ETHNO-GRAPHICS AND THE MOVING BODY

The article opens with a brief comment on a photograph from Evans-Prit chard's work to illustrate a fundamental problem with Western ways of viewing human movement. I suggest that despite an upsurge of interest in 'the body', an understanding of the person as a moving agent is sti ll absent from cultural theory and ethnographic accounts. I argue that the new realist perspective on person and agency, and not the existen tial philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, offers the necessary philosophical g rounding to accomplish an embodied definition of social actors. Once p eople are conceived as persons empowered to perform signifying acts wi th both speech and action signs, then the way is clear to develop stra tegies for the systematic investigation of embodied action. I discuss the adoption of a movement script (Labanotation) as a methodological r esource adequate to this task and critically examine methods used to r ecord (American) Plains Indian sign language. The article returns to E vans-Pritchard in recognition of his later interest in the idea of a l iteracy for movement.