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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 541

Part of Session 126: Gesture variation (Other abstracts in this session)

Gestural styles and identity among urban black male youth in a Johannesburg township

Authors: Brookes, Heather Jean
Submitted by: Brookes, Heather Jean (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

Among urban black South Africans in the Johannesburg region, gesturing is a prominent feature in every day interactions. Gestures frequently depict spoken content, and there is a large vocabulary of conventionalised gestural forms. Gesturing is most highly elaborated in conjunction with an urban informal spoken variety used among male youth in the teens and twenties when they gather together on the street corners in their local township neighbourhoods. 

Based on ethnographic work involving observation, video-recordings of spontaneous interactions and interviews, we compare gestural styles among young men in one township, identify how they vary and analyse their social meanings.

There is a metadiscourse about gestural behaviour among township residents. Gesture indexes two key social divisions within the township, an urban identity versus a rural identity and respectablility versus disrespectability. Among male township youth, speech and gestural style are a vital aspect of gaining status among peers and demonstrating an urban, streetwise and city slick identity. Gestural behaviour/style also indexes local identities and divisions among male social networks. Young men talk about three different male youth identities in the township that are marked by differences in language use and styles of gesturing: softies (those who don’t hang out much on the township streets) and their associated ‘subcultures’ including rappers and bhujwas ‘bourgeois,’ streetwise township males often referred to as maauthi ‘guys’ or magents ‘gentlemen’ and pantsulas ‘ruffians’ including tsotsis ‘thugs’ who are engaged in antisocial activities and sometimes crime. These three styles vary in terms of gestural space, hand action, how gestures are deployed in relation to speech, their semantic relation to speech and the use of specific gestural forms.

These findings on the role of gesture and gestural styles in relation to identity will be discussed in relation to the communicative economy of the urban African environment. The question of what aspects of gesture use are influenced by culture will be addressed. These data will also be considered in terms of our understanding of language as a multimodal variable semiotic system.