Rebooting Raymond Birdwhistell

ABSTRACT

The work of Raymond Birdwhistell is generally appreciated only within the communication subfield known as ‘nonverbal’ communication. The current paper reviews key elements of Birdwhistell’s larger theory of human communication and demonstrates its potential applicability to the wider academic field of Communication Studies. Viewed within this larger context, Birdwhistell’s true subject emerges. In this way, readers of the current paper may appreciate the focus of his work was not delimited to one specialised, distilled component of communication but, rather, was directed towards modelling and understanding human communication sui generis. Repackaging the conceptual thrust of Birdwhistell permits fresh exploration of ongoing and unresolved problems in the paradigm of Communication Studies. The paper indicates how select elements of Birdwhistell’s work may sharpen both the basic conceptual focus – and practical appreciation – of human Communication as a unique object of study and posits the possible strengthening of a unique Communication perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication theory
• social communication theory
• Raymond Birdwhistell

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank the contributions of the two anonymous reviewers along with the tireless work of the editor of the journal in bringing this paper into reality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

^1. Key figures include Bateson (1972/2008), Garfinkel (1967), Goffman (1961), and Scheflen (1972), Shaminoff (1980), and Thomas (1980).

^2. The phrasing communication itself may strike readers as odd or uncomfortable. The term is essential, however, in understanding Birdwhistell’s unique approach to Communication. Efforts are undertaken below to relate this to the overall presentation of his work.

^3. These two works were generously suggested by one of the anonymous reviewers of the present paper. Whilst neither creates a sustained focus on Communication irrespective of specific modes (e.g. nonverbal communication), they are outstanding resources which document Birdwhistell’s work within microanalysis and kinesics.

^4. As is clarified below, a distinction is made between the material characteristics of a technology on one hand and a medium/channel on another. Briefly noted here, a technology is a fixed item with clearly identifiable in-built characteristics. A medium/channel, in contrast, is the social communicative use into which a technology is appropriated. Building on Postman (1985) and placed into the general Communicative work of Birdwhistell (1970) the two terms are understood as not isomorphic with each other.

^5. Such analysis, according to Sigman, can be carried out productively in ‘mass’, ‘interpersonal’, ‘organisational’, and ‘intercultural’ areas.

^6. Noy (2008) is one of the small groups of communication scholars who remind us that ‘all communication is mediated’ (p.3).

^7. Sigman, one of Birdwhistell’s last PhD students at the University of Pennsylvania, articulates Birdwhistell’s work with clarity and precision. This, no doubt, comes as a consequence of spending years working with Birdwhistell and from having him as his PhD panel chair. In his later work, Sigman (1987) underscored Birdwhistell’s (1970) interest in the general, structural characteristics of interactive, coordinated symbol systems. Taken together, Sigman and Birdwhistell share a profound concern for encouraging the commencement of multiple, highly contextualised research programmes designed to support the explication of the way human communication requires both an orientation to moment-by-moment productions and intermodal or intergenerational meaning making structures. It is Birdwhistell, via Sigman, that the processes which make social meaning(s) possible are revealed.

^8. While also influenced by Goffman (1961), Hymes (1974), and Birdwhistell (1970), Sigman’s (1987) model is an original creation. His work consistently speaks of the inherently social, interactive, and mediated character of communication – irrespective of one’s context of investigation – as a uniquely human endeavour. The path cut out by a definition of human communication vis-à-vis SCT is informed by and motivated to address the problem of delimiting communicational perspectives from others. Indeed, within SCT are the seeds for a future, independent academic discipline of communication.