Our Hidden Culture

Early in Beyond Culture, Hall explains why some cultural behaviors or tendencies might lie below the awareness of its holders. The reason, he tells us, is because in pre-modern times nearly all of us lived in our own local and culturally uniform homogenous communities. Our cultural patterns applied to everyone and used to work so smoothly and automatically that they were invisible to us. Living in absence of people who were different and experiencing only rare behavioral dissonance from within the group, we had too few examples and occasions to see and distinguish our cultures side by side with another.

Even in modern times when many of us in the world are exposed to a much higher degree of cultural mixing, it remains extraordinarily difficult to see the most subtle aspects of our own culture—the nonverbal behaviors specific to different groups that Hall refers to as “hidden” or “unconscious.” Our nervous systems are organized according to principles of negative feedback. In order to become aware of these culturally conditioned reflexes and proclivities, we need constant exposure to those differing tendences in other cultures, and thus the dissonance that comes with those encounters that awaken us to how we are different.

“The reality and structure of a person’s own paradigms become available only in bits and pieces and in very special cases, usually after repeated unsuccessful attempts to maintain constancy of input in the face of a foreign culture,” Hall writes.

So difficult and deep is this learning, Hall says, that to acquire it successfully without the cross-cultural encounter component and the conscious intent underlying it would be an “achievement that can equal the great accomplishments in chemistry, physics and astronomy.”

As the world becomes smaller and as random cross-cultural encounters increase, the potential for misunderstanding also grows. One of humanity’s goals, Hall asserts, should be to make explicit the rules by which our different hidden cultures operate. We can only do this, he says, by deliberately exposing ourselves to, even immersing ourselves in, the cultures of others.

“Understanding oneself and understanding others are closely related processes. To do one, you must start with the other, and vice versa.”

Hall’s various books, including Beyond Culture, describe some of the innocuous cultural tendencies the author has identified over the course of his life as a cultural anthropologist.

The next section features some examples he cites in Beyond Culture and his other works.

Aspects of Hidden Culture That Are More Abstract

Monochronic and Polychronic Time

One of the hidden differences between cultures relates to how time and space are used as organizing frames for activities. Hall divides these tendencies into “monochronic” versus “polychronic” time (some use of space is also implicit here because the two systems, time and space, are functionally interrelated).

Monochronic time, characteristic of northern European and North American thinking, emphasizes linear schedules, segmentation, and promptness and deadlines in human activities. Polychronic time systems, typical of Mediterranean, Latin, Arab and many Asian cultures, are characterized by several things happening at once.

One example is the difference between the tendency in a monochronic culture to line up single file in any public queue, whereas in some of the most polychronic cultures, people gather at a queue in a chaotic mob, all vying for the attention of the dispensing clerk or agent at the same time.

In monochronic cultures, activities such as meetings—both work and social—are tightly controlled and pre-set, limited to only the few people those activities involve. There is as little deviation as possible from those plans. In polychronic time, gatherings are more inclusive and open-ended. Longer-term plans are less tangible, unfirm and are constantly being amended. There are often changes in the most important plans, often at a whim, and right up to the last minute.

Why Might This Be Important?

For one, such differences can cause anxiety, distress, or confusion between people of different cultures working with, or otherwise relating to each other.

For instance, a northern European may see too much canceling and amending of appointments by a Mediterranean business or government partner as a signal of disrespect—or a lack of seriousness about a collaborative process.

These unconscious cultural tendencies, Hall reminds us, are profoundly abstruse and impact our relations far more than we can know.

“Time is so thoroughly woven into the fabric of existence that we are hardly aware of the degree to which it determines and coordinates everything we do, including the molding of relations with others in many subtle ways,” Hall writes.

High and Low Contexts: How Much Information Is Enough?

A great deal of cross-cultural misunderstanding results from differing norms around either explicitly sharing too much information or withholding it because it is considered implicit and obvious. These two modes Hall describes as “high- and low-context” cultures. For Hall, cultures around the world fall onto a spectrum between the two.

“A high-context (HC) communication or message is one in which most of the information is already in the person, while very little is in the coded, explicit, transmitted part of the message,” Hall writes. “A low context (LC) communication is just the opposite; i.e., the mass of the information is vested in the explicit code. Twins who have grown up together can and do communicate more economically (HC) than two lawyers in a courtroom during a trial (LC), a mathematician programming a computer, two politicians drafting legislation, two administrators writing a regulation.”

Middle Easterners, South Europeans, Japanese and Chinese, all of whom have extensive information networks among family, friends and colleagues, and have many close, personal relationships, are high-context cultures. For most daily transactions they don’t require or expect much in-depth contextual background information. Much is already understood and implicit in their relationships. High-contexting people tend to be more aware and observant of facial expressions, body language, changes in tone, and other aspects of communication that are not directly spoken.

On the other hand, Germans and Scandinavians, for example, are much lower context, and have a tendency to spell things out to the letter when communicating. Other cultures, like Americans and the French, fall on the spectrum somewhere in between.

People in high-context cultures become impatient and irritated when low-context people inundate them with information. Members of low-context cultures are at a loss when high-context people don’t provide enough information during a communication.

In Edward T. Hall’s book Understanding Cultural Differences, he describes some of the difficulties that can arise in such situations.

“One of the great communications challenges in life is to find the appropriate level of contexting needed in each situation,” he writes. “Too much info leads people to feel they are being talked down to; too little information can mystify them or make them feel left out. Ordinarily, people make these adjustments automatically in their own country, but in other countries their messages frequently miss the target.”

Aspects of Hidden Culture That Are Less Abstract and More Physical

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 nonverbal 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 behavior together and not to distinguish between conscious, deliberate racism and structural differences in cultural systems,” Hall writes. “To categorize all behavior 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 nonverbal), 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 US—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, Hall 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.