kinesics

thumb|Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals Kinesics is the interpretation of body communication such as facial expressions and gestures, nonverbal behavior related to movement of any part of the body or the body as a whole. The equivalent popular culture term is body language, a term Ray Birdwhistell, considered the founder of this area of study, neither used nor liked (on the grounds that what can be conveyed with the body does not meet the linguist's definition of language).

==Birdwhistell's work== Kinesics was first used in 1952 by an anthropologist named Ray Birdwhistell. Birdwhistell wished to study how people communicate through posture, gesture, stance and movement. His ideas over several decades were synthesized and resulted in the book Kinesics and Context. Interest in kinesics specifically and nonverbal behaviour generally was popularized in the late 1960s and early 1970s by such popular mass-market (nonacademic) publications as How to Read a Person Like a Book. Part of Birdwhistell's work involved filming people in social situations and analyzing them to show elements of communication that were not seen otherwise. One of his most important projects was The Natural History of an Interview, a long-term interdisciplinary collaboration including Gregory Bateson, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Norman A. McQuown, Henry W. Brosin and others.