The Times’ Week in Review had an interesting column yesterday about the foreign policy implications of public kisses. The column looks at the recent uproars over Richard Gere’s effusive kissing of Indian actress Shilpa Shetty (interestingly, there’s no word on the immediate evasive actions she attempted) and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s kissing of the hand of a former teacher.

When Mr. Ahmadinejad, the ultraconservative president of Iran, kissed the gloved hand last week of an elderly woman who had once been his school teacher, at a ceremony for a national teachers’ day, he, too, received sharp rebukes from clerics.

Islamic religious leaders accused him of “indecency.” Islamic newspapers noted that under Shariah law contact with a woman with whom one is not related is a crime sometimes punishable by death.

. . .

In the case of Mr. Ahmadinejad, according to press reports, his respectful kissing of his teacher’s hand was a gesture of conciliation with Iranian school teachers, who as a group have recently complained of low wages.

In Mr. Gere’s case, no one seems to know much more than the obvious. They were on national TV, promoting AIDS awareness together. She was pretty. He was Richard Gere. The results are on YouTube.

‘Course, as the column also notes, Richard should have known better.

But anthropologists and philematologists (people who study kissing) say the harsh reactions to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s and Mr. Gere’s kisses underline a certain cultural and political mystery about the seemingly simple act of kissing.

Kissing in public . . . is quite often a public statement, they say: Witness the use of the public kiss in the lore of organized crime (to mean soon dead). Or in the political world, the moment in the 2000 campaign when Al Gore passionately kissed his wife, Tipper, (to signify his Alpha-Maleness). Or the mostly forgotten but once infamous kiss Hillary Rodham Clinton planted on the cheek of Yasir Arafat’s wife (signifying many things, not least of which that she would spend a good deal of time repairing relations with Jewish voters).

Vaughn M. Bryant Jr., an anthropologist at Texas A&M University, said that contrary to the lyrics of “As Time Goes By,” a kiss is almost never just a kiss. It is a language with a grammar all is own, which is as strict as the syntax of international diplomacy, he said.

“When people kiss, there are all kinds of hidden rules in play. . . . Where they are; who they are to each other; what the relationship between the sexes is in a country; all that gets considered.”

Robert Albro, a professor of anthropology at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., who specializes in the role that culture plays in international relations, said Mr. Gere’s faux pas was an example of a cultural “border clash” that is increasingly common in the era of globalization.

To plant a kiss on the face of an Indian woman in public, he said, would be seen by conservative Indians as a trespass on “the cultural space” of their country.

“Women, in particular conspicuous women such as the actress, bear the burden of cultural identity in many parts of the world,” he said. “They are like the social skin of society itself.”

And I thought the worst thing you could do was kiss another woman behind your significant other’s back. Who knew it had such international implications?

I love the following part, and then I’ll leave this alone and let you read the rest of the story yourself if you want to know more.

[W]herever people kiss, they practice the same categories of kissing that the Romans first identified: the “basium,” for the standard romantic kiss; the “osculum,” for the friendship kiss; and the “savium,” the most passionate kind, sometimes referred to as a French kiss. (Mr. Ahmadinejad’s was a classic osculum. Mr. Gere’s was probably an osculum playfully masquerading as a basium that, unfortunately for Mr. Gere, may have looked a little too much like a savium on TV.)