The Vezo of Madagascar frowned on pointing at whales, sharks, or large octopuses. The Zulu of southern Africa considered it taboo to point to anything associated with the ancestors. The Kedang of Indonesia avoided pointing at young pumpkins, lest they die. And in at least 124 societies around the world—as the linguist Robert Blust has documented, and as I recently wrote about for Atlas Obscura—there was once a prohibition on pointing at rainbows.
Pointing taboos like these are legion and colorful. What seems to underlie them is (1) the widespread—probably universal—idea that pointing is an aggressive act and (2) the sense that one should not behave belligerently toward things that deserve reverence. Anglo-Europeans no longer seem to hold any rigid taboos on pointing [1], but the idea that pointing is somehow aggressive still lingers. Heated exchanges of “finger jabbing” sometimes make the news—consider the 1959 Kitchen Debate between Nixon and Khrushchev, for example, or a recent heated exchange between Nancy Pelosi and a reporter. Politicians take pains to purge the extended index finger from their gestures and replace it with more benevolent handshapes (e.g., the “Clinton thumb”). Whether we consciously realize it, we Anglo-Europeans also adjust our pointing behavior on the fly to avoid seeming rude. When we point to other people, we tend to do so with an open hand rather than a protruding index finger [2].
Richard Nixon, then Vice President of the United States, and Nikita Khrushchev, then Soviet First Secretary, during the so-called “Kitchen Debate” of 1959. At several moments during the episode—as Nixon would later recall—the men pointed to each other in an aggressive manner.
But there’s a deeper, more vexing issue here. It’s one I didn’t have space to address in my recent article, it’s one Blust doesn’t comment on in his work on pointing-at-rainbows taboos, and it’s one that—as far as I can tell—no contemporary scholar of gesture has said anything substantive about: Why is pointing considered aggressive? What is it about this perfectly mundane act of directing attention that smacks of violence?
The most thoroughgoing discussion of the question I’ve found is an informal one, from 2011, on the blog of the International Cognition and Culture Institute. The thread takes off with the issue of whether humans might universally share a sense that pointing to people is inappropriate. (This may well be the case, though documentation is spotty.) Several commenters, speculating on the motivation for such a could-be universal, suggest pointing may be considered untoward for the same reasons that staring is. No one likes to be stared at; it signals unknown and possibly malevolent intentions [3]. Whatever those intentions actually are, staring is a publicly observable act and thus draws unasked-for attention to the staree. The same is true, of course, for pointing. We might call this the “unwanted attention” account of why pointing is aggressive, and it has some appeal. Certainly, pointing does draw attention—automatically, as by “blind compulsion,” in C. S. Peirce’s memorable phrasing. And gesture scholars have recently emphasized the kinship between pointing and looking, suggesting that pointing amounts to “doing focused looking” and is a kind of “representation of gaze.”
But, on closer scrutiny, the “unwanted attention” account is only half satisfying. Its major shortcoming is that it doesn’t square with one of the most interesting observations about pointing taboos across cultures: in the great majority of cases, it is specifically pointing with the index finger that is verboten. Drawing attention is not the heart of the problem, in other words—it’s drawing attention in a certain way. In many of the groups where pointing taboos have been found, there are alternative pointing methods that are allowed, methods that seem to have been concocted for just this taboo-skirting purpose. These alternatives include pointing with an elbow or fist; with the thumb or with the index finger bent back; with fingers of the pointing hand folded over each other into a wad; with a pout of the lips, wrinkle of the nose, or tongue pressed between the teeth. Blust—who has documented these variants in detail—terms this varied class of behaviors “avoidance deixis” [4]
Zooming out, what all these methods of avoidance deixis have in common is that they are less “pointy” than prototypical pointing is. It is natural to suspect, then, that it is the pointiness of the index finger per se that gives pointing its menacing vibes. So we come to a second account of why pointing might be considered aggressive: in its prototypical form it resembles stabbing. Earlier anthropologists had proposed something like this, in fact, likening pointing to a kind of mock fighting that precedes full-blown confrontation.
When I offered this explanation in a recent talk, an (otherwise appreciative) audience member remarked that it sounded like armchair anthropology of the 1940s, saying it had a “just so” flavor. He then proceeded to advocate strenuously for the “pointing is like staring” idea.
But, actually, this “just so” account connects in an intriguing way to recent proposals in gesture research. Several scholars have started to think about how gesture projects “imaginary forms” or “fictive geometric abstractions.” The idea is that, to understand many gestures, a viewer must at some level imagine an immaterial form that emanates from the hands. In the case of pointing with the index finger, what a viewer must imagine is a sort of ray shooting from the fingertip [5].
With these insights in mind, we can refine the “pointing is like stabbing” idea a bit: pointing might be considered aggressive because it seems to project a puncturing force. Certainly, compared to the “unwanted attention” account, the “puncturing force” proposal accounts more directly for that fact that less “pointy” pointing is considered harmless [6]. It also resonates with other observations. A recent study suggests that, at some unconscious level, people—in this case American undergrads—conceptualize eye gaze as “beam of force-carrying energy.” (This is related to a longstanding and resilient folk understanding of vision as involving “extramission.”) My hunch is that people also implicitly understand pointing as projecting a sort of “beam,” a kind of force. Again, implicitly—I’m not suggesting anyone would cop to this.
An image from The Algonquin legends of New England, or, Myths and folk lore of the Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot tribes (1884). It appears to show the legendary character Glooskap turning a man into a tree by pointing his index finger at him. In various traditions, pointing is thought to be an instrument of magic.
The proposal that pointing, like gaze, is understood as force-projecting remains to be demonstrated in lab conditions. But indirect evidence of it can be found in another set of curious beliefs: that the index finger is an instrument of magic. The notion seems to be that the forefinger—or a prosthetic surrogate, like a wand—can channel and transmit one’s energies. In some indigenous cultures—native North American, southern African, and Aboriginal Australian—these beliefs shade into so-called “aggressive magic.” The idea is that it’s possible to harm or kill another person or animal purely by pointing at it. (Often this done by pointing a bone or other wand-like object instead of the finger.) If the “puncturing force” account is right, humans everywhere are just a small step from these exotic-seeming beliefs.
Notes
[1] As Blust (2021) notes—just a few generations ago—the taboo on pointing to rainbows was present in Europe. One of the Grimm brothers, for example, documented it in his treatise on “teutonic” mythology.
[2] See especially Jarmołowicz-Nowikow (2014), as well as Fenlon et al. (2019).
[3] Beliefs about the “evil eye”—which are widely distributed and often quite elaborated—are of course rooted in the notion that staring is threatening.
[4] See also discussion in Green (2019) and Mechraoui & Noor (2017).
[5] Or, in Talmy (2017)’s terms, the viewer “imaginally schematizes the bulk form of the articulator into a fictive geometric abstraction”—specifically, into “a directed linear axis” (p. 217).
[6] I can vaguely see one way to reconcile the “unwanted attention” account with observations about avoidance deixis. Index-finger pointing calls attention in a direct and unambiguous manner. Alternatives that involve more attenuated attention-direction may thus be seen as more polite, perhaps like periphrastic requests (“I was wondering if you might be able to…”). These more contortionist formulations blunt the force, if you like, of an act that might, in direct formulation, seem presumptuous.