Edward T. Hall (1914-2009) is a famous anthropologist fascinated by the unique way people from different cultures interact, so he undertook anthropological research with those from different cultural backgrounds. As a project director of communications research at the Washington School of Psychiatry, he studied non-verbal communication and came to believe that basic differences in the way that members of different cultures perceive reality are responsible for many miscommunications.
Edward Hall was born in Missouri in 1914. As a young man, he worked as a construction foreman in Arizona. He lived with the Hopi Indians, who taught him about their culture and way of life. During this time, he gained firsthand experience of the Spanish American people and of the culture of Northern New Mexico.
After teaching anthropology at the University of Denver and Bennington College, Mr. Hall directed a program at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) designed to help State Department employees better understand and navigate cultural differences when they take on overseas assignments. He also conducted research at the Washington School of Psychiatry, which resulted in his most influential book, “The Silent Language” (1959). This book outlined his theory of explicit versus informal forms of communication.
Hall brought about a revolution in the field of human interaction through his theories of proximal science or the study of human use of space in a cultural context. He coined the term “proxemics” in the 1950s which became one of his many prominent contributions to the field.
Hall’s most famous innovation is the definition of the personal spaces that surround individuals. This has a tremendous influence on his successors. From his perspective, space can be conceived of as either private or social.
Some of Mr. Hall’s most provocative ideas about cultural attitudes towards space and time were developed when he was at the Illinois Institute of Technology in the 1960s. These ideas focused on how people communicate informally about these topics. Those ideas form the substance of his books “The Hidden Dimension” (1966) and “The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time” (1983).
His work has been followed by anthropologists to investigate how the built environment expresses culturally shared ideas and maintains unequal relationships between people. In his book “Beyond Culture”, Hall presented the concept of high and low communication.
After retiring from Northwestern, where he taught from 1967 to 1977, Mr. Hall lectured extensively on intercultural and interethnic relations. He wrote several more works with his wife, Mildred, including a series of books “Hidden Differences: How to Communicate with Germans” (1983), “Hidden Differences: Doing Business with the Japanese” (1987) and “Understanding Cultural Differences: Germans, French and Americans” (1990).
In 1992, he published a memoir, “An Anthropology of Everyday Life,” last of his official publication. Becoming a pioneer in the study of nonverbal communication and interactions between members of different ethnic groups, Edward T. Hall left a legacy of research when he died in 2009 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
