Pointing left in Ghana
How a taboo on the use of the left hand influences gestural practice
Sotaro Kita | Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
James Essegbey | Leiden University
In Ghana, many peolple consider pointing by the left hand to be a taboo. We investigated consequences of this taboo on the Ghanaian gestural practice by observing gestures produced during naturalistic situations of giving route directions. First, there is a politeness convention to place the left hand on the lower back, as if to hide it from the interlocutor. Second, as a consequence of left-hand suppression, right-handed pointing may involve an anatomically staining position when indicating a leftward direction across the body. Third, pointing is sometimes performed with both hands together, which does not violate the taboo. Despite the taboo, left-handed pointing is not suppressed fully. Left-handed pointing gestures occur in association with the verbalization of the concept LEFT, suggesting the embodied nature of the concept. In addition, it is noteworthy that there is a class of left-handed gestures, which are so reduced in form that Ghanaians do not consider them as pointing for the purpose of the taboo.
Keywords: gesture taboo, left hand, pointing, Ghana
Published online: 06 June 2002
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.1.1.06kit
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.1.1.06kit
Cited by
Cited by 38 other publications
Agwuele, Augustine
2014. A repertoire of Yoruba hand and face gestures.
Gesture 14:1 ► pp. 70 ff. 
Ameka, Felix K. & Anneke Breedveld
2004. Areal cultural scripts for social interaction in West African communities.
Intercultural Pragmatics 1:2
Barasa, Margaret & Augustine Agwuele
2021.
In The Palgrave Handbook of African Oral Traditions and Folklore,
► pp. 377 ff.
Brookes, Heather
2016. Review of Agwuele ((2015)): Body talk and cultural identity in the African world: A review.
Gesture 15:3 ► pp. 425 ff.
Brookes, Heather & Olivier Le Guen
2019. Gesture studies and anthropological perspectives.
Gesture 18:2-3 ► pp. 119 ff.
Brown, Lucien & Pilar Prieto
2017.
In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness,
► pp. 357 ff.
Casasanto, Daniel & Tania Henetz
2012. Handedness Shapes Children’s Abstract Concepts.
Cognitive Science 36:2 ► pp. 359 ff.
Casasanto, Daniel, Kyle Jasmin & Hans P. Op de Beeck
2010. Good and Bad in the Hands of Politicians: Spontaneous Gestures during Positive and Negative Speech.
PLoS ONE 5:7 ► pp. e11805 ff.
Chen, Rui, Jiao Sai, Qi Zhu, Renlai Zhou, Peng Li & Shunchao He
2018. Horizontal Spatial Metaphors for Morality: A Cross-Cultural Study of Han Chinese Students and Ethnic Minority Hui Students in China.
Frontiers in Psychology 9
Cooperrider, Kensy
2017. Foreground gesture, background gesture.
Gesture 16:2 ► pp. 176 ff.
Cooperrider, Kensy, James Slotta & Rafael Núñez
2018. The Preference for Pointing With the Hand Is Not Universal.
Cognitive Science 42:4 ► pp. 1375 ff.
Dumizulu Manungo, Rodgers
2020. Lived Experiences of the Left-Handed: A Case of Solusi University, Zimbabwe.
EAST AFRICAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION AND SOCIAL SCIENCES 1:3 ► pp. 39 ff.
Essegbey, J.
2006.
In Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics,
► pp. 369 ff.
Fenlon, Jordan, Kensy Cooperrider, Jon Keane, Diane Brentari & Susan Goldin-Meadow
2019. Comparing sign language and gesture: Insights from pointing.
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4:1 ► pp. 2 ff.
Filipi, Anna & Roger Wales
2004. Perspective-taking and perspective-shifting as socially situated and collaborative actions.
Journal of Pragmatics 36:10 ► pp. 1851 ff.
Green, Jennifer
2019. Embodying kin-based respect in speech, sign, and gesture.
Gesture 18:2-3 ► pp. 370 ff.
Gruber, James, Jeanette King, Jen Hay & Lucy Johnston
2016. The hands, head, and brow.
Gesture 15:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Gullberg, Marianne
2012.
In The Handbook of Bilingualism and Multilingualism,
► pp. 417 ff.
Hess, Ursula
2017.
In Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences,
► pp. 1 ff.
Hess, Ursula
2020.
In Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences,
► pp. 527 ff.
Hostetter, Autumn B. & Martha W. Alibali
2019. Gesture as simulated action: Revisiting the framework.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 26:3 ► pp. 721 ff.
Jarmołowicz-Nowikow, Ewa
2015. How Poles indicate people and objects, and what they think of certain forms of pointing gestures.
Lingua Posnaniensis 56:1 ► pp. 85 ff.
Kataoka, Kuniyoshi
2013. “We just don’t get it right!”—Multimodal competence for resolving spatial conflict in wayfinding discourse.
Language & Communication 33:4 ► pp. 404 ff.
Kita, Sotaro
2009. Cross-cultural variation of speech-accompanying gesture: A review.
Language and Cognitive Processes 24:2 ► pp. 145 ff.
Li, Heng & Yu Cao
2019. Hands occupied: Chinese farmers use more non-manual pointing than herders.
Lingua 222 ► pp. 1 ff.
Liszkowski, Ulf, Penny Brown, Tara Callaghan, Akira Takada & Conny de Vos
2012. A Prelinguistic Gestural Universal of Human Communication.
Cognitive Science 36:4 ► pp. 698 ff.
Mechraoui, Amal & Faridah Noor Binti Mohd Noor
2017. The direction giving pointing gestures of the Malay Malaysian speech community.
Gesture 16:1 ► pp. 68 ff.
Núñez, Rafael E. & Eve Sweetser
2006. With the Future Behind Them: Convergent Evidence From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time.
Cognitive Science 30:3 ► pp. 401 ff.
Payrató, Lluís
2003.
In Handbook of Pragmatics,
► pp. 1 ff.
Thommen, Evelyne, Emmanuelle Rossini, Angela Di Fulvio, Nicola Rudelli, Corinne Cattelan, Melissa Zecchin & Michèle Guidetti
2016. Le pointage dans l’autisme : Évolution de la compréhension et de la production après 6 mois d’intervention précoce.
Enfance 2016:04 ► pp. 445 ff.
Tkachman, Oksana, Gracellia Purnomo & Bryan Gick
2021. Repetition Preferences in Two-Handed Balanced Signs: Vestigial Locomotor Central Pattern Generators Shape Sign Language Phonetics and Phonology.
Frontiers in Communication 5
Vaidyanathan, Vidya & Daniel Rosenberg
2014.
In Human-Computer Interaction. Advanced Interaction Modalities and Techniques [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 8511],
► pp. 170 ff.
Yang, Ping
2017.
In Intercultural Responsiveness in the Second Language Learning Classroom [Advances in Educational Technologies and Instructional Design, ],
► pp. 127 ff.
Yang, Ping
2020.
In Language Learning and Literacy,
► pp. 339 ff.
Yang, Ping
2020.
In Multicultural Instructional Design,
► pp. 902 ff.
Yu, Quanlei & Yafei Guo
2017.
In Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences,
► pp. 1 ff.
Yu, Quanlei & Yafei Guo
2020.
In Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences,
► pp. 1872 ff.
Zhao, Xueru, Xianyou He, Wei Zhang, Guangyao Chen, Qing Chen & Lixiang Huang
2018. Interpersonal choice: The advantage on the left or on the right?.
International Journal of Psychology 53:5 ► pp. 331 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 08 april 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.