Edward T. Hall

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Edward T. Hall (born May 16, 1914, Webster Groves, Missouri) is a respected anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher. He has 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 Navajo and 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 field work and direct experience throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia. During the 1950s he worked for the United States State Department 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.

Hall first created the concept of proxemics, or personal spaces. In his book, The Hidden Dimension, he describes the subjective dimensions that surround each of us and the physical distances one tries to keep from other people, according to subtle cultural rules.

In The Silent Language (1959), Hall also 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.

Hall currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and frequently visits with family, students, and friends who live in the area.

Edward T. Hall is the grandfather of photographer Edward T. Hall III.

Admirers of Hall's style of grounding anthropological theorizing in concrete examples would probably also like the work of sociologist Stanislav Andreski.

[edit] Books

The Silent Language (1959)
The Hidden Dimension (1966)
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)