Cross Cultural Communication
THE GRIP OF CULTURE: EDWARD T. HALL
Edward T. Hall is an anthropologist and one of the founders of intercultural communication study. His works have played a key role in describing how people’s view of the world and behavior are largely determined by a complex grid of unconscious cultural patterns. In The Silent Language (1959) Hall outlined a broad theory of culture and described how its rules control people’s lives. In The Hidden
Dimension (1966) he introduced proxemics, the study of our culturally determined perception and use of space. In Beyond Culture (1976) he progressed further towards an integral vision of culture.
THE SILENT LANGUAGE
People communicate through a whole range of behavior that is unexamined, taken for granted. This process takes place outside conscious awareness and in juxtaposition to words. What people do is frequently more important than what they say. Nonetheless, people of European heritage live in a “word world” and tend not to perceive the relevance of communication through the language of behavior. Even though language molds thinking, other cultural systems have a pervasive effect on how the world is perceived, how the self is experienced, and how life itself is organized.
Culture may be defined as “the way of life of a people, the sum of their learned behavior patterns, attitudes and material things.” Culture controls behavior in deep and persisting ways, many of which are outside awareness and therefore beyond conscious control of the individual. Hall attempts to bring those patterns to awareness. He develops a method for the analysis of culture, through defining the basic units of culture, its building blocks or “isolates,” and then tying these isolates into a biological base so they can be compared among cultures, moving up to build a unified theory of culture. The Silent
Language outlines a theory of culture and a theory of how culture came into being. Its key message is that we must learn to
Edward T. Hall is an anthropologist and one of the founders of intercultural communication study. His works have played a key role in describing how people’s view of the world and behavior are largely determined by a complex grid of unconscious cultural patterns. In The Silent Language (1959) Hall outlined a broad theory of culture and described how its rules control people’s lives. In The Hidden
Dimension (1966) he introduced proxemics, the study of our culturally determined perception and use of space. In Beyond Culture (1976) he progressed further towards an integral vision of culture.
THE SILENT LANGUAGE
People communicate through a whole range of behavior that is unexamined, taken for granted. This process takes place outside conscious awareness and in juxtaposition to words. What people do is frequently more important than what they say. Nonetheless, people of European heritage live in a “word world” and tend not to perceive the relevance of communication through the language of behavior. Even though language molds thinking, other cultural systems have a pervasive effect on how the world is perceived, how the self is experienced, and how life itself is organized.
Culture may be defined as “the way of life of a people, the sum of their learned behavior patterns, attitudes and material things.” Culture controls behavior in deep and persisting ways, many of which are outside awareness and therefore beyond conscious control of the individual. Hall attempts to bring those patterns to awareness. He develops a method for the analysis of culture, through defining the basic units of culture, its building blocks or “isolates,” and then tying these isolates into a biological base so they can be compared among cultures, moving up to build a unified theory of culture. The Silent
Language outlines a theory of culture and a theory of how culture came into being. Its key message is that we must learn to