My younger daughter, Nava, turned two last week. Among her favorite phrases are “No, Nava do it” and “what da HECK.” Her favorite music, by a wide margin, is Elton John. And her favorite gesture is a hearty, full-body nod. She deploys this repertoire with enormous humor, precision, and grace.
I love being a parent. The thing I find most fascinating about the experience is how it throws a mirror not just on one’s own childhood, but on all of human nature. It’s an obvious point, but one that I never thought about before having kids: all newborn babies are always the same, everywhere. And then, slowly but surely, they become not the same. As cultural and family influences accumulate like sedimentary layers in these tiny personalities, you can see nurture reshaping nature in a deeply embodied, physical way.
Nava experiencing what she calls “pumpkin day” last October.
One thing that Nava has got me thinking about is the deep history of gesture. Gesture exists on the borderland between nature and nurture. Certain physical actions are so universal that they communicate effectively not just across human societies but across species: bared teeth, for instance. Other gestures encode more specific cultural patterns, but do so in a way that is more expansive than language.
A few months ago, for instance, I watched my mother-in-law (who was born and raised in a village in northern Iran) teach Nava how to knock on wood for good luck. I hadn’t realized this was so widespread a practice until I checked Wikipedia and found that variants exist in Bulgaria (chukam na dǎrvo), Georgia (kheze daḳaḳuneba), Indonesia (amit-amit jabang bayi), Norway (bank i bordet ) and some two dozen other countries.
Why? Could we trace embodied behaviors through history just as anthropologists can trace, say, legends or etymologies relating to magical blacksmiths or slaying serpents?
What I found is that written evidence for knocking on wood (and for the history of gesture as a whole) is remarkably sparse. In the Penguin Guide to Superstitions, folklorist Steve Roud offers a skeptical take on the provenance of knocking on wood due to the near total absence of written records about it:
The two most popular explanations of origin are that the belief goes back to pagan times when we believed in tree spirits, or that we are invoking Christ’s protection by referring to the wood of the Cross. The former is nothing but guesswork, based on the conviction that all superstitions must be ancient, and it has the usual problem of spanning thousands of years with no evidence at all of its existence, or, for that matter, any evidence that ‘we’ ever believed in tree spirits.
Roud then ventures a theory of his own: the custom, he argues, probably developed from a children’s game called Tig-touch-wood that was popular in early 19th century England.
If true, the practice of knocking on wood for good luck is actually surprisingly new.
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