By Edward T. Hall
Hidden cultural forces shaping human interaction
Subject
Themes
Two interrelated crises confront the modern world: the visible environmental crisis and the subtler crisis of humankind's relationship with its own extensions, institutions, and fellow cultures. Neither can be solved without the other, because the technical solutions that might address environmental problems cannot be applied rationally until people transcend the intellectual limitations imposed by their cultures. Through "extension transference," humans confuse the tools, languages, and institutions they create with the processes those extensions were meant to serve, becoming alienated from their own nature in the process.
Two interrelated crises confront the modern world: the visible environmental crisis and the subtler crisis of humankind's relationship with its own extensions, institutions, and fellow cultures. Neither can be solved without the other, because the technical solutions that might address environmental…
Published in 1976, the work arrived at a pivotal moment in American intellectual life. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the counterculture revolution had exposed deep fractures in American society, making questions about cultural blindness, institutional irrationality, and…
Human beings are unique in the elaboration of their extensions. Like the bowerbird of New Guinea, which externalises brilliant plumage into decorated bowers, humans have transferred bodily and mental processes into tools, languages, institutions, and technologies that evolve far faster than the body…
Cultures can be arranged along a continuum from high-context to low-context, and this placement determines virtually everything about the nature of communication within them. A high-context communication carries most of its information in the physical setting or internalised in the person, with…
Learned cultural behaviour, once acquired, sinks below the surface of conscious awareness and controls life from the depths, like the admiral of a submerged submarine fleet. These hidden controls are experienced as though they were innate, simply because they are both ubiquitous and habitual. The…
Educational systems throughout the Western world have committed a fundamental error by equating intelligence with verbal facility. Since the establishment of schools, intelligence and education have become irrevocably linked in men's minds. People who could not succeed in school were thought to be…
Life is punctuated by separations from birth to death, each forming a foundation for new stages of identity and psychic growth. The infant does not initially distinguish between his own body and the nurturing breast. Sullivan built his theory of the self around the notion that the baby only…
Western culture has created chaos by enshrining linear logic, the system valued above all others since Socrates, while denying the integrative parts of the self. Only a small fraction of mental capabilities are used, and Freud's recognition of dreams and the unconscious as legitimate mental…
For over a million years, human forebears knew the significance of every act of those around them, reading behavioural cues as easily as a dog's wagging tail or raised hackles. In small, stable communities, people could predict others' actions before they happened. "Jake's going to get a new horse.…
People in interaction move together in an unconscious dance, synchronising finger movements, eye blinks, and head motions with the verbal code. William Condon's frame-by-frame analyses of 16mm films revealed that every human movement is under the control of "body synchronizers." Newborn infants sync…
American law has been so decontexted that it resembles gambling more than justice. The "opinion rule" strips testimony of all background data, demanding "Answer the question, Yes or No." This makes US courts the epitome of low-context systems, vulnerable to manipulation by the powerful who can…
Cultures contain hundreds if not thousands of situational frames, each made up of specific dialects, behaviours, and material elements appropriate to particular settings. The situational frame is the smallest viable cultural unit that can be analysed and transmitted as a complete entity. Traditional…
"If I could have found my tongue, I would not have struck him," says Billy Budd. People avoid verbalising their most basic modes of interaction because much integrative cultural behaviour is controlled by parts of the brain unconcerned with speech. A Pueblo Indian struggled painfully to articulate…
Using fine surgical instruments for carpentry or Einstein to teach primary arithmetic would be foolish, yet educational institutions routinely misuse human potential by failing to understand the organism they develop. The brain consists of three distinct parts: the reptilian brain handling automatic…
Life is punctuated by separations from birth to death, each forming a foundation for new identity and psychic growth. The infant does not initially distinguish between his own body and the nurturing breast. Sullivan built much of his theory around the notion that the baby only gradually and in…
By Edward T. Hall
Subject
Themes
Two interrelated crises confront the modern world: the visible environmental crisis and the subtler crisis of humankind's relationship with its own extensions, institutions, and fellow cultures. Neither can be solved without the other, because the technical solutions that might address environmental problems cannot be applied rationally until people transcend the intellectual limitations imposed by their cultures. Through "extension transference," humans confuse the tools, languages, and institutions they create with the processes those extensions were meant to serve, becoming alienated from their own nature in the process.