Vilém Flusser defines gesture as «a movement of the body expressing a certain intention», immediately situating it within the field of interpretation: a gesture exists only insofar as it is read by an observer. Despite its conceptual coherence, this formulation harbors a concealed anthropocentrism and a semiotic reductionism, reducing the gesture to a communicative interface and stripping it of ontological autonomy. What if the gesture is an autonomous object, possessing an interior depth irreducible to either the performer or the spectator? In the ritual practices of the Navajo or Lakota, the gesture is precisely this: it outlives its creator, remains independent of hermeneutic contingency, and preserves its efficacy as an autonomous event within the world-without-us.

Consider, for example, Diné ceremonies aimed at restoring cosmic harmony, hózhǫ́. During a healing ceremony (hózhǫ́ǫ́gi), the practitioner-healer (hataałii) reproduces strictly canonical hand movements, directing sand, herbs, or breath along precise trajectories. Ritual cleansing movements function in a similar manner. In academic literature, they are occasionally designated as «purifying gestures», accompanying smudging ceremonies and prayer rituals. The tracing of the contours of a sand painting (iikááh) and the guiding of hands over the patient’s body are integrated into the procedure of restoring hózhǫ́ (harmony, balance). These gestures do not «signify» healing; they constitute it as an event. They do not belong to the performer, but rather to a certain order of things, through which the mediator’s body becomes a conduit for the Other. In the Lakota tradition, for instance, such gestures constitute an integral part of the preparations for the Inípi (sweat lodge) or the Wiwáŋyaŋg Wačípi (Sun Dance) ceremony. Their significance lies in ontological efficacy: here, the gesture is an instrument for the transformation of state, not a communicative act.

Flusser’s phenomenological framework, which presupposes «intention» and an «interpreter», proves inadequate to encompass these practices. The ritual gesture operates outside this paradigm: it is not addressed to an observer, but directed toward a cosmic order. Its «intention» – if such a psychological term is even appropriate here – is not subjective, but ontological. The gesture does not «signify»; it «is». It possesses its own spirit and density, persisting even in the absence of a «spectator».