Edward T. Hall

For other people named Edward Hall, see Edward Hall (disambiguation).

Edward Hall
Born	(1914-05-16)May 16, 1914 Webster Groves, Missouri, United States
Died	July 20, 2009(2009-07-20) (aged 95) Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States
Citizenship	United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Anthropology
Institutions	United States Army, University of Denver, Bennington College, Harvard Business School, Illinois Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, United States Department of State
Alma mater	Columbia University
Known for	High context culture, Low context culture, proxemics, monochronic and polychronic time

Edward Twitchell Hall, Jr. (May 16, 1914 – July 20, 2009) was an American anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher. He is remembered for developing the concept of Proxemics, a description of how people behave and react in different types of culturally defined personal space. Hall was an influential colleague of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller.

Biography

Born in Webster Groves, Missouri, Hall taught at the University of Denver, Colorado, Bennington College in Vermont, Harvard Business School, Illinois Institute of Technology, Northwestern University in Illinois and others. The foundation for his lifelong research on cultural perceptions of space was laid during World War II, when he served in the U.S. Army in Europe and the Philippines.

From 1933 through 1937, Hall lived and worked with the Navajo and the Hopi on native American reservations in northwestern Arizona, the subject of his autobiographical West of the Thirties. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1942 and continued with field work and direct experience throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. During the 1950s he worked for the United States State Department, at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), teaching inter-cultural communications skills to foreign service personnel, developed the concept of "High context culture" and "low context culture", and wrote several popular practical books on dealing with cross-cultural issues. He is considered a founding father of intercultural communication as an academic area of study.

Throughout his career, Hall introduced a number of new concepts, including proxemics, polychronic and monochronic time, and high and low context culture. In his second book, The Hidden Dimension, he describes the culturally specific temporal and spatial dimensions that surround each of us, such as the physical distances people maintain in different contexts.

In The Silent Language (1959), Hall coined the term polychronic to describe the ability to attend to multiple events simultaneously, as opposed to "monochronic" individuals and cultures who tend to handle events sequentially.

In 1976, he released his third book, Beyond Culture, which is notable for having developed the idea of extension transference; that is, that humanity's rate of evolution has and does increase as a consequence of its creations, that we evolve as much through our "extensions" as through our biology. However, with extensions such as the wheel, cultural values, and warfare being technology based, they are capable of much faster adaptation than genetics.

He died at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico on July 20, 2009.

Books

• The Silent Language (1959)
• The Hidden Dimension (1966)
• The Fourth Dimension In Architecture: The Impact of Building on Behavior (1975, co-authored with Mildred Reed Hall)
• Beyond Culture (1976)
• The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time (1983)
• Handbook for Proxemic Research
• Hidden Differences: Doing Business with the Japanese
• An Anthropology of Everyday Life: An Autobiography (1992, Doubleday, New York)
• Understanding Cultural Differences - Germans, French and Americans (1993, Yarmouth, Maine)
• West of the Thirties. Discoveries Among the Navajo and Hopi (1994, Doubleday, New York etc.)

Influence

According to Nina Brown, the work of Hall was so groundbreaking that it created a multitude of other areas for research. One of the most widely sought after topics of anthropology is an idea that was first introduced by Edward Hall; Anthropology of Space. Brown goes on to mention that Anthropology of Space has essentially opened the door to dozens of new topics.

Along with influencing the Anthropology of Space, Hall also did substantial research on intercultural communication. For example, Hall based a large amount of his research on the Chilean culture and how they interact in a High context culture as opposed to a Low context culture used in the United States.

Robert Shuter, a well-known intercultural and cross-cultural communication researcher, commented: "Edward Hall's research reflects the regimen and passion of an anthropologist: a deep regard for culture explored principally by descriptive, qualitative methods.... The challenge for intercultural communication... is to develop a research direction and teaching agenda that returns culture to preeminence and reflects the roots of the field as represented in Edward Hall's early research."

External links

• Edward T. Hall's website
• Gifts of Wisdom: An Interview with Dr. Edward T. Hall in The Edge at InterculturalU.com
• Edward T. Hall: Proxemic Theory, 1966 by Nina Brown
• Edward T. Hall and the History of Intercultural Communication: The United States and Japan by Everett M. Rogers, William B. Hart and Yoshitaka Miike
• Ariane Laroux : Portraits Parlés, Entretiens et portraits d'Edward T. Hall aux éditions de l'Age d'Homme (2006)
• Obituary-Edward Hall Loves New Mexico
• Obituary, NYTimes
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