Edward Hall

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Edward Hall

Biography

Edward Twitchell Hall Jr. (16 May 1914 – 20 July 2009) was an American anthropologist and the founder of the field of intercultural communication. Born in Missouri and raised largely in New Mexico, he did fieldwork among the Navajo and Hopi in the 1930s, took his doctorate at Columbia in 1942, and commanded an African American regiment in Europe and the Philippines during the Second World War. From 1950 he ran the Foreign Service Institute's training programme in Washington, teaching American diplomats and technical staff how to operate in cultures whose non-verbal rules differed from their own — the practical problem out of which his theoretical work grew. He later taught at Illinois Institute of Technology, Northwestern and elsewhere.

Proxemics

Hall coined the term in The Hidden Dimension (1966) for the study of humans' use of space as a specialised elaboration of culture. His central claim is that people carry an invisible spatial envelope with them, that its dimensions are culturally learned rather than natural, and that violations of it produce strong physiological and emotional responses that the person experiencing them will usually misattribute to the other party's character.

He proposed four zones for middle-class Americans, each with a near and far phase: intimate distance (up to about 18 inches — embrace, whispering, wrestling), personal distance (about 1.5 to 4 feet — conversation among friends), social distance (about 4 to 12 feet — acquaintances and business), and public distance (12 feet and beyond — speaking to a group). The measurements are the least important part; the argument is that the boundaries are learned, differ substantially between cultures, and are enforced without anyone being able to state the rule.

Other Key Ideas

• High- and low-context cultures. Introduced in Beyond Culture (1976). In high-context communication, most of the meaning resides in the situation, the relationship and what is left unsaid; in low-context communication, meaning is made explicit in the message. Hall's point is that speakers of each find the other unreadable — one seems evasive, the other blunt.
• Monochronic and polychronic time. Monochronic cultures treat time as a linear commodity to be scheduled, saved and spent, doing one thing at a time; polychronic cultures treat time as a context in which multiple involvements proceed together and human relationships take precedence over schedules. Neither is a failure of the other.
• The silent language. His general thesis, from the 1959 book of that title: culture is communicated primarily through what is never taught explicitly — timing, spacing, gesture, tone — and is therefore invisible to its own members until it is violated.

Selected Works

• The Silent Language (1959)
• The Hidden Dimension (1966)
• Beyond Culture (1976)
• The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time (1983)

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Hall's categories transfer to mediated interaction with almost no adjustment, and the transfer is one of the most productive moves available in this field. Video calls collapse proxemic distance — every participant appears at conversational range regardless of relationship — which is a substantial part of why they are tiring. Virtual worlds reproduce proxemic behaviour faithfully, with users maintaining interpersonal distances that have no physical basis; see extended avatar. Text communication is radically low-context by construction, which is why online writing has had to reinvent paralanguage to restore what the situation would otherwise supply. And the monochronic/polychronic distinction describes exactly the fault line between calendar-driven and message-driven work.

Related Reading

• Paralanguage
• Extended Avatar
• Social dialect
• Robert Levine
• Time and Space