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I’m waiting for some time…, let’s face it: for some years to have enough time to film in Cairo, Egypt, spontaneous nonverbal communications in public and domestic spaces.
I expect it to actually publish my article on the gesture of Cairo, (Repertoire of gestures of Cairo [temporary title]), which is a second component after the article (An Outline of a Yemeni Body Language (Taiz and Sanaa)): to offer simultaneously a multimedia version, and to use the videos to be able to ask such good drawings than those in my Yemeni article.
Then recently I had the idea that I could either create an experimental situation, well... or borrow these videos to film pre-existing corpus. In seeking, there is one case I recorded, the work of Carolyn Killean: Egyptian Arabic Gestures I and II, a Mac CDRom, published in 1996 (Chicago, New Haven, University of Chicago, Language Faculty Resource Center, Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning).
Alas, I still couldn’t get this work; it is nevertheless promising:
“Multimedia clips of body gestures taken from a popular Egyptian soap opera; runs directly from the CD-ROM.” All I learned taht its project started in Dec., 31th, 1992.
The idea is good: even if they are actors, to use of Egyptian soap operas to illustrate a study of Cairo gestures (and not to study the gestures in the musalsalat) can be helpful.
A friend, Célame Barge, reported me the broadcast of this advertisement which converges to the idea that I want to do.
This ad for Mobinil (one of three major mobile operators in Egypt), released in 2009, is partly based on nonverbal communication in Egypt.
The English text that accompanies the advertisement (broadcast on television channels) says:Egyptian have a million of creative ways of to communicate, Mobinil just gave them a new one.