The flight of the arrow, the turn of the body. Contributions to a cultural semiotics of gesture
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1980-4016.esse.2026.244168Keywords:
Body gesture, Domestication, Semiosphere, Subject, Traditional danceAbstract
This research focuses on human gesture from an anthropological, semiotic, and complex perspective that, far from centering on labor, takes it as the basis for the production of cultural life. It articulates, from the semiotics of culture, an analysis of the technical and material production of arrowheads, bows, and atlatls in the civilizations that arose in what are now Egypt, China, and Mexico. In this section, gesture is analyzed from a diachronic perspective, specifically in terms of styles and materials. In turn, bodily gesture is investigated in synchronic terms within the dances of the same countries, where dance is analyzed from a symbolic and corporeal perspective to understand the dance text in its particular codification for each case. The study proposes equating gesture in its complexity with the lotmanian sujet, thus seeking to make this research a reflective narrative on the nature of human gesture as something more than an act of subsistence, reaching its symbolic and artistic dimension.
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