The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time

Description

The late American cultural anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher Edward T. Hall was considered an outlier in his broader field of ethnography. Unlike most of his 20th century colleagues working in anthropology, Hall wasn’t drawn to the more tangible aspects of what most of us call human “culture”: things like music, food, art, language, dance, clothing, rituals, celebrations and rites of passage. Instead, after spending his early adulthood working and travelling among non-Anglophones, both in the United States and in other parts of the world, he became cognizant and fascinated in the deeper layers of culture that he claimed lie buried beneath those more obvious forms.

Hall devoted his academic life to studying and articulating the various aspects of “unconscious culture” in a cross-cultural context, writing several books on comparative non-verbal behaviour including, The Silent Language, The Hidden Dimension, The Dance of Life, and Beyond Culture. His ideas, like those of his two friends and colleagues, Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, both of whose works he influenced, were the bases of new paradigms about human behaviour that changed the way we see the world and ourselves.