The Cross-Cultural Gesture Trap

There are two kinds of nonverbal signal, and confusing them causes most cross-cultural damage.

Affect displays are the expressions discussed in chapter 34 — the facial configurations associated with emotional states, which have at least substantial cross-cultural regularity and are produced without deliberate intent. Emblems are different. An emblem is a gesture with a direct verbal translation, produced deliberately, understood as a statement, and entirely conventional. The thumbs-up, the OK ring, the V sign, the beckoning finger, the head-shake for no.

Emblems are words. Like words, they mean whatever the local convention says they mean, and they do not travel.

The catalogue of reversals is long. The ring gesture that means OK in the United States is an obscene reference to the anus in Brazil and parts of the eastern Mediterranean and South America. The thumbs-up is an insult in parts of the Middle East and West Africa. The V sign with the palm inward is offensive in Britain, Ireland and Australia and merely means two elsewhere. Beckoning with an upturned index finger is used for dogs in much of Southeast Asia. The Bulgarian and parts of the Balkan and South Asian convention inverts or complicates the head movements for yes and no; the South Asian head wobble maps onto no Western equivalent at all.

Richard Nixon's 1958 goodwill tour of South America is the case usually cited: greeted by hostile crowds after a difficult visit, he is reported to have given the ring gesture from his aircraft to a waiting crowd in Brazil, with results that did not improve the diplomacy. Similar incidents recur through the diplomatic record because the failure mode is peculiarly invisible.

That invisibility is the mechanism. When you mispronounce a word in a foreign language, you know you have done it and so does the listener; both parties recognize an error and repair it. When you produce an emblem, you have no sense that you have said anything at all — you have made a gesture that is transparent to you. Meanwhile the receiver has heard a sentence, delivered deliberately, and since emblems are intentional by definition, the sentence is not read as an accident. It is read as an insult chosen on purpose.

Neither party has any reason to check. The error propagates into an impression of character.

The professional response among people who negotiate across borders for a living is not to learn the local emblem set, which is a large and unreliable body of knowledge with regional variation inside every country. It is subtraction. Strip emblems from your repertoire when abroad: keep hands visible and still, use open-palm gestures which are close to universally neutral, avoid pointing with a single finger, and let affect displays and proxemic calibration carry the nonverbal load, since those are far more portable.

And when a counterpart's manner suddenly changes for no reason connected to the substance, consider that you may have said something. The correct move is to ask, directly and without embarrassment. An emblem misfire that gets named is a small joke; one that does not is a fixed impression that will outlast the meeting.