We've been talking in this unit about cultural boundaries and crossing boundaries. Before concluding, we have to say something about gestures. They're so hugely important in defining cultural boundaries. Who's in and who is out? And they can also cause problems and crossing boundaries. They're little to be sure, we rarely think about them but, they're also powerful. The story I heard several times, while I was in Brazil in the 1970's concerned Richard Nixon, the story could be apocryphal, that is false, but it is still instructive. I was told that when Nixon was the vice president of the United States during the Presidency of Dwight David Eisenhower, he visited Brazil. Perhaps this was in connection with the inauguration of the Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek. In any case, the story goes that he was in a motorcade and standing in the back of his vehicle, he gave what in America is the okay gesture with both hands, something like this. And, actually we can show you maybe a photograph of that here. Here it is. Now, in Brazil a very similar gesture is quite obscene, It has a sexual connotation and I'm not going to tell you what that is but, maybe you can do an internet search and find it. Really, it's in some ways closest analogue in American culture is. What's known as the middle finger gesture or flipping the bird or simply giving someone the finger. The gesture in America is made by showing the back of the hand in a fist but with the middle finger extended. Of course, if Nixon really did do in Brazil, what some people said he did, it would be like a foreign dignitary say Vladimir Putin visiting the United States and with both hands giving the American audience the finger. One point this anecdote highlights is the powerful emotional effect gestures can have. We'll be talking a lot more about emotions in the next unit when we look at symbols and rituals. In the present context however, it's important to appreciate that gestures play a key role in defining group boundaries. You need only think back to sports players giving each other the high five or doing signature dances after scoring. Gestures that mark team membership. The Bryan brothers, Bob and Mike Bryan are a famous tennis doubles team in the US. They are said to have won more games, more matches and more tournaments than any men's doubles team in history. They also had a signature leaping chest bump. They do when they win a match. If you do an image search on the Internet for Brian brothers chest bump, you'll find numerous photographs of this team gesture. You can even see videos of it. [SOUND] And there's even a video online, an instructional video by the brothers, showing you how do the chest bump. I have the opportunity some years ago to learn about an in group marking gesture among elementary students, and particular among fourth graders and fifth graders in the school near me. They adopted a gesture from the first non cartoon movie version of Scooby Doo in 2002. Now, you may not know Scooby Doo, this was a well known television cartoon series and I think it may still be on, about four teenage friends and the dog, a great dane of one of those friends. The dog's name was appropriately, Scooby Doo. The group would solve mysteries. In the 2002 movie, the dog gives a greeting gesture while uttering the phrase, keeping it real, or actually keeping it real. The voice modified the gesture to look like this and I'll try to do what they were doing. They will take their fist and they would sort of pound it on their chest then they would raise it up to their lips, do a little kiss and go like that. So [SOUND] Keeping it real. The gesture was performed by any two boys in the group when they met in the halls between classes. Further they don't necessarily utter the verbal component and only members of the m group did this. So it was in fact a boundary marker.
