Edward T. Hall
Edward T. Hall
Edward Twitchell Hall, Jr.was an American anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher. He is remembered for developing the concept of proxemics and exploring cultural and social cohesion, a and describing how people behave and react in different types of culturally defined personal space. Hall was an influential colleague of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth16 May 1914
CountryUnited States of America
Edward T. Hall quotes about
jobs real years
Culture hides more than it reveals and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from it's own participants. Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own.
communication essence important
The essence of cross-cultural communication has more to do with releasing responses than with sending messages. It is more important to release the right response than to send the right message.
details-of-life culture attention
One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.
simple space sacred
Each organism, no matter how simple or complex, has around it a sacred bubble of space, a bit of mobile territoriality which only a few other organisms are allowed to penetrate and then only for short periods of time.
mean other-cultures people
We should never denigrate any other culture but rather help people to understand the relationship between their own culture and the dominant culture. When you understand another culture or language, it does not mean that you have to lose your own culture.
voice movement body
... while infants will sync with the human voice regardless of language, they later become habituated to the rhythms of their own language and culture ... ... humans are tied to each other by hierarchies of rhythms that are culture-specific and expressed through language and body movement.
sitting culture characteristics
Each culture has its own characteristic manner of locomotion, sitting, standing, reclining, and gesturing.
culture made evolve
Culture is not made up but something that evolves which is human.
life intelligent thinking
We live fragmented, compartmentalized lives in which contradictions are carefully sealed off from each other. We have been taught to think linearly rather than comprehensively, and we do this not through conscious design or because we are not intelligent or capable, but because of the way in which deep cultural undercurrents structure life in subtle but highly consistent ways that are not consciously formulated.
time wall people
People are tied together and yet isolated from each other by invisible threads of rhythm and hidden walls of time. Time is... a primary organizer of all activities, a synthesizer and integrator, a way of handling priorities and categorizing experience, a feedback mechanism for how things are going, a measuring rod against which competence, effort, and achievement are judged as well as a special message system revealing how people really feel about each other and whether or not they can get along....
body slow-motion realizing
Viewing movies in very slow motion, looking for synchrony, one realizes that what we know as dance is really a slowed-down, stylized version of what human beings do whenever they interact.
differences interest-in-life way
The best reason for exposing oneself to foreign ways is to generate a sense of vitality and awareness - an interest in life which can come only when one lives through the shock of contrast and difference.
light shining desire
Shakespeare reveals human nature brilliantly: he shines a light on our instinctive desire to dominate each other.
zoos culture break-out
Because we have put ourselves in our own zoo, we find it difficult to break out.