ISBN The Silent Language

The Silent Language

In the everyday, but unspoken give-and-take of human relationships, the “silent language” plays a vitally important role. Here, a leading American anthropologist has analyzed the many qays in which people “talk” to one another without the use of words. 

The pecking order in a chicken yard, the fierce competition in a school playground, every unwitting gesture and action—this is the vocabulary of the “silent language.” According to Dr. Hall, the concepts of space and time are tools with which all human beings may transmit messages. Space, for example, is the outgrowth of an animal’s instinctive defense of his lair and is reflected in human society by the office worker’s jealous defense of his desk, or the guarded, walled patio of a Latin-American home. Similarly, the concept of time, varying from Western precision to Easter vagueness, is revealed by the businessman who pointedly keeps a client waiting, or the South Pacific islander who murders his neighbor for an injustice suffered twenty years ago.

“THE SILENT LANGUAGE shows how cultural factors influence the individual behind his back, wihtout his knowledge.” —Erich Fromm


About author(s)
Edward T. Hall was a widely traveled anthropologist whose fieldwork took him all over the world—from the Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest to Europe and the Middle East. As director of the State Department’s Point Four Training Program in the 1950s, Dr. Hall’s mission was to teach foreign-bound technicians and administrators how to communicate effectively across cultural boundaries. He was a consultant to architects on human factors in design and to business and government agencies in the field of intercultural relations, and had taught at the University of Denver, Bennington College, the Washington School of Psychiatry, the Harvard Business School, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Northwestern University.

Dr. Hall was born in Webster Groves, Missouri. He received an AB degree from the University of Denver, and M.A. from the University of Arizona, and a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. He lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, until his death in 2009.