Ray Birdwhistell

Ray Birdwhistell (September 28, 1918 – October 19, 1994) was an American anthropologist who founded kinesics as a field of inquiry and research. The term kinesics, meaning "facial expression, gestures, posture and gait, and visible arm and body movements", was coined by Birdwhistell. He estimated that "no more than 30 to 35 percent of the social meaning of a conversation or an interaction is carried by the words." Stated more broadly, he argued that "words are not the only containers of social knowledge." He proposed other technical terms, including kineme, and many others less frequently used today. Birdwhistell had at least as much impact on the study of language and social interaction generally as just nonverbal communication because he was interested in the study of communication more broadly than is often recognized. Birdwhistell understood body movements to be culturally patterned rather than universal. His students were required to read widely, sources not only in communication but also anthropology and linguistics. Collaborations with others, including initially Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and later, Erving Goffman and Dell Hymes had huge influence on his work. For example, the book he is best known for, Kinesics and Context, "would not have appeared if it had not been envisaged by Erving Goffman" and he explicitly stated "the paramount and sustaining influence upon my work has been that of anthropological linguistics", a tradition most directly represented at the University of Pennsylvania by Hymes.

Birdwhistell was born in Cincinnati on September 28, 1918 and died October 19, 1994. He was raised and went to school in Ohio. He graduated from Fostoria High School in 1936, and was involved in the history club, debate team, journalism, and school plays. Birdwhistell received his BA in Sociology in 1940 from Miami University, his MA in Anthropology in 1941 from Ohio State University, and his PhD in Anthropology in 1951 from the University of Chicago, where he studied with Lloyd Warner and Fred Eggan. From 1944 to 1946 he conducted dissertation fieldwork among the Kutenai Indians of British Columbia during which he first realized that tribal members moved differently depending on whether they were speaking English or Kutenai, which sparked his interest in nonverbal behavior. While completing his dissertation, he taught at the University of Toronto (Ontario), where Erving Goffman was one of his students. From 1944 to 1948 he worked with G. Gordon Brown and Edmund S. Carpenter, who were in the same department as him at the University of Toronto.

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