Virtually any time I tell someone that I am a movement analyst, I am met with a puzzled look and the query –“Oh, like body language?”
Warren Lamb hated having Movement Pattern Analysis characterized as body language, and rightly so. Popular treatises on body language primarily focus on poses and isolated gestures and affix simple meanings to these.
For example, while trawling the internet recently, I came across a “scientific portal on body language” that explained the meaning of various poses and gestures. For example, one photo showed a man (his head cropped out) seated in a narrow and erect pose. According to the explanation, this position conveys interest or surprise.
Another headless photo showed the fellow with his arms crossed over his chest. This gesture was said to indicate being defensive.
Of course, postures and gestures do have meaning. But poses and gestures come and go in an ongoing stream of human behavior. Just as the meaning of individual words can change depending upon how they are used in a sentence, so too the meaning of poses and gestures must change in the context of the ongoing movement flow.
As Warren Lamb would say, there are so many ways to fold the arms over the chest. Surely there are worlds of meaning to be perceived when we stop thinking of bodily action as a set of static punctuation points – arms open, arms crossed – and start to perceive it as a process of change, one that can be done in many ways.