Cover information:

Beyond Culture is a proud celebration of human capacities. For too long, people have taken their own ways of life for granted, ignoring the vast, international cultural community that surrounds them. Humankind must now embark on the difficult journey beyond culture, to the discovery of a lost self and a sense of perspective. By holding up a mirror, Hall permits us to see the awesome grip of unconscious culture. With concrete examples ranging from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake to the mating habits of the bowerbird of New Guinea, Hall shows us ourselves. Beyond Culture is a book about self-discovery; it is a voyage we all must embark on if mankind is to survive.

"In this penetrating analysis of the culturally determined yet 'unconscious' attitudes that mold our thought, feeling, communication and behavior ... Hall makes explicit taken-for-granted linguistic patterns, body rhythms, personality dynamics, educational goals ... Many of Hall's ideas are original and incisive... [and] should reward careful readers with new ways of thinking about themselves and others."----Publishers Weekly

"A fascinating book which stands beside The Hidden Dimension and The Silent Language to prove Hall one of the most original anthropologists of our era." ----Paul Bohannan

"Fascinating and emotionally challenging... The book's graceful, nontechnical style and the many illuminating, real-life illustrations make it a delight to read."----Library Journal

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edward T. Hall, anthropologist and author of The Silent Language, The Hidden Dimension, and, with Mildred Reed Hall, Hidden Differences, has taught at Northwestern University, the University of Denver, Bennington College, the Washington School of Psychiatry, the Harvard Business School, and the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Best known for his work in intercultural communication, he is a consultant to business and government agencies. Part of the year he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he writes and does research.

 

Contents

Introduction 1. The Paradox of Culture 2. Man its Extension 3. Consistency and Life 4. Hidden Culture 5. Rhythm and Body Movement 6. Context and Meaning 7. Contexts, High and Low 8. Why Context? 9. Situation---Culture's Building Block 10. Action Chains 11. Covert Culture and Action Chains 12. Imagery and Memory 13. Cultural and Primate Bases of Education 14. Culture as an Irrational Force 15. Culture as Identification Notes Bibliography

 

Introduction

There are two related crises in today's world. The first and most visible is the population/environment crisis. The second more subtle but equally lethal, is humankind's relationships to its extensions, institutions, ideas, as well as the relationships among the many individuals and groups that inhabit the globe.

If both crises are not resolved, neither will be. Despite our faith in technology and our reliance on technological solutions, there are no technical solutions to most of the problems confronting human beings. Furthermore, even those technical solutions that can be applied to environmental problem can't be applied rationally until mankind transcends the intellectual limitations imposed by our institutions, our philosophies, and our cultures. Compounding all of this is the reality of politics.

Politics is a major part of life---beginning in the home and becoming more and more visible as power is manifest in the larger institutions on the local. national, and international level. We should not be fooled by the façade of either politics or political institutions. What we are talking about is power and its use. Certainly there is more to life than either disguised or raw power; at least one hopes that in time the power motive will combine with more rational, more humane ways of proceeding Apart from power, culture still plays a prominent visible role in the relations between Russians and the West, for example. Culture has always been an issue, not only between Europe and Russia, but among the European states as well. The Germans, the French, the Italians, the Spanish, Portuguese, and English, as well as the Scandinavian and Balkan cultures, all have their own identity, language, systems of nonverbal communication, material culture, history, and ways of doing things. The frequently heard argument that cultures are not unique is one of the irrationalities discussed in the chapters to follow. At this moment, Europe is prosperous, temporarily calm, and causing few problems. But what about the clash of cultures in the Middle East that threatens to involve all countries that are high consumers of oil? And what about the emergence of China and Japan? Any Westerner who was raised outside the Far East and claims he really understands and can communicate with either the Chinese or the Japanese is deluding himself. On the horizon are the multiple cultures of Africa and the emerging nations of Latin America demanding to be recognized in their own right. In all these crises, the future depends on man's being able to transcend the limits of individual cultures. To do so, however, he must first recognize and accept the multiple hidden dimensions of unconscious culture, because every culture has its own hidden, unique form of unconscious culture.

Exacerbating the world's political and cultural problems are environmental and economic crises. As Hardin showed with wisdom and insight in his article entitled, "The Tragedy of the Commons," mankind cannot continue to increase the consumption of the world's finite resources. The classical English pattern of using the village commons (that communally owned and used land which was available for pasturing private livestock) did not involve a conflict between public and private welfare as long as there was enough land. However, as herds increased, the overgrazed land became less productive so that herdsmen had to increase their stocks in order to stay even, and thus the commons were destroyed. The tragedy was that profits accrued to the opportunistic herdsmen who exploited the commons the most, while losses were shared by all the users. Those who exercised restraint were doubly penalized. Not only did they suffer losses from the overgrazing of neighbors, but they were unable to exploit the market by means of their own production.

Today, the sea, the air, the waterways, the earth, the land and what it produces have all become our commons, and all are being overused. It is clear that appeals to altruism are futile and in a sense foolhardy. Technology will not resolve this dilemma either because these are human problems. Hardin argues that the single-track, Newtonian approach will satisfy only the politicians and the big exploiters of the commons who stand to gain from oversimplification of issues. What is needed, he feels, is a more comprehensive, Darwinian (Dionysian) approach that can be used as a basis for establishing priorities, alternatives, and options. 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 ways of thinking.

The answer lies not in restricting human endeavors, but in evolving new alternatives, new possibilities, new dimensions, new options and new avenues for creative uses of human beings based on the recognition of the multiple and unusual talents so manifest in the diversity of the human race.

This brings us to an important question that has grown in my mind throughout my lifetime. It has to do with our underlying attitudes toward ourselves. I am not speaking of something superficial, which can be easily observed or experienced. but something deeper and more subtle than what appears on the surface. The question is: Why are most people so unnecessarily hard on themselves? Why do they not make better use of their talents? It is as though we nurtured the child that is in all of us and, in being childish, were afraid of each other. This is not a simple problem, and it may be worldwide. Certainly the human species has not begun to tap its potential and half suspecting this deficiency, we blame everyone and everything except the real culprit.

We see evidence of mankind's disparaging itself in folklore, religion, philosophies, institutions, as well as in daily life. It seems that these processes are not within the reach of conscious control but deep within us. Freud was so struck by the capacity of the human race to put itself down that he posited a death instinct and built his theories around the notion that the human species inevitably advances at its own expense. Freud believed that the basic energies (the libidinal forces) had to be repressed for people to even live in groups, and that the libidinal energy was "sublimated" into the creative, cooperative drives that produced modern institutions. For him, creativity was a by-product of the necessity for man to repress his human nature. Like all of us, Freud was a product of his times, which we characterized by such thinking, and in the context of the times much of Freud's thinking made sense. Nevertheless, the study of our past as well as our present fails to confirm Freud's view that humans advance and build institutions through a process of sublimation of sexual energy. This book suggests another alternative, namely that once people began evolving their extensions, particularly language, tools and institutions, they got caught in the web of what I term "extension transference" (Chapter 2), and as a consequence, they err in judgment and become alienated from and incapable of controlling the monsters they have created. In this sense, human have advanced at the expense of that part of themselves that has been extended, and as a consequence ended up repressing human nature in its many forms. Man's goal from this point should be to rediscover that lost, alienated natural self.

Certainly, there are tremendous areas of conflict between Western man and his material, and nonmaterial extensions. The instruments we have created are like ill-fitting shoes. By creating extensions that don't fit or don't work, humans have failed to develop some of the most important aspects of their own psychic and physical potential. According to some of the most distinguished and thoughtful students of the mind, perhaps the most devastating and damaging thing that can happen to someone is to fail to fulfill his potential. A kind of gnawing emptiness, longing, frustration, and displaced anger overwhelms people when this occurs. Whether the anger is turned inward on the self, or outward toward others, dreadful destruction results. We know that mankind has great talent, we see evidence of it on all sides. Yet, how humans evolved with such an incredible reservoir of diverse talents is not completely understood. We haven't looked, possibly because we are not nearly enough in awe of ourselves, possibly be. cause we know so little and have nothing to measure ourselves against.

Part of the problem lies in the tension between creativeness and diversity and the rather specific limiting needs of institutions. Most cultures and the institutions they engender are the result of having to evolve highly specialized solutions to rather specific problems. For example, in England during the early days of the Industrial Revolution, when villagers and field hands were brought into the factories to work, the first generations of mill hands had not been conditioned to the factory whistle and linear scheduled time Like all preindustrial peoples, when they earned enough to pay off their debts and keep body and soul together for a while they would quit and go home, much to the consternation of the factory owners. This situation could have continued indefinitely if there had not been a hidden trap---children. Not only were there no child labor laws then, but no one to care for the children at home; so the malleable children worked with their parents in the factory, and being young, they became imprinted by the whistle. When they grew up they brought up their own children accordingly, thereby setting in motion a series of events and ways of handling time which fit neither the psychic nor the physical needs of the workers. However, because the adaptation to the linear schedule had become internalized and automatic, it was viewed as an asset and not a liability. It has taken almost a century and a quarter to begin to work itself out. Today children are brought up on a different time system---one that is less obviously tied down in time and space, and to single institutions; there is also growing pressure to overcome monotony and the tempo conflicts between man and the machine. Because we have put ourselves in our own zoo, we find it difficult to break out. Since people can't fight institutions on which their lives depend, the result is that first they unconsciously turn their anger inward then later outward.

To continue our basic theme, many people's sense of worth is directly related to the number of situations in which they are in control, which means that many people have problems with their self-image because they are clearly in control of so little. The ultimate in human degradation and the subservience of human needs to institutional forms is shown in Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Big Nurse in Kesey's book epitomizes all the anti-humanism and destructiveness, all the distortions of the communication process, all the violations of cultural norms that one finds in the bureaucracies that we have created. The book is an exquisitely apt metaphorical statement of the powerlessness and lack of self-affirmation so common in our times.

Powerlessness and lack of self-affirmation lead to aggression, as repeatedly asserted by psychologists and psychiatrists. Psychological powerlessness is the result of past events, but situational and cultural powerlessness are here and now. Blacks and other minorities rioted in recent years because they saw themselves as powerless to make the system work. There is no other way to explain the incredible outburst of rage triggered by the assassination of Martin Luther King or the "incursion" into Cambodia. The groundwork had been laid long before, but it was suddenly and overwhelmingly apparent to minority groups.

Things are quieter in the ghettos now because the rhythm of black life is in a quiet phase---they are taking a breather. It is quieter on the campus since the winding down of the Vietnam War. But a major and continuing source of frustration exists because the many gifts and talents of women, blacks, Native Americans, Spanish-Americans and others are not only unrecognized, but frequently denigrated by members of the dominant group. It is the corrosive daily frustration, the inability to communicate or to establish meaningful relationships that is so soul-shrinking.

The cultural and psychological insight that is important for us to accept is that denying culture and obscuring the effects that it can have on human talents can be as destructive and potentially dangerous as denying evil. We must come to terms with both. It is our powerlessness in the face of culture and the cultural limitations placed on the development of self that result in aggression. Paradoxically, the only way that we can escape the hidden constraints of covert culture is to involve ourselves actively and consciously in the very parts of life that we take most for granted.

A massive cultural literacy movement that is not imposed, but which springs from within is called for. We can all benefit from a deeper knowledge of what an incredible organism we really are. We can grow, swell with pride, and breathe better for having so many remarkable talents. To do so, however, we must stop ranking both people and talents and accept the fact that there am many roads to truth and no culture has a corner on the path or is better equipped than others to search for it. Furthermore, no man can tell another how to conduct that search.

Writing a book is a cooperative effort, while the author is ultimately responsible for the content, form, style, and organization of ideas, he depends upon the assistance of others, without which his task would be immeasurably lengthened.

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