[1] Birdwhistell coined the term kinesics, meaning "facial expression, gestures, posture and gait, and visible arm and body movements".
"[9] Collaborations with others, including initially Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and later, Erving Goffman and Dell Hymes had huge influence on his work.
For example, the book he is best known for, Kinesics and Context, "would not have appeared if it had not been envisaged by Erving Goffman" [10] and he explicitly stated "the paramount and sustaining influence upon my work has been that of anthropological linguistics",[11] a tradition most directly represented at the University of Pennsylvania by Hymes.
[21] In addition to Edmund Snow Carpenter, Marshall McLuhan, and Birdwhistell, Lawrence K. Frank, Robert Graves, Dorothy D. Lee, and David Riesman contributed.
Through the 1950s he participated in multiple interdisciplinary collaborations: at the Foreign Service Institute of the United States Department of State, where he first outlined his ideas about the study of nonverbal behavior, working with Edward T. Hall, Henry Lee Smith, George L. Trager, Charles F. Hockett;[22] at the Macy Conferences on Group Processes, with Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and many others;[23] and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where he participated in the Natural History of an Interview project with Gregory Bateson, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Norman A. McQuown, Henry W. Brosin, and others.
At EPPI he managed a lab that included a fully equipped 16mm film studio, a resident cinematographer (Jacques van Vlack), an artist who illustrated research findings, and numerous graduate students and visitors who conferred with him and his colleague, psychiatrist Albert E.
[26] As a result, Birdwhistell was at the hub of an informal, interdisciplinary network of scholars in anthropology, ethology, linguistics, and psychiatry that "made up in vitality what it lacked in organization and professional identity.
[27] Together with Jacques van Vlack (the filmmaker), he prepared a series of films that were commercially available, although, as with his teaching, they were intended mostly for a technically trained audience.
TDR- 009, an eighty-minute 16 mm black-and-white sound film of an English pub scene in a middle class London hotel.
[32] From 1969 until he retired in 1988, Birdwhistell held the position of professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania,[33] where he worked closely with Dell Hymes and Erving Goffman, brought Gregory Bateson in as a guest speaker,[34] and influenced a new generation of students.
He was also influenced by David Efron's earlier work, the first major study of the influence of culture on gesture [37] prepared under Franz Boas, noted American anthropologist, and Eliot D. Chapple's work on rhythms of dialogue (Chapple is the one who introduced the term interaction to the study of behavior, knocked down a wall at Harvard University so he could establish a one-way screen for observing conversations in the 1930s, and was an early adopter of computer analysis of interaction patterns in the 1960s).
Birdwhistell viewed communication as a continuous, multichannel (today, the more common term is multimodal) process through which and in which social interaction occurs.
[13] Although he is best known for inventing kinesics, his influence was much larger: he helped establish the logical underpinnings of language and social interaction research generally,[54] and such approaches as the coordinated management of meaning.