ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the physical, social, and mental dimensions of the general space of the left hand by looking at its relationship to the right hand in two Western gestural systems. This reveals that how hands as spatial practitioners may simultaneously contain the traces of various worldviews such as Arabic, early modern European, or Roman. In his discussion of 'spatial architectonics', Lefebvre examines the way the body generates space, he considers hands and their role in gestural systems. In 1909, Robert Hertz, a young member of Durkheim's circle, published a thought-provoking and elegantly written paper on the place of the right and left hands and the pre-eminence of the former in both designating and becoming a focus for the sacred and profane. One was that of dualism, which Hertz saw as essential to the thought of primitives their social organisation, as influential in religious activity, and as governing both social and natural bodies.
