Edward T.

Hall
Edward Twitchell Hall, Jr. (May 16, 1914 – July 20, 2009) was an American
Edward T. Hall
anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher. He is remembered for developing the
concept of proxemics and exploring cultural and social cohesion, and describing
how people behave and react in different types of culturally defined personal space.
Hall was an influential colleague ofMarshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller.[1]

Contents
Biography
Influence
See also
Books
Hall in 1966
References
Born Edward Twitchell Hall,
External links
Jr.
May 16, 1914
Webster Groves,
Biography Missouri,
Hall was born in Webster Groves, Missouri and taught in University of Denver,
United States
Colorado, Bennington College in Vermont, Harvard Business School, Illinois Died July 20, 2009
Institute of Technology, Northwestern University in Illinois and others. The (aged 95)
foundation for his lifelong research on cultural perceptions of space was laid during Santa Fe, New
World War II, when he served in theU.S. Army in Europe and the Philippines. Mexico,
United States
From 1933 through 1937, Hall lived and worked with the Navajo and the Hopi on
Nationality American
Native American reservations in northeastern Arizona, the subject of his
autobiographical West of the Thirties. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia Citizenship United States
University in 1942 and continued with field work and direct experience throughout Alma mater Columbia University
Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. During the 1950s he worked for the United Known for Proxemics, High
States State Department, at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), teaching inter- context culture, Low
cultural communications skills to foreign service personnel, developed the concept context culture,
of "high context culture" and "low context culture", and wrote several popular monochronic and
practical books on dealing with cross-cultural issues. He is considered a founding polychronic time
father of intercultural communicationas an academic area of study.[2][3]
Scientific career
Throughout his career, Hall introduced a number of new concepts, including Fields Anthropology
proxemics, polychronic and monochronic time, and high and low context culture. In
Institutions United States Army,
his second book, The Hidden Dimension, he describes the culturally specific
University of Denver,
temporal and spatial dimensions that surround each of us, such as the physical
Bennington College,
distances people maintain in different contexts.
Harvard Business
In The Silent Language (1959), Hall coined the term polychronic to describe the
School, Illinois
ability to attend to multiple events simultaneously, as opposed to "monochronic"
Institute of
individuals and cultures who tend to handle events sequentially
.
Technology,
In 1976, he released his third book, Beyond Culture, which is notable for having Northwestern
developed the idea of extension transference; by an extension, he simply means any University, United
technological item, from clothes to computers. He brings to our attention the fact States Department of
that these 'extensions' only help us perform certain functions, but they as extensions State
will never quite be able to carry out these functions by themselves (for example,
think about computers, airplanes, etc. We can fly with airplanes, but we can't on our own and nor can airplanes fly 'on their own'). His
biggest claim is that culture itself is an extension of man. Extensions also exist in their own evolutionary realm, as well. That is, they
evolve on their own and do not directly influence human evolution.

The 'transference' of 'extension transference' is a term he coined to describe when people regard a symbol to actually be its referent.
The clearest example of this would be language; like when people do not realize that words are merely symbolic to their referents.
For example, there is nothing inherently watery about the physical object water, at least in terms of the symbolic acoustic properties
that are produced when someone utterswater. Evidence for this would be the fact that across languages there are thousands of unique
words that all refer to water. Culture, as an extension, is also a good example; extension transference of culture happens naturally
when people are unaware of the extent to which culture shapes how they perceive time and space, or that culture shapes their
perception of them at all. Time and space are the two prominent aspects that Hall in particular focuses on in many of his works.

[4]
He died at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico on July 20, 2009, but his research will be remembered.

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 the Anthropology of Space has essentially opened the door to dozens of new topics.[5] Along with
influencing the Anthropology of Space, Hall's research had substantial influence on the development of intercultural communication
as a research topic. Since at least 1990, he has been acknowledged frequently for his role in introducing nonverbal aspects of
communication, specifically proxemics, the study of the social uses of space, the investigation of communication between members
of different cultures.[6] For example, Robert Shuter, a well-known intercultural 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
[7]
returns culture to preeminence and reflects the roots of the field as represented in Edward Hall's early research."

What was particularly innovative about Hall's early work is that instead of focusing on a single culture at a time, or cross-cultural
comparison, as was typical in 1950's anthropology, he responded to the needs of his students at the Foreign Service Institute of the
Department of State to help them understand interactions between members of different cultures.[8] Hall points out that the only
environment in which classroom dialogue is encountered is simply in the classroom, ergo it served the students little use when
actually in the foreign country of interest. At the same time, and in response to the same students, he narrowed his focus from an
entire culture, as was then standard within anthropology, to smaller moments of interaction.[9] Colleagues working with him at FSI at
the time included Henry Lee Smith, George L. Trager, Charles F. Hockett, and Ray Birdwhistell. Between them, they used
descriptive linguistics as a model for not only proxemics, but alsokinesics and paralanguage.

See also
Symbolic interactionism

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(1990, Yarmouth, Maine)
West of the Thirties. Discoveries Among theNavajo and Hopi (1994, Doubleday, New York etc.)

References
1. Rogers, Everett M. (2000)."The Extensions of Men: The Correspondence of Marshall McLuhan and Edward. THall."
(http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15327825MCS0301_06)Mass Communication and Society, 3(1):
117-135.
2. Rogers, Everett M., Hart, William B., & Miike, Y
oshitaka. (2002). “Edward T. Hall and the History of Intercultural
Communication: The United States and Japan.”Keio Communication Review, 24: 3-26. Accessible at
http://www.mediacom.keio.ac.jp/publication/pdf2002/review24/2.pdf
3. Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy. (1990). “Notes in the History of Intercultural Communication: The Foreign Service Institute
and the Mandate for Intercultural Training.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 76(3): 262-281.
4. http://www.santafenewmexican.com/Local%20News/Edward-T--Hall--1914-2009-Anthropologist--loved-to-bring-N-M-
-w
5. Brown, N.. "Edward T. Hall: Proxemic Theory, 1966." Csiss. CSISS Classics, 2011. Web. Available at
http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/13
6. Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy. (1990). Notes in the History of Intercultural Communication: The Foreign Service Institute
and the Mandate for Intercultural Training. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 76(3): 262-281.
7. Shuter, Robert. (2008). The centrality of culture. In Molefi Kete Asante, Yoshitaka Miike, & Jing Yin (Eds.), The global
intercultural communication reader(pp. 37-43). New York: Routledge.
8. Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy. (1990). Notes in the History of Intercultural Communication: The Foreign Service Institute
and the Mandate for Intercultural Training. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 76(3), 263.
9. Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy. (1990). Notes in the History of Intercultural Communication: The Foreign Service Institute
and the Mandate for Intercultural Training. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 76(3), 263.

External links
Edward T. Hall: Proxemic Theory, 1966 by Nina Brown
Edward T. Hall and the History of Intercultural Communication: The United States and Japanby 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 Loved New Mexicoat the Wayback Machine (archived March 14, 2012)
Obituary, NYTimes
[1]

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