Category Archives: Gestures

Arab Three Kiss Greeting

Nationality: Lebanese
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 2/14/2023
Primary Language: English
Language: Arabic

My informant (18), from Lebanon, describes a greeting: “So a standard Arab greeting, is, typically in the Middle-East, you have to do three kisses on the cheek. It must be on the cheeks. It’s not allowed to be an air kiss. It can be a cheek to cheek thing.”

The informant went on to explain further implications of the gesture, saying that if not done properly, “it’s gonna be a sign of disrespect. It’s typically used as a formality. So if you do any less than 3 it’s seen as informal. It’s like you didn’t complete the transaction of greetings which is very important in Arab culture. How to greet people, how to welcome them into your home. If you are welcoming an individual into your home and they don’t give you three kisses, […] then it’s seen as they don’t respect you, they don’t hold you to a high authority, they are uncomfortable in your home. And usually this is seen throughout most Arab culture. It’s not seen as a first formal greeting, it’s mostly done between family members. But it can also be seen as a casual greeting between family members. […] Like ‘you’re welcoming me into your home, you’re feeding me, you’re entertaining me, you’re bringing a smile to my face’. And everyone must do it and even kids are taught it from a young age. It’s mostly family, but, family and close friends. The main symbol is deep loyalty to one another.”

Because the greeting is both a gesture of respect and also mostly used for family members, we might expect that family is very important in this culture, especially respect between members of the same family. It is important to maintain a level of respect within tight social circles, and to communicate this respect and appreciation of hospitality.

Lintu lentää, liitää laataa, kiitää kaataa, hocus pocus pocus!

Nationality: American
Age: 65
Occupation: Writer
Residence: Seattle, Washington
Performance Date: April 28, 2022
Primary Language: English
Language: Finnish

Informant Background:

My informant, KL, is my mother. Her father was born in Finland and immigrated to the United States as a young adult. She described this nursery rhyme that she remembers from growing up and then passed down to my sister and myself when we were very young.

Piece of Folklore:

Original Wording: “Lintu lentää, liitää laataa, kiitää kaataa, hocus pocus pocus!”

Translation: bird flying, soaring high, diving down, hocus pocus pocus!

This short lullaby would be accompanied with hand movements mimicking a bird flying overhead for the first half (the part spoken in Finnish), followed by the hand “diving down” to snatch the child as a meal, i.e. tickle the child’s stomach or chin during “hocus pocus pocus.”

Analysis:

            I remember giggling to this often as a child. In addition to the tickling itself, as the lullaby was repeated over the duration of my early childhood, there was an aspect of anticipation – I knew the tickling was coming, and so I would burst into laughter before I was even touched. From a larger cultural standpoint, the lyrics of the lullaby reflect a naturalistic element of Finnish culture. There is a concept of the Sielulintu, or soul-bird, which was thought to deliver souls to children when they were born and carry them away when they died, which may be related to this tradition.

Jeep Wave

Main Piece:

So my thing is more of a gesture. It’s kind of something that happens and I didn’t know about it till after I got my car. But basically, once you get the Jeep, there’s something known as a Jeep wave. And so basically it’s with, I don’t really know, like, I think there are different variations of how you do it. But the one I was told is that you put one hand and one hands on the wheel, and it’s just like, three of your fingers are just like couple your fingers up. And it’s the idea is if you see a Jeep, like driver and you and you’re driving your Jeep and you’ll see each other you do a Jeep wave. And it’s a form of like a community type thing, but like it’s really just like a wave that you do. So

Relationship to the Piece:

My informant has driven a Jeep for the last few years and was told this by his friend who also drove a Jeep and it’s become a way for him to connect to his community of Jeep drivers, especially as he recently began to drive his Jeep around LA. 

Context: 

My informant is a 19-year-old BFA lighting design student at the University of Southern California and I was told this as we were hanging out in a theatre on campus swapping tales of folklore. 

Analysis:

I’d never heard of the Jeep wave, but I think it makes sense, as especially in America, the cars we drive often become aspects of our identity, especially with all the stereotypes we associate with certain makes and models of vehicles. It makes sense that a little community would form around certain cars, but it also creates questions, like who began the gesture and how it spreads. 

UCLA Gesture “Fours Up”

Text:

“At all of our sports games we would do “fours up.” You would hold up four fingers.”

Context:

MM is a 24-year-old American Missionary from a town in the middle of California. She attended UCLA for college, and I asked her if there were any specific UCLA sports traditions that she remembered. She wasn’t sure what this tradition meant – she said she just walked into it and that originally, she thought it was for fourth down in football but then they did it at basketball games too. She ended up looking it up and telling me it was for the four letters in UCLA. 

Interpretation:

This example of a tradition that you take part in but don’t know what it means is probably pretty common in places like a college. When you get to college, you are thrown in to a bunch of traditions that everyone else seems to know, and you are often on your own to figure them out. When everyone else seems to understand a tradition, it seems silly to ask about it, so it’s better to just pretend. This can show us how important it is in our society to fit in and avoid doing things that could put you in the outgroup. It also shows us how traditions and their meanings could evolve – if my informant told someone else their theory of the meaning behind “fours up” being for fourth downs in football, that meaning could spread as well if other people didn’t know what it meant. And certain traditions can take on different meanings for different people, even if born out of the same context. Even if looking up what “fours up” means would be an easy solution, our tendency is to try to figure it out ourselves because we want to take part in the tradition naturally so we can really feel like a part of the group. 

Undoing the Macbeth Curse

Background: the informant is a college student and theater major. He is originally from Scranton, PA. He is also my roommate. 

Context: I asked him about this practice while he was cleaning the room. 

Me: What do you do to undo the curse if you say “Macbeth” in a theater?

Informant: Go outside, spin around three times, over your left shoulder, spit over your left shoulder, say a curse word, knock and be let back in. 

(He was adamant that this is the only right way)

Reflection: I asked another theater student with a different background about how to undo the same curse, and she had a slightly different answer. This informant was positive there was a right and wrong way to do this, whereas the other informant (who had folklore experience) believed there were a variety of ways that this tradition could be performed. Perhaps the saying a curse word part of this tradition has something to do with a transference of the curse or bad luck.