The Silent Language

Hall, Edward T. 1968 [1959]. The Silent Language. Greenwich (Conn.): Fawcett

People of the Western world, particularly Americans, tend to think of time as something fixed in nature, something around us and from which we cannot escape; an ever-present part of the environment, just like the air we breathe. That it might be experienced in any other way seems unnatural and strange, a feeling which is rarely modified even when we begin to discover how really differently it is handled by some other people. (Hall 1968: 19)

Honest and sincere men in the field [anthropology] continue to fail to grasp the true significance of the fact that culture controls behavior in deep and persistent ways, many of which are outside of awareness and therefore beyond conscious control of the individual. When the anthropologist stresses this point he is usually ignored, for he is challenging the deepest popular American beliefs about ourselves as well as foreigners. He leads people to see things they might not want to see. (Hall 1968: 35)

Language is the most technical of the message systems. It is used as a model for the analysis of the others. In addition to language there are other ways in which man communicates that either reinforce or deny what he has said with words. Man learns to read different segments of a communication spectrum covering events of a fraction of a second up to events of many years. This book deals with only a small part of this spectrum. Other chapters describe the content of messages of the man-to-man variety and how they are put together. (Hall 1968: 38)

Vrd. man-to-man ja face-to-face.

Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides most effectively from its own participants. Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own. I am also convinced that all that one ever gets from studying foreign culture is a token understanding. The ultimate reason for such study is to learn more about how one's own system works. 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. (Hall 1968: 39)

Power tools, glasses, TV, telephones, and books which carry the voice across both time and space are examples of material extensions. Money is a way of extending and storing labor. Out transportation networks now do what we used to do with our feet and backs. In fact, all man-made material things can be treated as extensions of what man once did with his body or some specialized part of his body. (Hall 1968: 60)

Freud also relied heavily on the communicative significance of man's acts rather than his words. He distrusted the spoken word, and a good deal of his thinking was based on the assumption that words hid much more than they revealed. He depended more on communication in the larger context; on the symbols of dreams and the meaning of insignificant events which would ordinarily go unnoticed and were therefore not subject to the censors that we all have within us. Despite his massive discoveries, what Freud really lacked was a theory of communication. Today, years after the major part of his theory was laid down, psychoanalysis still lacks a systematic way of describing the events of communication which occur between doctor and patient. (Hall 1968: 63)

Vt. Jurgen Ruesch.

In time, as formal systems become firmer they become so identified with the process of nature itself that alternative ways of behavior are thought of as unnatural - if not impossible. Yet this rigidity has its advantages. People who live and die in formal cultures tend to take a more relaxed view of life than the rest of us because the boundaries of behavior are so clearly marked, even to the permissible deviations. There is never any doubt in anybody's mind that, as long as he does what is expected, he knows what to expect from others. (Hall 1968: 75)

Kuniks teen mida minult oodatakse, tean mida oodata teistelt.

There is little or no affect attached to informal behavior as long as things are goind along nicely according to the unwritten or unstated rules. Anxiety, however, follows quickly when this tacid etiquette is breached. Extreme discomfort is apt to occur when someone stands to close or uses a first name prematurely. What happens next depends upon the alternatives provided by the culture for handling anxiety. (Hall 1968: 76)

Kuniks asjad sujuvad kenasti enigmaatiliste reeglite järgi, ei ole informaalse käitumisega seotud emotsioone. Kui neid kirjutamata reegleid aga rikutakse, järgneb ärevus. Liiga lähedale tulemisega seostab hilisemas ta hilisemas raamatus, The Hidden Dimension, ärevuse asemel hoopis adrenaliini vallandumist.

To recapitulate, man is constantly striving to discover the meaning of relationships between individuals and groups of individuals [definition of the situation]. The professional scholar soon learns to diregard the immediate explicit meaning of the obvious and to look for a pattern. He also has to learn to scale his perceptions up or down, depending on what type of communication he is trying to unravel. (Hall 1968: 96)

The hierarchical emphasis which the Japanese observer gave this pattern suggests another aspect of our way of life which is ostensibly characterized by an underlying formal pattern of equality. It points up to the fact that we also have a very complex informally patterned status system. The counters on the mobility scale are numerous and so finely grained that while the average person can manipulate the system he cannot describe how it works technically. (Hall 1968: 116)

Pattern congruity or style in writing is a function of knowing what can and cannot be achieved within the limits of the pattern. Newspaper or journalistic writing is adapted to the medium and all that medium implies. When it is bad it's because the writer has not learned what can be done within the limits set by the pattern. To do this type of writing well is a highly skilled art and is learned only after years of experience. The writing of a scientist is often incongruous because it drags the reader from one analytical level to the next and then back again. This kind of writing treats the reader like the boor who says "get it," indicating the scientist's fear that people will twist, distort, and take exception to what he says. He has to communicate on a number of different analytical levels at once by footnoting and overqualifying each statement. In defense of my fellow scientists it should be said that one of the most difficult things in the world to do is to learn to keep the levels apart as well as to maintain congruity. Harry Stack Sullivan, a very great contributor to psychiatric thinking in this country, once described his own attempts at writing by saying that the person who appeared before him as he wrote and who appraised his sentences as they were coming out was a cross between an imbecile and a bitterly paranoid critic! Sullivan was not alone in having this kind of self-image; he recognized the difficulties and the humor of having to try to force one's writing onto such a Procrustean couch. Another point to make about scientists is that most of them are more concerned about making precise statements than they are about writing. They depend upon their colleagues to know what they are talking about. Therefore, they can get by with less literary ability than writers. Scientific congruity and not literary congruity is their preoccupation. (Hall 1968: 125)