"Ray Birdwhistell . . . is the first to have built a bridge between anthropology and the world of contemporary arts."--Marshall McLuhan
"Few brilliant pioneer workers have the opportunity that Professor Birdwhistell has had to see his unique observations validated through technical innovation. So he was able to develop kinesics, which has now become part of a systematic anthropological investigation."--Margaret Mead
Ray L. Birdwhistell, in this study of human body motion (a study he terms kinesics), advances the theory that human communication needs and uses all the senses, that the information conveyed by human gestures and movements is coded and patterned differently in various cultures, and that these codes can be discovered by skilled scrutiny of particular movements within a social context.