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Elizabeth Edwards

‘of ’ someone and treasured as such, long after the material decay of the photo-graph had rendered the image illegible in terms of Western thinking.The relationship between touch and sound is what Conner (2004: 154–6)terms a form of ‘sonic tactility’, which is connected to the telling of history.In this, he echoes Finnegan’s (2002: 213–14) argument that ‘Human memoryis extended and embodied through our tactile as well as our visual or audi-tory experience. Something of a commemorative function can be performedthrough the handling of familiar objects (such as photographs) […]. [S]ymbolictactile contact between humans through external artefacts is yet another way inwhich human beings extend their experience beyond the here and now intothe longer ranges of the past’. 25 The tactile qualities of photographs, with theirsmooth surfaces and delicate paper bases may be secondary to the visual, butthey are nonetheless highly significant in the transmission of shared values. Andindeed, it is often the case that touch is necessary in order to see and thus toconstruct a stable and apprehensible visual field. 26 However, in this, not only are photographs touched, but they are alsoenmeshed in a fluid continuum of touch and gesture by means of which groupsof interlocutors are made to cohere. As I mentioned earlier, in the context of mydiscussion of materiality, photographs are viewed in groups: bodies touching,a proximate sense of an interpreting community. 27 For as Classen (2005: 1)has pointed out, touch is not just a private act, but a ‘fundamental medium forthe expression, experience and contestation of social values and hierarchies’.A number of anthropologists have noted how photographs are viewed, passedaround and commented upon, according to local kin and political hierarchies,and in this way, the photographs are made to perform the appropriate historieswithin age and gender groups. Poignant (1992: 73), for instance, reports howphotographs were passed back away from the women and taken to the otherside of the yard for viewing by the young men of the family, in accordance withthe community’s complex avoidance rules. Similarly, Bell (2003: 115), workingin the Purari Delta region of Papua New Guinea, describes how at Koiriki hehanded photographs first to male elders as protocol demanded, after which theywere passed down through the hierarchy.Proximity brings into play non-verbal channels of communication – facialexpression, gesture, even smell – all of which contribute to photographicmeaning, in that they create environments for the affective experience ofimages. Following McNeill (1992: 1), gesture in this context might be describedas the ‘spontaneous creations of individual speakers’ and is marked here onlyas the articulation of touch and embodied responses to photographs. Touchingis one of the most expressive gestures, which both links the personal, idio-syncratic, and context-specific to socially regulated aspects of experience, andframes the pragmatic content of the oral image, marking the story. Gesturecoexists with speech, in that we should ‘regard the gesture and the spoken utter-ance as different sides of a single underlying mental process’ (McNeill 1992:1). Even small movements reinforce both voice and image and thus narration.