The Lifting Both Hands Up Gesture (Eitan Vilker)

Title: The Lifting Both Hands Up Gesture

General Information about Item:

Informant Data:

Ari was born in New Jersey in 2001. His father is an lawyer, and his mother is a doctor. who operates a private practice. Ari and his family are Jewish. He has lived in Rhode Island for most of his life. Ari attends East Greenwich High School. He has family from Israel and from Germany.

Contextual Data:

Cultural Context: Children like to use gestures that can apply to multiple different scenarios and that they can have plausible deniability for if they are accused of being rude. Thus, gestures that can be polite in certain contexts but unkind in others are a favorite of many children.
Social Context: This hand gesture was brought up as a result of the interviewer asking what insulting gestures Ari knew. He’s not certain where he learned it from, but he suspects it originates from within his family. Most insulting gestures children make are used in school settings, physical activities and games, casual conversations, and at home- in short, the situations in which children spend the majority of their time.

Item:

When using this gestures, one should hold the fingers of each hand together and bob them up and down a few times. This gesture is actually used in a polite or neutral manner more often than it is used in a rude way, but it can be used to indicate that small talk with another person would be a waste of time and it would be best to end the social encounter as soon as possible.

Associated File:

Transcript:

Collector’s Comments:

This gesture has a very specific meaning but it can be used in a few different ways, which makes it very useful if one’s goal is to do something that looks innocuous while conveying an entirely different meeting.

Collector’s Name: Eitan Vilker

Tags/Keywords:

Dartmouth Folklore Archive