sweetnpetite
Intellectual snob
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2003
- Posts
- 9,135
Put your sweet lips . . .
A simple gesture that can express love and reverence — or insult and betrayal. A kiss, Keith Thomas discovers, is never just a kiss
Look at these people! They suck each other! They eat each other's saliva and dirt! — Tsonga people of southern Africa on the European practice of kissing, 1927
In what must still be the longest single work devoted to the kiss — Opus Polyhistoricum . . . de Osculis — the German polymath Martin von Kempe (1642-83) assembled 1,040 closely packed pages of excerpts from classical, biblical, legal, medical and other learned sources to form a sort of encyclopaedia of kissing. He listed more than 20 types of kiss. These included the kiss of veneration, the kiss of peace, the kisses bestowed by Christians on images and relics, and by pagans on idols, the kissing of the Pope’s foot, the kiss bestowed by superiors on inferiors, the kiss used in academic degree ceremonies, the lovers’ kiss, the lustful and adulterous kiss, the kiss exchanged by couples sealing their marriage vows, the kiss of reconciliation, the kiss carrying contagion, the hypocritical kiss and the kiss of Judas.
It would not be difficult to prolong von Kempe’s list ad infinitum. For kisses take so many different forms. A kiss can be given in private or in public, by men to men, men to women, women to women, adults to children or children to each other. They can be unilateral or reciprocated. They can be on the lips, on the cheek or on any other part of the body. They can be blown in the air. A kiss can express deference, obedience, respect, agreement, reverence, adoration, friendliness, affection, tenderness, love, superiority, inferiority, even insult. There is no such thing as a straightforward kiss.
The conventions governing the use of the kiss as a gesture of greeting or farewell have, for most historical periods, been established only in the most fragmentary outline, and then usually only for the upper classes of society. What sort of gestures, if any, were exchanged on meeting and parting by two 12th-century serfs? When, if at all, did an 18th-century collier’s wife kiss her friends? These are not questions to which it is yet possible to give a confident answer.
But the kiss does have a history. While psychologists and psychoanalysts tend to write as if kissing has a universal and unchanging meaning (for Freud, the erotic kiss is an attempted return to the security of the mother’s breast), it is far from a universal practice. It seems to have played a less conspicuous part in either the ritual or the erotic life of most Asiatic, Polynesian or sub-Saharan societies, while in the West the norms and conventions governing its employment have, from the beginning, been constantly evolving.
complete article(recomended): http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,592-1647622,00.html
A simple gesture that can express love and reverence — or insult and betrayal. A kiss, Keith Thomas discovers, is never just a kiss
Look at these people! They suck each other! They eat each other's saliva and dirt! — Tsonga people of southern Africa on the European practice of kissing, 1927
In what must still be the longest single work devoted to the kiss — Opus Polyhistoricum . . . de Osculis — the German polymath Martin von Kempe (1642-83) assembled 1,040 closely packed pages of excerpts from classical, biblical, legal, medical and other learned sources to form a sort of encyclopaedia of kissing. He listed more than 20 types of kiss. These included the kiss of veneration, the kiss of peace, the kisses bestowed by Christians on images and relics, and by pagans on idols, the kissing of the Pope’s foot, the kiss bestowed by superiors on inferiors, the kiss used in academic degree ceremonies, the lovers’ kiss, the lustful and adulterous kiss, the kiss exchanged by couples sealing their marriage vows, the kiss of reconciliation, the kiss carrying contagion, the hypocritical kiss and the kiss of Judas.
It would not be difficult to prolong von Kempe’s list ad infinitum. For kisses take so many different forms. A kiss can be given in private or in public, by men to men, men to women, women to women, adults to children or children to each other. They can be unilateral or reciprocated. They can be on the lips, on the cheek or on any other part of the body. They can be blown in the air. A kiss can express deference, obedience, respect, agreement, reverence, adoration, friendliness, affection, tenderness, love, superiority, inferiority, even insult. There is no such thing as a straightforward kiss.
The conventions governing the use of the kiss as a gesture of greeting or farewell have, for most historical periods, been established only in the most fragmentary outline, and then usually only for the upper classes of society. What sort of gestures, if any, were exchanged on meeting and parting by two 12th-century serfs? When, if at all, did an 18th-century collier’s wife kiss her friends? These are not questions to which it is yet possible to give a confident answer.
But the kiss does have a history. While psychologists and psychoanalysts tend to write as if kissing has a universal and unchanging meaning (for Freud, the erotic kiss is an attempted return to the security of the mother’s breast), it is far from a universal practice. It seems to have played a less conspicuous part in either the ritual or the erotic life of most Asiatic, Polynesian or sub-Saharan societies, while in the West the norms and conventions governing its employment have, from the beginning, been constantly evolving.
complete article(recomended): http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,592-1647622,00.html
is still a kiss 
