In Body Language and Social Order, Albert Scheflen argues that body language is used for political control, manipulation, and the maintenance of power and class hierarchies. The book reveals how specific bodily behaviors in public places reinforce the status quo. Scheflen utilizes numerous candid photographs of men, women, and children to support his arguments.
When I first read this book many years ago, I found it deeply disturbing. I felt that body movement was a liberating force, not a binding one. Scheflen’s perspective made me reflect.
While reflecting, I began to look more closely at the behaviors Scheflen had flagged. Most involved still poses or isolated gestures. In other words, Scheflen was not actually looking at movement of the whole body. He was observing what was static, not what was dynamic. No wonder he concluded that body language tends to preserve order and social stability!
As Rudolf Laban observes, stability and mobility alternate in human movement behavior. Continuous movement of the whole body is punctuated by moments of stillness and by instances when only a single part of the body is in motion. These postures and gestures can be singled out, just as camera captures a moment in time and freezes it forever.
However, there is a big difference between looking at snapshots isolated from the stream of bodily movement and observing the stream itself. In the next blog, I examine differences between the study of body language and the analysis of body movement in more detail.