Author: Alexander Nagel
Creating a syllabus for a liberal arts course that delves into cultural foundations in an exciting, hands-on way was my goal for the Fall 2016 semester at NYU DC. Earlier in the year, I read Dario Leader’s intriguing and inspiring book “Hands: What we do with them – and why” (Hamish Hamilton, 2016). In his book, Leader offers a series of thought provoking ideas, and describes how thinking about hands and hand gestures offers opportunities to examine culture. Leader reflects on common phrases such as “in God’s hands” or to have something “coming in handy.” While anthropologists, linguists and thinkers such as the Medievalist Jean-Claude Schmitt have written on hands and the meaning of gestures, the theme of hands in culture is probably seldom used as an obvious choice for a semester long theme in a class room full of undergraduate students. After all, hands enabled us to write down large epics and those great stories of humanity. Craftsmen in ancient societies scratched scripts in cuneiform tablets, and used sticks to write with ink on papyri, and they also created masterpieces from stone, bronze, and wood. Hands connect when shaken, hands sign, and most great achievements in our society would simply not be possible without them.
Early on I reflected on how I could include the notion of hands appearing in all major epics, and thought about including ideas from Leader’s book for our course, which covers thousands of years and myriad cultures. Exciting students, who are used to click, scroll and swipe, about the story of Enkidu and Gilgamesh is made easier when asking students to think about the role of hands in composing texts from stories which were only spoken about in earlier cultures, and how hands feature into the narrative. In the story of Gilgamesh, the priestess Aruru washes her hands before pinching off a piece of clay. Herakles carries the heavens, and the Ramayana’s monkey king Hanuman carries a mountain. In the Iliad, Priamos is said to kiss the hands of Achilles who had killed Hektor. In all these stories, hands illustrate common themes be that in a historical, mythical or religious context. Modern science would be impossible without the free movement of hands; typing on an iPad without fingers would prove challenging.
Some students had never heard of these texts and cultures. However, students are familiar with gestures and symbolism carried by hands, such as when they give each other a high five. Including assignments that dealt with the broadest possible idea of hands did not prove difficult. Hands featured in our weekly classroom discussions. We discussed the famous stone reliefs of the Apadana at Persepolis in Iran, carved some 2,500 years ago, where powerful carvings depict people of an empire taking each other by the hand (Fig. 1). We discussed the role of attributes ascribed to hands in the Gilgamesh and other primary texts, and engaged in debates about the cultural-specific or world-wide significance of a gesture described or translated. Weekly meetings discussed how hands operated in our daily life, and we looked at guest speakers’ gestures (Fig. 2). When discussing commonalities between the Biblical traditions and the Qur’an, we visited an exhibition and storage rooms at the Smithsonian and discussed ancient bronze hands with writings, leading to a project on “Hands-off antiquities” in Yemen.
Students took photographs of hands in the museum and behind the scenes. One student wrote a paper on the evolution of civilization by looking at hand-axes (Fig. 3), while another discussed the role of hands in creating ancient Near Eastern cylinder seals. Sometimes, hands were found in the most unusual places (Fig. 4). In conclusion, the semester long focus on hands stimulated creative thinking and allowed students to understand the universal role of hands in creating the foundations of our culture. Focusing on hands can bring balance between looking an old texts and new things. And for the instructor, taking students by the hand in a literary sense can be fun and enjoyable.
