2. Showing submissive attitude
A submissive attitude is performed by a person—the actor of the communication event— to the addressee who is eminent in the society in terms of age, strength and power. In fact, it indicates a state of humble obedience of this person to the superior addressee whom the person needs to show his/her due loyalty. So, during showing a submissive attitude the person, the actor of communication, might show his/her mental loyalty which is visualized in different body parts such as face, hand shape etc. There appears a huge social dimension as well as stratification in the Bengali community (Mukherjee 1972). Bangladesh—the land of Bengali speaking people with relatively a very small area (148,000 km2) — is one of the most densely (>1,000 persons/ km2) populated countries in the world. Due to the rapid population growth, the country is encountered with resource limitation, which has resulted in massive poverty. Again concerning getting scope and facilities a small proportion of the people are highly privileged, whereas most of them are deprived in this community (Rahman 1995). Therefore, these poor and underprivileged people are to regularly perform various forms of submissive attitudes to the counterparts who are rich and powerful in the society. Sometimes they exhibit such attitudes not only to get undue privileges from the powerful ones, but also to show their pretending obedience to them. On the other hand, powerful members of the society, who are willing to establish their dominance, also enforce the poor people to perform submissive attitudes to them. As a result these pressurized poor and underprivileged people either utter some verbal codes denoting expressing a form of submissive view, or exhibit nonverbal activities symbolizing a full extent submission to the superior ones. BEE hand gestures among all nonverbal components are the prominent ones that Bengali people commonly perform to show their slavish attitude to the superior members mentioned above. Now in showing this attitude they mainly perform the following two types of BEE hand gestures.
- Imposed BEE hand gesture
- Pretending BEE hand gesture
a. Imposed BEE hand gesture: Imposed BEE hand gesture is a kind of communicative sign which is made by the gesturer having followed the order of an influential person. Sometimes powerful and influential members of the society like police, musclemen, and political leaders compel the poor or the subordinates to perform a submissive BEE hand gesture like Salam to establish their dominance and authority over them. For example, in Figure 2a a muscleman is threatening a street child3 to give a Salam which symbolizes a submissive attitude of this boy to him.
b. Pretending BEE hand gesture: Pretending BEE hand gesture, on the other hand, is a self-motivated communicative sign. It indicates that the gesturer him/herself feels an urge to perform this sign with a fake attitude of ‘submission’, if s/he wants to get some extra privilege from the addressee who is superior to him/her in terms of both position and power. In the Bengali community sometimes a subordinate person (e.g. an employee of an office, or a student in the classroom) performs a flattering gesture—an example of pretending BEE hand gesture— to take a favor from the boss of the office or the teacher of the classroom respectively (see Figure 2b). So, in this community the existence of various forms of submissive BEE hand gestures is a crude reality.