When talking about the future, I gesture to my front. When talking about the past, I gesture to my back. Over the last several years of teaching English in Korea, I've become aware that this may not be a human universal, but rather, something dependant on my Western cultural background.
I don't really know what the "rule" is, in Korea, about whether the future is in front of you or behind you, but I've gradually come to suspect it might not be exactly as in Western culture. Recently, I ran across something that hints at the possibility of difference – not with respect to Korean culture specifically, but with respect to language and/or cultural universals. A quote (hat tip to Sullyblog):
Patterns in spatio-temporal metaphors have also revealed striking reversals of the direction of time. For example, in languages like English and Spanish spatial metaphors put the past behind the observer (e.g., the worst is already behind us) and the future in front (e.g., the best is still ahead of us). In Aymara [a Peruvian native American language], this pattern is reversed and future is said to be behind the observer while the past is in front. This pattern in metaphors is reflected in patterns in spontaneous co-speech gesture. When talking about the past, the Aymara gesture in front of them, and when talking about the future, they gesture behind them, a striking reversal from patterns observed with speakers of English or Spanish.
I'm going to have to watch Koreans closely for those "spontaneous co-speech gestures." I have some suspicion (which may be false) that I might find a different conceptualization of time, which has been hinted at by the difficulties I've occasionally had with using gesture to convey the meanings of past and future (which, in an EFL classroom, come up in a discussion of verb tenses, among other things). More on time spatial metaphors here.
