272
Book
ReviewOnly
ConnectCommunicating:
the multiple modes of human interconnection. Ruth Finnegan, 2002. London
and New York: Routledge; ISBN: 0415241189, paper, 306 pp., £20.00
SAGE Publications, Inc.2005DOI: 10.1177/09675507050130030504
BrianRoberts
University of Huddersfield
This
book is based on long reflection by Ruth Finnegan on how we com- municate
with others and her own research experience in widely separated places – witnessing the richness of story-telling performances in West
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Africa,
the evocative sounds, colours and scents of a Fijian market, and the musical
and social activities of musicians in England. It draws not only on retrospection
of her past `academic' anthropological endeavours but also on the contemplation
of her own `ordinary' experiences of `every- day living and of contacts across
distance through telephones, letters, presents' and `those variegated family
heirlooms, material contacts with earlier generations' (p. xv). She also uses
a formidable array of reading and knowledge of the literary, visual and musical
arts. Finnegan's `quest' is to show the diversity and complexity of how `human
beings interconnect with each other' through `modes of commu- nicating', since
`many accounts seem not to taken on this full multisen- sory range', being
limited to words or to more recent developments in visual technologies and
their effects (p. xv). She says: Looking back at my own experiences, I felt
the need for a wider view of communication. There seemed a place for a book
which could draw together something of the many current insights into the
importance of all the sense in our human interconnecting, of material objects,
contacts across space and time, and the significance of experiential dimensions
of human life, not just the cognitive. Too many of our assumptions and analyses
have been logocentric or unidimensional, cutting out the dynamic processes
of gesture, dance, often even sound itself. (p. xv) The two chapters in Part
1 `Foundations' are concerned with various per- spectives on communication
and the basic resources that humans and other animals have for communication.
The approach may be said to be open and inclusive: `communication is here
taken to be a dynamic inter- active process made up of organised, purposive,
mutually-influential and mutually-recognisable actions and experiences that
are created in a vari- ety of modes by and between active participants as
they interconnect with each other' (pp. 28–29). Communication, thus
conceived, is a `relative process with multiple features' – a `multidimensional
spectrum of acting and experiencing', with humans using a `variety of modes'
to interconnect with each other (pp. 29, 31). Part II `Channels of communication'
describes the variety of forms of communication with others that we possess – `The sounding world and its creation', `Shaping the sights: vision and the
communicating body', `Creating and sharing sights: human arts and artefacts',
`Sensing the odour' and `Communicating touch'. Finally, in Part III two chapters
address `A mix of arts' (or the `interweaving' of the above `channels') and
communication `Through space and time'. Throughout the text there are over
40 illustrations – including maps, diagrams, photographs, musical scores
and pictures – that admirably support the attempt to show the
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variety
and sophistication of human communication. For example, there is a diagram
of `Australian aboriginal hand signals', photographs of `The Laughing Buddha'
and `The painted rickshaw', and a diagram of the `Meanings of touch among
American students at a Western university'. It is the mark of a stimulating
text that the reader responds to discussion by following his or her own imagination; for instance, on reading the account of gestures and signals, I remembered
the Celtic `finger alphabet' as outlined by Robert Graves in The White Goddess.
The more `rounded' view of communicative channels has made me more aware of
the limi- tations both methodologically and theoretically of much of the work
we undertake in the biographical field in considering how individuals con-
struct and `compose' their lives. Ruth Finnegan's book deserves to become
a `classic' account of human communication but I fear that because of its
cross-disciplinary range and depth it may not get the attention it richly
deserves.