Rhythm and Body Movements
Hall tells us that culture can both affect and encompass how people move their bodies—down to smallest, most imperceptible motions. Kinesics is the name for the technical study of such body movements. Hall was long interested in these tendencies. He argued that body movements between people during a communication or transaction, amount to a kind of unconscious “dance” performed without music or orchestration. This idea, and the subject it circumscribes, is the basis of another of Edward Hall’s books, The Dance of Life.
The author cities his own experiments, and those of other researchers, in which film footage of people conversing together, when slowed down, revealed those individuals moving in synchrony with one another when speaking. The interlocutors mirrored each other’s movements. When these sorts of experiments were performed in different cultures, the researchers discovered similar, but different rhythms in those contexts.
“Humans are tied to each other by hierarchies of rhythms that are culture-specific and expressed through language and body movements,” Hall writes in Beyond Culture.
For Hall, the consequence of this is that when people of differing cultures come together, there is the potential for their movements and rhythms to be out of phase. A lack of physical synchrony between people, or simply an inability to unconsciously recognize and relate to another’s movements, may inadvertently affect our feelings, opinions and judgements about others, without our realizing it.
Hall first witnessed these dynamics when he worked with indigenous Navajo and Hopi communities as an engineering foreman in the American Southwest as a young man. His subsequent experiences interacting with Spanish Americans in the same region allowed him to observe the reaction of Hispanics and Anglophone Americans to one another’s non-verbal cues.
“To the Spanish, the Anglo has an uptight, authoritarian walk unless he is just ambling,” he writes. “To the Anglo, the Spanish-American male walks look more like a swagger than a purposeful walk.”
Hall’s point is that when such synchrony is low between cultures, it can cause undue judgement, conflict, or awkwardness.
Similarly, Hall postulates that a certain degree of the racism problem between whites and blacks in the United States is likely attributable to unconscious misreading of bodily cues—such as the white Anglo tendency in some parts of the country to avoid direct eye contact with strangers in public at a certain distance.
“When miscuing of this sort is added to feelings of rejection, prejudice, or discrimination on the conscious level, the results can be overwhelming, for it is natural to lump all behaviour together and not to distinguish between conscious, deliberate racism and structural differences in cultural systems,” Hall writes. “To categorize all behaviour as racist sidesteps the issue that not every white is consciously or even unconsciously racist but will, regardless of how he feels, use white forms of communication (both verbal and non-verbal), if for no other reason than he simply does not know any others.”
It is important, Hall says, that we become as cognizant as possible to these seemingly minute, yet critical differences, lest they not only remain barriers to effective cross-cultural understanding, but also amplify conflict.
Unconscious Spatial Differences
Yet another category of hidden culture mentioned in Beyond Culture, and which also forms the core of Edward Hall’s book The Hidden Dimension is the human perception of and use of physical space. Proxemics is the study of the human being’s use of space as an aspect of culture. It includes things such as conversational distance, the use of interior space, urban and city planning, architecture, and the importance and meaning placed upon aspects of one’s living and working quarters.
“Each culture and each country has its own language of space, which is just as unique as the spoken language, frequently more so,” Hall writes in Beyond Culture.
For instance, Hall tells us that in the United States personal status and rank is deeply intertwined with the type of space a person inhabits. This also applies to varying degrees in other cultures, but it is especially pronounced in the U.S.—particularly in the corporate workplace. Larger and more lavish offices denote importance, while smaller offices for workers signal less power (and in some cases are used to signal demotions). The author argues that in the United Kingdom this is somewhat less true, but for a very particular reason. Status in English culture, he adds, is read more by way of internalized markers, such as regional accents.
How close we allow others to approach us physically is also culture dependent. Westerners have less of a spatial threshold before personal space is invaded, whereas people living in crowded places, like in parts of the Middle East and South Asia, have no problem with approaching within inches and touching another person. Hall speculates that to adapt to crowding these people have to bury their sense of self below the skin.
Going ‘Beyond Culture’ Means Transcending Our Cultural Differences
Hall’s ultimate message in Beyond Culture is that to properly understand each other and avoid conflict, human collectives must learn to understand both their own cultures and that of others. Neither is comprehensible without the other. And no aspect of culture is more important to grasp than the latent, unstated and nonverbal realms of culture that lay hidden from view. If they are to be dealt with, they must be identified and brought to conscious awareness.
“Man must now embark on the difficult journey beyond culture, because the greatest separation feat of all is when one manages to gradually free oneself from the grip of unconscious culture.”
Our survival as a race, he adds, may depend on it—if only because the challenges and threats that face us as a race, require a level of cooperation free from the types of dissonance that our out-of-awareness cultural differences still cause.
“In a word, unless human beings can learn to pull together and regulate consumption and production patterns, they are headed for disaster. It is impossible to cooperate or to do any of these things unless we know each other’s way of thinking.”