes and mosaics that had come to light in the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii, for he believed that there was continuity in the expressive culture of present day Neapolitans with that of the ancient Greeks who had founded the city some two and a half millennia before. In effect, de Iorio had undertaken a detailed ethnographic study of Neapolitan gesture use. Adam made a full English translation of de Iorio’s book and this, together with a lengthy discussion of de Iorio’s work and its place in the development both of gesture studies and of Neapolitan archaeology, was published in 2000 under the title Gesture in Naples and Gesture in classical antiquity’ (see De Iorio, 2000). This publication received wide notice, being reviewed in The Economist, The New York Review of Books, and the The New Republic, as well as in a number of scholarly journals.
In 1988 Adam returned to Philadelphia. There he taught for two years at the Annenberg School of Communications. At the same time, he began to develop a new line of research suggested by the comparative work of David Efron (1941). Efron, in a study of immigrants in Manhattan, had shown that Southern Italians made use of an elaborate vocabulary of gestures which could be used independently of speech and that in this they differed from another cultural group, East European Jews. Efron demonstrated that this difference is the product of differences in cultural tradition, leaving open the question as to why such differences should arise. Adam decided that a study of gesture among Southern Italians in their original settings might throw light on why gesture played such an important role for them. He proposed that the ecology of everyday social life might offer circumstances in which the elaboration of gesture might be adaptive. In 1991 he was invited by Pio Enrico Ricci Bitti and Pina Boggi Cavallo to become Visiting Professor the University of Salerno. He was also granted research funds from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research of New York. In this way he began what became a long association with Campania, especially with the city of Naples. In 1996, thanks to Jocelyn Vincent Marrelli and Carla Cristilli, he was appointed as a Visiting Professor at the Istituto Universitario Orientale (now the Università degli Studi di Napoli “Orientale”) where he was able to collaborate with students in the collection and analysis of a great deal of video recordings of everyday interaction in Naples.
From 1991 onwards Adam spent increasing amounts of time in southern Italy, mainly in Naples. From 2002-2005 he was a Visiting Professor at both the “Orientale” and at the University of Calabria. Both before and during these years, he was able to collaborate extensively with many students in directing their graduation theses and in several cases this work resulted in significant studies of gesture in Naples and how gestures are used in spoken discourse. Some of this work has been published in a number of separate papers (Kendon, 1993, 1995,1997, 2004a,b; Kendon & Versante, 2003) but it also is prominently featured in Adam’s seminal book Gesture: Visible action as utterance’ (Kendon, 2004a).
This book is probably the most significant contribution to gesture studies to appear since David McNeill’s Hand and mind (1992) and must be ranked among the most important books on gesture to be published in English since David Efron’s book of 1941. It makes a serious claim to establish the domain of ‘gesture’ as a coherent and separable field of study. It contains an extended and detailed history of the study of gesture; there are chapters which provide detailed descriptions of gesture use in conversation (unmatched in any other publication), an extensive study of gestures with meta-discursive or pragmatic functions, as well as chapters which discuss how gesture develops when used without speech (as in sign languages), cultural variations in gesture, and an attempt to propose an ecological theory to account for why cultures vary in gesture use.
Anyone who has had the opportunity to work with Adam also knows that he was not just a keen observer, an acute ethologist and well versed in the literature of his chosen fields. They soon discovered his manifold other interests, talents, and fascinations. Adam was a great devotee of the poetry of Edward Lear and the works of Lewis Carroll, which, given the slightest excuse, he would quote from extensively. He was an accomplished cook of Indian cuisine, he was fond of wine and especially particular about tea. He was very devoted to cats and (over the years) had been a host to a great many. He practiced photography extensively and although he twice entered exhibitions, his works in this medium were mostly to be seen in his home. In 2005, however, the association Artefactory 41.14 of Procida published a set of 12 photographic postcards, ‘The Cats of Corricella – I gatti di Corricella’, a series of images showing cats as they are so often found among the brilliantly coloured fishing nets and boats of this little fishing village on the Island of Procida. Adam also occasionally wrote poetry (or rather, as he would tell you, one of his cats did this for him).
In the three main areas of his research, Adam worked within an empirical framework that follows a unique style. He shows how human behavior can best be understood through naturalistic observations and fine-grained structural studies of interactions, signs, or gestures in their everyday contexts. This work is both ethological and ethnographic and represents a distinct approach to the study of what today is often referred to as the multimodality of communication.
Whoever has had the chance to analyze data with Adam remains fascinated by his capacity to “see” structural patterns of behavior in their natural contexts. And it is this combination of meticulous observations of behavior in context, a rigorous analytic style, along with in-depth knowledge of the historical literature that characterize his work in general – not only his pioneering work on human gestures.
Adam Kendon‘s passing marks a generational change for the community of gesture students, sign language researchers and all those fascinated by the study of social interaction. It leaves those of us who are fascinated by the range of phenomena addressed in his work to further engage with Adam through his writings. It invites us to continue the study of gesture in its historical depth, its cultural width and its phenomenological range. The call is on us to keep him present by continuing on the scholarly paths he has so uniquely designed and – with a twinkle in his eyes – that he – or rather William Warambungle, Cat, Esq, – displayed in a poem on the occasion of the inaugural meeting of the International Society for Gesture Studies:
Gesture Foolish
Gestures all come out to play,
The moon is shining as bright as day,
Leave your videos, and DVDs,
and come with your playfellows to take your ease.
Come hither all Emblems, line up over there,
Then join hands in a circle, a dance to prepare.
Let Illustrators rush in a jumble together,
Spontaneously Gesticulating hither and thither,
Preparations and Strokes, get ready to Hold,
The Growth Points are coming, you have to be bold!
Let the Lexical Movements bring their Affiliates along,
They might help me find words to continue my song!
And now as we gather for feasting and fun,
Semasiological soup, Mismatches to run,
Here come the Iconix, hands held really high,
And the Beats, Metaphorix, let the Butterworths fly!
The Quotable Gestures are doing eurythmics
To the thud of the drums of the Gesture Pragmatics,
Kines, Kinemes and Kinemorphs are taking a bow,
Once they were all the rage, but look at them now!
And here come the Deictics, abstract and concrete,
A bit late, to be sure, but still part of this great treat!
The Head Nods and Head Shakes, they bring up the rear
But they look a bit nervous, is it Catchments they fear?
And now there’s a bevy of Signs at the door,
Let them in if you like, but we can’t take much more.
For out in the garden there are Facial Expressions,
And Postures and Gaze Directions all wanting admission!
We can’t let them in, we have to decide
That if they can’t help it they’d best take a ride!
Gestures all come out to play,
Its work again soon, perhaps the very next day!
Back to being coded, dissected and classified,
Back to being measured, analyzed and specified.
Gestures all come out to play,
The moon is shining as bright as day,
Leave your videos, and DVDs,
And come with your playfellows to take your ease…
The poem was written by Adam Kendon on the occasion of the inaugural meeting of the ISGS as a token of gratitude to its organizer and first president Jürgen Streeck.
Adam was married for many years to Margaret Rhoads of Philadelphia. He is survived by three children and several grandchildren.
Selected publications
Kendon, A. (1967). Some functions of gaze-direction in social interaction. Acta Psychologica, 26, 22–63.
Kendon, A. (1972a). Some relationships between body motion and speech. An analysis of an example. In A. Siegman & B. Pope (Eds). Studies in dyadic communication (pp. 177-210). Elmsford, New York: Pergamon Press.
Kendon, A. (1972b). A review of 'Kinesics and context' by R. L. Birdwhistell. American Journal of Psychology, 85, 441-455.
Kendon, A. (1980a). A description of a deaf-mute sign language from the Enga Province of Papua New Guinea with some comparative discussion. Part I: The formational properties of Enga signs. Semiotica, 32, 1-32. Part II: The semiotic functioning of Enga signs. Semiotica, 32, 81-117. Part III: Aspects of utterance construction. Semiotica, 32, 245-313.
Kendon, A. (1980b). Gesticulation and speech: two aspects of the process of utterance. In M. R. Key (Ed.). The relationship of verbal and nonverbal communication (pp. 207-227). The Hague: Mouton and Co.
Kendon, A. (1986). Some reasons for studying gesture. Semiotica, 62, 1-28 (Special Issue of Semiotica "Approaches to Gesture", A. Kendon and Thomas D. Blakely, Guest Editors)
Kendon, A. (1988). Sign Languages of Aboriginal Australia: Cultural, semiotic and communicative perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kendon, A. (1990). Conducting interaction: Patterns of behavior in focused encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kendon, A. (1993). Human gesture. In T. Ingold and K. R. Gibson (Eds). Tools, language and cognition. (pp. 43-62), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kendon, A. (1995). Gestures as illocutionary and discourse structure markers in Southern Italian conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 23(3), 247-279.
Kendon, A. (1997). Alcuni modi di usare i gesti nella conversazione. In M. Carapezza, D. Gambararra and F. Lo Piparo, (Eds). Linguaggio e cognizione. Atti del XXVIII Congresso della Societˆ di Linguistica Italiana, Palermo 27-29 ottobre 1994 (pp. 215-223). Rome: Bulzoni.
Kendon, A. (2000). Andrea de Iorio and his work on gesture. Editor's introduction. In Gesture in Naples and gesture in classical antiquity. A translation of Andrea de Iorio's La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano, and with an introduction and notes by Adam Kendon (pp. xix-cvii). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kendon, A. (2004a). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kendon, A. (2004b). Some contrasts in gesticulation between speakers in Naples and speakers in Northamptonshire. In C. Mueller & R. Posner (Eds). Semantics and pragmatics of gesture: Proceedings of the Berlin Conference, April 1998. Berlin: Weidler Buchverlag.
Kendon, A. (2020). Sign Language in Papua New Guinea. A primary sign language from the Upper Lagaip Valley, Enga Province. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kendon, A. (2023). Three modalities of languaging: Speaking, gesturing, signing. Selected Essays 1972–202. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Kendon, A., & Ferber, A. (1973). A description of some human greetings. In R. P. Michael & J. H. Crook (Eds). Comparative ecology and behaviour of primates (pp. 591-668). London: Academic Press.
Kendon, A., & Versante, L. (2003). Pointing by hand in 'Neapolitan'. In S. Kita (Ed.). Pointing: Where language, culture and cognition meet (pp. 109-137). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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