I am interested in gesture, in particular human gesture as enactment of the world both responsively (is only another aspect of… one’s own body) and generatively (new meaning is synthetically acquired) with the non-human world. For Merleau-Ponty, things themselves, and their being perceived, are the same in kind. Gestures, or exploratory movements, are the ordinary way we carry on meaning. This phenomenology of gesture is resonant with my experience of Xicana-Nahua traditional ceremony. In Nahua cosmology the human body exists as an interface with el cielo and la tierra and the epistemological reality and requirement of in xochitl in cuicatl.

According to Nahua logic, Noble speech, Flower and Song or walking in xochitl, in cuicatl, in poetry and prayer, is a methodology of emergence, a methodology of the heart. “In xochitl, in cuicatl was an epistemological practice embedded in a Nahuatl ontology conceived of philosophical, religious, and social practices that were interwoven in the cultural habitus of Nahua warriors (Farias 2013, iii).” A prerequisite for this station is that one must be related to Tlalticpac (that which is on earth). In Xochitl In Cuicatl emerges as an expression of truth out of the earth embodied heart. When you go deep inside yourself to your most authentic, connected and emergent knowing and you give rise to that expression, when teotl discloses itself to you -then you are expressing something into reality. You are making it so.

Truth is created as we express flower and song - constructive, connected and in balance between the rhythmic oscillating dualities of the world. This resembles Merleau-Ponty’s human gestures and our deep inhabitation of the place world, our gestures’ intimate association with the ‘flesh of the world.’ We move primordially and elementally embedded and embodied. Our bodies, as they move, express and create waterways, windy respirations, fiery inspirations and earthly formations. For Stephen J. Smith, Flesh speaks to our bodily relations with the elements of a more-than-human world…the felt imperative to these relations where, as Merleau-Ponty put it, ‘all distance is traversed’ and wherein movement arises not specifically in the body, but in the nexus and intertwining of bodily engagement with the world.

There is a primacy to movement that registers in the living body in its carnal ties to the elements of the world’s flesh. The ‘radical reflection’ on the ‘flesh of the world’ to which this analysis aspires in turn bears upon the general field of gestural reciprocities and connections, providing the insight that intimate gestures of the flesh, such as the embrace, are primordial attunements, motions of rhythm and reciprocity, that emanate from the world in identification with it. The embrace is fundamentally, elementally, a gesture of landscape dwelling.

A phenomenology of elemental motions provides the textual reminder that to be at home in various landscapes means to know what it is to be embraced corporeally, sensually, within the human and especially the more-than-human folds of the world. (Smith, Abstract) As a way of exploring gestural potential in ceremonial cultural restoration, I have embarked on three phenomenological, poetic audio-visual presentations that reflect and generate my understanding of phenomenological gesture as ceremony, ritual that “enacts the world” (Appfel-Marglin) In a similar vein as Smith’s look at the embrace, I take a visual, kinesthetic, and an in xochitl in cuicatl, look at the gestures of three aspects of constructing the memory of being Xicana Indígena. 

PHENOMENOLOGY OF GESTURE

The identity of the thing through perception experience is only another aspect of the identity of one’s own body throughout exploratory movements; thus they are the same in kind as each other. (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. 215). 

 Gestures are the ordinary way in which we carry on meaning, as the etymology of the word (from gero = I bear, I carry on) implies. Complete gestures are those in which new meaning is synthetically acquired. (Maddalena, 9)