Adam Kendon

Career

After completing the D. Phil., he accepted a position in the Institute of Experimental Psychology at Oxford, where he worked in a research group with Michael Argyle and E.R.W.F. Crossmann. He initially focused on sign systems in Papua New Guinea and Australian Aboriginal sign languages, before developing a general framework for understanding gestures with the same kind of rigorous semiotic analysis as has been previously applied to spoken language.

Important influences on his theoretical understandings included: Erving Goffman, Albert Scheflen, Ray Birdwhistell, and Gregory Bateson. Becoming aware of Scheflen's work in 1965, while still at Oxford, he managed to meet him in Philadelphia, where he shared his earliest work; as a result, he was first invited to join William S. Condon's research team at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in 1966-67, and then to join Scheflen's research team at Bronx State Hospital in 1967. He never actually worked with Birdwhistell directly, but they were in contact, and he did work with films made available to him by Birdwhistell.

In 1976 he took up an appointment in Canberra, Australia at the Department of Anthropology in the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. He undertook filming everyday interaction in Papua New Guinea but also was able to record a sign language in use in the valley where he worked where there was a considerable number of deaf persons. His publication of this work, in three articles in 1980, proved to be a pioneering study; no other accounts on sign language from this part of the world were to appear until the beginning of the twenty-first century. This work was republished as a monograph together with a new essay written by colleagues bringing the original work up to date. After this he undertook a major investigation of the sign languages in use among indigenous Australians - these are sign languages used for ritual reasons or for practical reasons in situations where speech might is impractical or inappropriate. These are known as alternate sign languages, distinguishing them from primary sign languages developed among deaf people. Extensive documentation of his research in Australia is available at the library of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

In 1988, he returned to Philadelphia, teaching for two years at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kendon then moved to Naples, Italy and undertook fieldwork on the use of gesture in everyday interaction among Neapolitans and also published a translation of a 19th Century book about Neapolitan gesture (by Andrea de Jorio), comparing it to gesturing among the Greeks and Romans. In 2004 he published an important general book on the phenomena of gesture which drew extensively on his work in Naples as well as his work in New Guinea and Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. Since then he has published various articles on gesture and related topics, including discussions of the place of gesture in theories about language origins.

In 2012, he returned to Cambridge, where he spent the rest of his life, associated with the Division of Biological Anthropology at Cambridge, and an Honorary Professor in Psychology and Language Sciences at University College London. In 2014 at UCL, he presented a lecture series "Topics in the study of gesture."

Kendon received research grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to the previously mentioned positions at Oxford and Bronx State Hospital, he held research positions at the University of Pittsburgh and Indiana University in the United States, the Australian National University and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies in Australia; and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Germany. In addition to teaching at Oxford and Penn, he held positions at Cornell University and Connecticut College in the US, as well as the Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale", the University of Salerno and the University of Calabria in Italy. Kendon was a founding editor of the journal GESTURE (published by John Benjamins of Amsterdam), along with Cornelia Müller, in 2000. He was the sole editor from 2010 to April 2017, when he was replaced by Sotaro Kita. In his role as editor of GESTURE he was an Ex Officio member of the board of the International Society for Gesture Studies, of which he was elected Honorary President in 2006.

He edited the book series Gesture Studies for John Benjamins, with 9 volumes published between 2007 and 2022. Colleagues prepared a festschrift in 2014, honoring his contribution to the study of gestures and interaction. In 2016, Frederick Erickson interviewed Kendon about his techniques for analyzing both videotapes and live interaction for the conference “Learning how to look and listen: Building capacity for video-based transcription and analysis in social and educational research;” the videos of their conversations have been made publicly available.

Family

Kendon married Margaret Rhoads in 1961; they had three children, Gudrun, Benjamin and Angus.