Speaking through Touch

A more responsible me would be packing right now. But I feel like I've left so much unsaid about India on this blog. Its definitely not for a lack of insights and excitement (my blogging absence has been the product of intermittent internet access, project business, and illness). There are a hundred little themes about India I could blog about right now: the food, the noise, the colors, the head-bob, the dogs, the trash, the "What is your country?"s... Anyone who has traveled to India knows each of these Indian tidbits well. But there's another aspect of Indian culture that I've noticed that I haven't heard mentioned much. Combined with my reading of a recent article from the Economist and viewing of the excellent new Pixar film WallE, I'd like to talk about that lost form of human communication: touch.

In India, people are just as fluent in "touch" as they are in the spoken word. Beggars in the street flock to me and any other white people in my company, touching our arms and gently tugging on our sleeves. We watch same-sex friends drape themselves over each other shoulders and interlock fingers and hands in the process. New acquaintances we meet smother our hand shakes in double-fisted hand pumps and warmly throw an arm around our shoulder like they're picking up their son from a tee-ball game.

So what are they all saying? Touch has a wide vocabulary but all of these people are generally saying the same thing: "I want to connect with you."

Touch is a way of building relationships. Harry Harlow's famous study of monkeys separated from their mothers showed that this is indeed one of the primary ways that a baby monkey builds a relationship with its mother (babies separated from their mothers and any other soft touch showed extremely high levels of stress whereas babies whose mothers were replaced by terry cloth towels bonded with the soft touch of the towel just as they would to the soft touch of a mother). The same is true of humans.

Yet the shift to internet communication, the cult of personal space, and homophobia in the US has greatly reduced our fluency in "touch" in America. Sure we still shake hands with new acquaintances and hug old friends but we often seem to do so out of tradition, rather than a genuine desire to embrace. And a touch for the sake of tradition doesn't communicate much. It can also be easy to think that emails, video chat, and text messages can communicate just as much as anything we do or say in person, but the fact is we're still biological creatures with evolved needs.

Fortunately, as any student of a foreign language who has returned to their former study abroad location after years at home, though languages fade fast without practice, they revive themselves in our minds almost as quickly with practice.

So try something this week. Next time you really want to show some gratitude, say it with touch.