CALL FOR PAPERS 6 – THE HISTORICITY OF GESTURES

Anthropology & Materialism. A Journal of Social Research, an international and interdisciplinary journal dedicated to critical thought is launching a call for papers for its sixth issue, “The Historicity of Gestures”, to be published in 2027.
Gestures—ranging from subtle hand movements to full-body expressions—constitute a fundamental dimension of communication, deeply embedded in social, historical, and technological contexts. As both markers of belonging and potential instruments of power or resistance, gestures offer a valuable lens through which to analyze transformations in bodily experience and social relations. Anthropology & Materialism invites submissions from philosophy, social theory, literature, anthropology, art history, and media studies that explore the historicity of gestures.
Contributions may address specific gestures and their histories, artistic practices that use gestures as material, the role of gestures in political movements, or the transformation of gestures in media and technological contexts. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome. The journal also invites artistic experiments and interviews, for example, with artists, anthropologists, or other scholars whose work engages with the study or practice of gestures.
Please submit articles (max. 50,000 characters, incl. space) to anthromat.issue6@gmail.com
by September 5th, 2026, so they can be reviewed by anonymous reviewers. Contributions
are welcome in French, English, German, or Spanish and must follow the Author Guidelines
To read the full call for papers, click here.
Pointing, rhythmic hand movements, folded arms: gestures—whether understood narrowly as movements of the hands or more broadly as movements of the entire body, including nodding, facial expressions, or the positioning of legs and feet—constitute an irreducible dimension of human and nonhuman communication. Although gesturing may be considered an anthropological constant, specific gestures are embedded in social relations and historical contexts. By adopting gestures, subjects bodily integrate themselves into social spaces such as families, peer groups, political movements, subcultures, or class positions. Gestures thus function as markers of belonging, but they may also exert normalizing effects and serve as instruments of power.
From the handling of tools and domestic objects to the use of digital interfaces, technologies reorganize bodily movements and sensory perception. Smartphones, for instance, reshape the movements of the fingers as well as the perception of images. These transformations suggest that gestures constitute a crucial site where technological change becomes inscribed in bodily experience. The development of tactile perception—already discussed by Walter Benjamin following Alois Riegl—can thus be understood as a historically specific form of perception enacted through gesture. In this sense, gestures provide a productive object for a materialist phenomenology of both past and present. Early Critical Theory already reflected on such transformations. In Minima Moralia, Theodor W. Adorno describes how the transition from bourgeois interiors to functionalist design transformed everyday gestures. As he suggests, technification simultaneously makes gestures more precise and more abrupt, thereby reshaping human experience.
This Call for Papers proposes to approach the historicity of gestures not as a hypothesis but as a point of departure. Gestures may be read as historical indices that reveal the social and technological transformations of a given epoch. At the same time, they can function as forms of action capable of intervening in—and destabilizing—the ideological regime of a historical moment. Following Marcel Mauss’s reflections on the “techniques of the body,” gestures can be approached as socially embodied and historically situated practices. Our aim is therefore to examine gestures within a materialist anthropological perspective.
A critical analysis of gestures must address both their aesthetic and political dimensions. Because gestures are performed by bodies—and because bodies are socially interpreted through intersecting norms of gender, race, and class—gestures are never neutral but interpreted differently depending on the bodies that enact them. In this sense, gestures can reveal forms of domination and repression, yet they may also function as modes of resistance or collective expression. Precisely because they incorporate and internalize social codes while remaining symbolically legible, gestures are not merely effects of social transformation but can also intervene in historical situations as political instruments.
Gestures may contain an aesthetic power of knowledge. This recalls an idea often associated with East Asian traditions, according to which the technical crystallization of a gesture—from the martial art of the sword to calligraphy—can generate a form of knowledge of the gesture itself. In this perspective, every gesture might contain an emancipatory potential, capable of transferring forms of attention and bodily energy across heterogeneous practices of embodied knowledge. Walter Benjamin gestures toward such a possibility when he writes:
“The realization that the first material upon which the mimetic faculty attempts to act is the human body might be applied with greater emphasis than it has been so far to the prehistory of the arts. One may ask, for example, whether the earliest mimesis of objects in dance and visual representation is not largely based on the mimesis of the actions in which primitive humans interacted with these objects. Perhaps Stone Age humans depicted the land in such a singular way only because the hand that guided the pencil still remembered the bow with which it had killed the animal.” (GS VI, 127; our translation)
Can gesture be approached as a site of memory and repetition capable of migrating across practices and reconfiguring their cultural forms? Can gesture be thought of as an emancipated form of practice?
Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following questions
- What role do gestures play in artistic practice and aesthetic theory?
- How can the concept of a gestural phenomenology be theoretically developed, and how can it be applied to concrete historical or artistic cases?
- How do technological media reshape gestures and bodily perception?
- How can gestures operate as forms of resistance or political intervention?
- What role do non-human gestures play in communication and interaction?
- To what extent do human gestures function as models for thinking about action, communication, and expression, even in post-human or technological contexts?
- How have modern and contemporary media (from photography and silent cinema to digital media) transformed the status of gesture?
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
juliajankowska (May 8, 2026). CALL FOR PAPERS 6 – THE HISTORICITY OF GESTURES. ANTHROPOLOGICAL MATERIALISM. Retrieved June 12, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/16703
