ABSTRACT
The emic gesture is frequently made visible in ethnographic writing through the names assigned to others, which might be taken for an index of alterity. As a concept, the 'emic gesture' does the work of naming a foundational anthropological procedure with the purpose of articulating the Roy Wagnerian instantiation of a gesture that points to the emic to the possibilities and entanglements that its iteration in anthropological discursive practice have implicated. The connections between Wagner's actualizations of the emic and the various iterations of this gesture in anthropology and beyond must remain partial, as is the case with any attempt at description that also aims to be transformative. Wagner argues against "constructivist" anthropology on the basis that it considers social phenomena merely as "social constructions," and in doing so disregards the interplay of the innate and the artificial in human symbolization. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
