Abstract
A gesture is reached by many different paths. One of these, little explored by anthropologists or sociologists, is the analogical. This is the path taken by those people who colonise new gestural spaces by transfering gestures from one part of their lives to others. After a critical reading of Marcel Mauss's classic article on "body techniques", we propose other ways to interpret the nature of the gestures, positions and movements. Two ethnographic examples illustrate these reflections.