1 - Introduction
This paper is based on my own experiences in the Brazilian everyday life as a native speaker and on a series of interviews that I made in Mangueira, an Afro Brazilian community located in Rio de Janeiro, during 1996, as part of my doctoral dissertation research. In it, I tried to show how the categorization system works based on bodily experiences and , consequently, how categories become samples of embodied language, in a especial for the case of African descents in the US and Brazil.
For this presentation I will sustain the argument that is: culture creates a rhythmic tissue that enacts meaning and the materiality of the signs to those individuals that act as subject/agent. This mentioned rhythmic process of meaningfulness envelops the agent and the medium of the communicative process, and, from this installed process the result is a holistic configuration expressed in both mundane and mental imagery spheres evoking gestures based on diagrammatic aesthetic and kinetics.
To get a substantial material as reference for this argument, I will bring the idea of Ginga among Afrobrazilians which is an ideia that is not possible to be conceived without certain gestural diagramma that makes the meaning of Ginga possible to be understood. Without gestures (kinetics and aesthetic ) to reefer to Ginga would not make any sense for the Brazilians being Ginga, itself, a sample of gestural category.
However, it would be appropriated to give for all of you, before beginning my presentation, a short piece of Ginga historical background. Ginga’s roots are in the Kikongo language, one of the languages spoken in part of Angola today and in part of the Congo Kingdom, where the Portuguese arrived in the early fifteenth century. Through the cultural contact Ginga came into the Portuguese language in many aspects:
first, as a metonymic effect of Nzinga, a Mbundo Queen --the first woman to lead the Mbundo Kingdom-- who fought and endured strong opposition from healers, farmers, Portugueses and Imbangala warriors-- a secret male society that initiated youths inside the Kingdom to war and were called Jaga or Yaka by the Portuguese.
Second, as a reference to Nginga’s warriors, also called ginga by the protuguese according to Joseph Miller, an African historian.
Third, as Jinga a Mbundo word whose semantic universe is centered around the idea of “unceaseable movement, unendable articulation”. Then, for both cases, either being a metonymic effect on a semantic meaning appropriated by both Portuguese and African descendants under lusophonic colonization, Ginga became a figure of speech that indicates balance through movement, stylization, negotiation, non-confrontation and something like “being in peace with God and life,” that is, a cosmic equilibrium.
I might say that Ginga works a state of mind that grammaticalizes the cognitive functioning in a very proper manner as a support for the recreation of several performances that originally had Bantu motor actions such as Samba, Capoeira, Jongo, etc., and still, Kikongo and Kimbundo belief among African descendants in Brazil. At the same time, it becomes a core concept that acts as a pragmatic-transcendental sense of rhythm that defines a moral philosophical imaginary.
In other words, what I am positing is that, the communicative process that implies is based on rhythm, a core concept of the process of embodiment and a very singular constellation of non-verbal signs that enacts movement to social representation. For this case, so, rhythm emerges as a "conductor" that coordinates the poetic between movement and cultural representation, where motor action and body signs are revealed. The speed of flow by which meaningfulness produces "making sense" and the adjustments of our cognition to what is going on together, define what I call rhythm which is itself the process of embodiment seen as a quantum perceptual dimension of the materiality of communication. Then, my theoretical hypothesis for this presentation is that our conceptual system is not only embedded by gestures, but above all, rhythmically embedded by our physical and gestural experience.

2 - THE BODY NARRATIVE AND THE SEMIOTIC REGIME OF GINGA
2.1 - Embodied Language, Gesture and Memory, Ginga, turns to key word that operates as a figure of speech for Brazilians designate their belonginness to the national Brazilian order either inside or outside of Brazil. So, it turns to a case that allows us to understand the popularized way by which Brazilian define the singular trace that gives to themselves the condition of being nationally or transnationally. considered Brazilian, as to say that Ginga is one of the traces that make Brazilians Brazilian. Usually, if you ask to Brazilians what makes their Carnival somehow different from the others, they would say that it is because of ginga presence in Samba. If you ask what makes Brazilian soccer player different from others, they will answer that is because the presence of ginga in their way of playing, and so forth. Thus, in a mundane sphere when people pronounce the word to index something Ginga emanates a kinetic effect that provokes bodily movements that imply hips and shoulders as their source domains --people tend to add hip and shoulder movements when referring to Ginga, though most of the time without naming these parts of the body as conceptual domains. And, in a mental imagery sphere Ginga operates as a way of thinking that has the body metaphor as a reference, meaning whatever action is able to embody difficulties to create other chances. Chances created in the context of yearnings towards an immediate goal or towards a cosmic and moral engagement that implies, in this particular case, a kind of moral philosophy.
Consequently, to my interviewees these elements were so strong that they nearly had to perform part of the meaning in order to express themselves and, consequently, to make visible the whole embodiment of the semantic realm. It was not simply a bodily expression to reinforce their performance, because gesture or bodily expression make a “presentation” of the meaning as part of the believes that they bring out and are, for this reason, a communicative component of the conversation (Armstrong 1995, Kendon 1983, 1990, 1994).
Doing it, let’s go to take a look at the first case. One of the lady that is interviewed is Ana Maria, a Mangueira resident, who, in the middle of a conversation, when I asked her about Ginga she answered me in the following way:
“In our Portuguese ginga is a slang word that means to shake THE BODY, TO SHAKE WITH SKILL; You seek, you get, you get a crash, and then you get Ginga turn around – and you go through another way you go forwards”.
The image painted and the gesture presented by Ana Maria are constituent elements of the gestaltic figure that the meaning implies. The picture evoked in a conversation composes a frame that contains expressive images and bodily behaviors, and may indicate a prototype or other crucial devices to the communicative process. For her, Ginga is a box of command that imply a set of cognitive activities that define a series of tasks: decision-making, searching, aiming, achieving, etc.
This activity is proceeded by a mapping of action of thought -- the curve-lines that are always described by people’s gestural metaphors -- and a state of mind, which is part of the dynamic reinforcement of that originary feeling, the prereflexive one -- the “firstness” in Peirce’s words -- which generates the whole process of categorization.
So, also it may turn into an ethnic concept, and under this conditions Ginga performs the function of mapping and making reference to how blacks operate in Brazil in multiple worlds in their everyday life. Based on this map Ginga may also define style, ethics, access to multiple worlds, self-presentation, self-construction, attitude, conduct and, on a very concrete level, ways of walking.
For this case, I bring for you another interviewed who pointed to these possibilities that I just mentioned. Jefferson is his name and he says: “Ginga for me is my way of walking , speaking and dressing. This is the black Brazilian ginga. Ginga is a slow way of speaking, a sort of dancing, a way of walking and wearing light clothes”
As you could see, when people define Ginga, they reveal a sort of minimum cache of bodily movements that are very constant among them and also very present in their everyday life context. Thus, as components of the process of communication, these minimalities include, for example, in both case so far presented, the shoulders in movement. It might be a gesture metaphor that reconstructs the narrow path built by a post-colonial Brazilian society through which the black body may pass; either the unceasing movement to achieve some goal or an expressive behavior that becomes a visual-gesture, both turn to a phenomenon appearing to achieve a thick understanding, like the “I got it!” that coined the firstness in Pierce.
This points to a holistic knowledge that brings up a clear “logic of negotiation” and not a “logic of the confrontation”. This negotiation is grammatically ensured by the expressively permanent ‘good mood’ as part of an empirically broad philosophy, whose emblem is the “alegria de viver” (“happiness of living”). To say that there is a grammar is to think about these minimalities that come out in everyday communicative practices and that are not necessarily hidden in the semantic realm, but are also a constitutive part of it. To show once more this process, let’s see these other pieces from my interviews.
“Ginga of Brazilians is ‘malandragem’ (trickstering); it is the ‘trickster fomula for solving problems. It is our daily life, it is a smiling, a ‘hips-play’, it is to continue believing that the situation goes get better right away even when it is very hard”
“Between Jeitinho and Ginga I stick with Ginga. I can make my own Jeitinho. The government does not need to teach me the skill (o jeito) because I did not get job opportunities. Ginga is that swing, it is being in peace with god, with the people. That’s where Ginga is born.”

3 - The POST-COLONIAL GINGA’S CORPOREAL FIELD
Through these last enouncements we may think about the variation that is possible to find when we look up Gina’s definition. It is able to provide a net of conceptualization and a chain of subcategorizations that I do not want to show here now but that is part of the futures intention of this research.
As a dense concept, Ginga may tells us not only about the kinetics of the human body in everyday life, but also about the embodiment of a word that blooms as a language inside of Portuguese language when it refers to kinetics in the living world and the aesthetic wisdom of living. In other words, Ginga is the perception that catches the rhythm of life. And because it has been a word quite often used to express embodied forms of acting (their strength, force, will and sensuality) in the quotidian life of Afro-Brazilians, Ginga has gained a symbolic mark. This symbolism comes integrated and wrapped in a series of indexes that identify Ginga as a sign in the Peirce sense, in order to affirm that Ginga is a socio-cultural epiphenomenon whose sign functioning operates in tandem with people’s actions, people’s consciousness of Ginga and the events that create the corporeal field in which Ginga becomes part of a semantic realm that posits a grammar of our everyday life.
Certainly, to speak of the sign function of Ginga implies to consider it as a holistic configuration in which, as I said at the beginning, the semantic packing that Ginga loads envelop, on the one hand, the corresponding meaning in Mbundo with the African signifiers, on the other, with the Portuguese imaginary in relation to the idea of having permanent skills for tolerating the Other in order to obtain the best accommodation.

3.1 - The KINETIC QUALITY of WORDS
The “kinetic quality” of Ginga is what retains people’s imaginary attention and shapes their articulation of the meaning. The kinetic mediation in this case is the markedness for the speech action and by the extension, for dissimulative symbolism that Ginga stabilizes in the symbolic discursive everyday market in Brazil. The act has the “hip movement” as its metaphor, pattern and isolated component. This “hip movement” might be considered in light of an anthropological approach as part of the “hip event” visible through the hips’ movements in walking styles, in Brazilian soccer styles, in Capoeira and in Samba; it is a quality that marks a situation as good, bad or advantageous whenever you hear “Jogo-de-cintura”.
The kinaesthetic minimality within the semantic meaning shows us the body and, in it, the hips, as sites of memory that bring an implicit memory and transitivity by repeting those previous ideas of Ginga that I connected to ‘comings and goings’ of Jasgas’ warriors. These are responsible for the image of the body in permanent transition from one contact to another, from one “state of affairs” to another, from one situation to another. This nomadic imagery makes “Jogo-de-cintura” circulate as an original type that serves as a model upon which present stages create a template. It is a prototype and an abstract deixis marker that points to the bodily quality to ‘jump over’ obstacles, hence it is a distinctive construction that attributes a moral force to the agent who has it. Hre, the kinetic meaning is transported to the political level of commitments entailed in such agency.
The meaning embedded in deixis is a demonstration of something, indication, index, indexicalization, and in this way it is the connective, of that component of some level of transitivity between subject-agents historically contextualized and other subjects or objects.
(What concerns me is how the field of deixis that deals with the articulation between the gestural and symbolic usage in creating and articulating a spatial logic to reinforce the indexial mediation is located in deixis context, as in “Jogo-de-cintura” vis-à-vis the idea of Ginga.) The symbolic-gestural expression of hip indexicalization occurs when one says that it is necessary to have Ginga in quotidian contexts in Brazilian culture. Its utterance delivers an indexical meaning that has the deixis form “Jogo-de-cintura” that anchors bodily attributes based on kinetics. Such a conceptualization expresses the transformation of body as a corporeal field of memory emphasized in its speakers’ routines and actions, which makes sense within their cultural utterances.
“Jogo-de-cintura” (again, meaning hip play) is a conceptual bodily reality evoked through pronouncing the concepts of Ginga. This evocation implies embodied rhythms that bear the meaning indexicalization and enact the communicative practice. In this case, the configuration of a linguistic subsystem and social construction build the cultural intelligibility of the communicative practice (Hanks 1996: 248-68) which becomes meaningful only inside of this cultural system.
The property of index is to make a non-linguistic or extra-linguistic context emergent. Hence, it would be impossible to understand Ginga without taking into consideration the black body, which is the protagonist in this language game. This body matters because it interacts phenomenologically and creates a field of mediation on language, performative agency and cognitive mapping (Fouconnier 1997). These elements are relevant for the agents in making sense of their everyday life by acting through these categories, either syntagmatically or paradigmatically. The deixis expression evoked here is responsible for the constitution of a corporeal field (1996: 248-68) that builds the environment through the sequences of setting that this action supposes.
The deixis of hip movements depicts curving tracks, plots scenes and relates actions that should be taken and that become a dynamic balance whose gestus is the creation of a state of mind. The corporeal field (Hanks 1996) that the “hip effects” substantiates and defines is a pragmatic phenomenology whose result is a theory of action and a cognitive mapping of territories of thought and language. Thus, the pragmatic function that is represented by the deixis “Jogo-de-cintura”, requires an inferential scheme or frame (Tannen 1979, Goffman 1974, Batenson 1972 ) whose referential properties are the hips in movement and the context that is created and marked by the circumventing movements that map the implied path towards a specific goal.
“Jogo-de-cintura” as a prototype, cultural marker, mediator and part of that “hip event” describes a cognitive action that, through an apparent renunciation of bodily action, is still an action; an action that moves intentionality, feelings and sentiments ahead, maintaining an ongoing process of stillness in repetition that implies historical dissimulation of movement through cosmic movement, similar to explanations of the “Four moments of the sun” (Thompson, n/d,; Busenki-Lumanisa 1969). Thus, “Jogo-de-Cintura” is the deixis for actions that involve participation instead of confrontation. Its singularity is the logic of paradox (Deleuze 1990), meaning movement through motionless; being without being.
This allows me to posit the African Diaspora as a family of language games and forms of life that establishes a resemblance of performative manifestations that promote a sort of cultural and political interaction, expressed through tropes bound to a somatic (or enacted) categorical system. Ginga is one of these embodied categorizations.
This approach yields a glimpse of the web of spaces and familiarities that bear out another hypothesis, that everyday life is not a pre-determined given context; it occurs and transforms itself through body action and affections smoothly navigated under the motivation of soothing rhythms of life. These rhythms convey the very structure of everyday routines. They are forms that traverse the narration of memory and experiences through movements and affections that make the body a virtual site of memory. To finishing up: As cultural trope for a particular feeling implying bodily practice, Ginga become bridge between everyday life practices and sentiments, creating a synthetic understanding. This understanding evolves on a figurative terrain overriding the semantic ground. Ginga performs as search for a balanced form of life represented by flow and rhythm through motion ideas. By achieving Ginga one is able to access more options in social contexts, to obtain equality, and presuppose the wisdom to be engaged with the dynamic capacity to make decisions. It’s a category that runs parallel to colonial memory and discourse being it associated with body and quotidian self presentation: gestures, dress, manners of walking and, above all, social posture.
Thus trope also shows us much of what has been recognized in current studies of memory in cognitive sciences, in which ideas such as coupling (association), semantic networking, prototyping and articulation are performed. Therefore, the kinaesthetic -- here understood as motion and feeling -- of everyday life experiences are microphysical “affordances” to the communicative and cognitive process (Karel 1988). These cultural models reach a comprised habitus, style and rhythm of being that shape systems of communication. We shall call these systems of communication “language games”. However, unlike the language games which we describe as incomplete parts of language, these are complete systems of communication. These gestural tropes act as if they were something close to what Marcel Mauss (1979) called a “whole social fact”, defined as a result of the striking articulation of gestures, speech, ideology, the perception of everyday life and elements of social order.
Thus, I am speaking of gesture as an extensive field that contains all possible forces able to make meaning active as a form of life; that is, verbal and non-verbal signs, words, gestures, images and contexts with their time-space references which, above all, are physically constituted and uttered pragmatically throughout performative events. In such models, speech categories or categories of speech define (and are defined by) habitus, style, rhythms of being and diagrammatic gestures . They may become ethnic, cultural, and national components of self-referentialization and authenticity as well.
Seen through this framework, the African Diaspora becomes a melange of geographically displaced memories throughout different places; memories that come not only through roots and routes but also through riots and rhythms, which make specially rhythm to be always in the here and now. Such a consideration indicate a type of “dancing consciousness” scenario in which the gap between actions and phisicalities that covers the process of cognition is replete of motion and e-motion.
Essentially, the only thing that exists is rhythm, which is conspicuously opened to be appropriated by neurons’ snaps, hearts and lungs, music and poetry, winds and tides, languages and thoughts, locomotion and dreams, suggesting rhythm’s biological, social, natural, cultural, physical and metaphysical reach. Rhythm is always in-between, on the border of everything, scattered, fractal and universal; quantum and qualia. Gestus and dance of life. This is precisely why any possible theorization on rhythm is always political, because in catching its unreachable density, one should go beyond the sign, the text and the narrative; there are no sign actions nor narrative articulations without it. Rhythm means that besides place, perception of body, cosmological connection and everything else, there is only intersection, fold and flow...

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