Hand Gestures Reflecting Bengali Culture by Hakim Arif

Literally the term ‘globalization’ indicates a form of global economic system (Jay 2001, Said 2001). But it has linguistic and cultural dimensions too. In fact, the present form of globalization is a uni-directional process since the ‘big’ economy and the ‘big’ culture of the west have established a controlling authority over the ‘small’ economies as well as the ‘small’ cultures of the earth’s relatively poorer. Hence it creates a hegemonic approach of ‘americanization’⁵ and ‘englishnization’⁶ – two aggressive cultural phenomena all over the world nowadays—to the rest of the world. For example, people, especially the young generation living in many developing countries including Bangladesh practice English as well as American life-styles not only to be accommodated in the big culture but also to get jobs in transnational companies that make their life easy and uninterrupted. But a critical observation helps to conclude that such a uni-directional globalization process led by the West seriously affects the culture and livelihood of the world’s developing and underdeveloped countries specifically Bangladesh. Nowadays the city dwellers of this country are changing their cultural practices from native tradition to the western styles such as, enjoying music and movie, taking cloth and food, practicing language and nonverbal behaviors for the purpose of communication and so on that can be termed as cultural imperialism (Arif 2004).   Given this existing reality the practice of a specific BEE hand gestures give rise to new hope. The recent usage of the BEE hand gesture the vertical attached palms (see the Figures 6a and 6b) indicating Namaste—an Indo-Bengal origin communicative sign— is going to be a greeting-sign of international community, since many celebrities all over the world are regularly performing this Namaste sign. For example, in Figure 6a the President of Peru exhibits this Namaste gesture to Prof. Mohammad Yunus (a Bangladeshi Nobel laureate for Peace in 2006) in Peru, whereas Figure 6b shows that Mr. Barak Obama—the present President of the USA—is showing a Namaste gesture while he was visiting New Delhi in 2010. Alongside, the Namaste gesture is now being used as a sign of greeting on the cover of different daily commodities like hand bags, T-shirts etc in many countries in Europe and Asia (see Figure 6c and 6d).   In addition, Shakira—the world famous as well as heartthrob singer of the present time—and her co-performers exhibit Namsate gestures in performing the theme song ‘Waka Waka’ in the inaugural ceremony of the FIFA World Cup-2010 in South Africa. Such these aforesaid examples indicate that in the era of cultural imperialism the Namaste BEE hand gesture is making a counter-globalization—a form of cultural expansion moving from the opposite direction of the existing globalization process— throughout the world.