Cover Information:

In his pioneering work, The Hidden Dimension, Edward T. Hall spoke of different cultures' concepts of space. Now THE DANCE OF LIFE deals with the most personal of all experiences: how people are tied together, and yet isolated from each other by invisible threads of rhythm and hidden walls of time. Time is treated as a language, as an organizer of activities, a synthesizer and integrator, as well as a special. message system revealing how people really feel about each other.

The Americans and Japanese are described, as mirror images of one another. Even in such diverse cultures as these, time sets the stage for everything else. Dr. Hall also deals with how time influences relations among people in West European countries, as well as among Latin Americans, Anglo-Americans, and Native Americans.

"THE DANCE OF LIFE is at once an important anthropological treatise on the cultural nature of time and a moving commentary on the problems contemporary America is causing itself. "---Library Journal

"Hall, whose Beyond Culture and The Silent Language won a wide readership, has written a groundbreaking investigation of the ways we use and abuse time, rich in insights applicable to our lives. Business readers will enjoy the crosscultural comparison of American know-how with practices of compartmentalized German, centralized French, and ceremonious Japanese firms." -Publishers Weekly

Edward T. Hall is a consultant to business and to government. He lectures widely in America, Europe, and Japan, and has taught at Northwestern University, Bennington College, and the U.S. Department of State. He and his wife, Mildred Reed Hall, live in Santa Fe, where they write and do research in intercultural relations.

Dr. Hall is the author of The Hidden Dimension, The Silent Language, and Beyond Culture.

CONTENTS

Foreword Introduction PART I. TIME AS CULTURE 1. How Many Kinds of Time? 2. Different Streams 3. Monochronic and Polychronic Time 4. High and Low Context Messages 5. Culture's Clocks: Nuer, Tiv, and Quiché Time 6. The East and the West 7. The French, the Germans, and the Americans PART II. TIME AS EXPERIENCE 8. Experiencing Time 9. The Dance of Life 10. Entrainment 11. God Is in the Details APPENDIX I. A Map of Time APPENDIX II. Japanese and American Contrasts, with Special Reference to the MA Notes Glossary Bibliography

 

INTRODUCTION

The subject of this book is time as culture, how time is consciously as well as unconsciously formulated, used, and patterned in different cultures. Because time is a core system of all cultures, and because culture plays such a prominent role in the understanding of time as a cultural system, it is virtually impossible to separate time from culture at some levels. This is particularly true of primary level culture, about which I will be saying more.

The Dance of Life is one of several books about human beings, culture, and behavior. It deals with the most personal of all experiences: how people are tied together and yet isolated from each other by invisible threads of rhythm and hidden walls of time. Time is treated as a language, as a primary organizer for all activities, a synthesizer and integrator, a way of handling priorities and categorizing experience, a feedback mechanism for how things are going, a measuring rod against which competence, effort, and achievement are judged as well as a special message system revealing how people really feel about each other and whether or not they can get along.

Time is a core system of cultural, social, and personal life. In fact, nothing occurs except in some kind of time frame. A complicating factor in intercultural relations is that each culture has its own time frames in which the patterns are unique. This means that to function effectively abroad it is just as necessary to learn the language of time as it is to learn the spoken language. Several chapters in this book deal with the Americans and the Japanese as mirror images of each other, in which the determining threads of time set the stage for everything else. Other chapters are devoted to relations between Western European countries, as well as among Latin American, Anglo American, and Native American peoples.

One of the themes of this book is that human beings live in a single world of communication but they divide that world into two parts: words and behavior (verbal and nonverbal). Words, representing perhaps 10 percent of the total, emphasize the unidirectional aspects of communication---advocacy, law, and adversarial relationships---while behavior, the other 90 percent, stresses feedback on how people are feeling, ways of avoiding confrontation, and the inherent logic that is the birthright of all people. Words are the medium of business, politicians, and our world leaders, all of whom in the final analysis deal in power, so that words become the instruments of power. The nonverbal, behavioral part of communication is the provenance of the common man and the core culture that guides his life. This complex of feedback, local wisdom, and feelings is generally ignored or disparaged by our leaders. The question is: How is it possible to maintain a stable world in the absence of the feedback from the other 90 percent of communication?

In the above concept it is necessary to say something about culture, about which there has been considerable misinformation and not a little folklore. There are those who think of culture as something promulgated by anthropologists. Culture is not just a concept invented by anthropologists, any more than stratigraphy is a concept invented by geologists or evolution by Darwin. Culture is no more a concept than earth, air, or water. All of these things---including evolution---exist completely independent of what people believe. There are, of course, conceptual aspects of culture---i.e., our belief systems concerning the nature of culture which are analogous to the belief systems concerning the universe. Simply believing in something, however, doesn't make it so, and indeed, if what is believed is quite wrong, any action based on these beliefs can lead to dissonance and worse.

In taking the position that time and culture are inseparable in certain circumstances, I find myself on the opposite side of a high fence from many Western social scientists who, like pre-Copernican philosophers, hold that Western philosophical scientific models and, by association, Newtonian models are applicable to all cultures. They see time as a constant in the analysis of culture, and they also see Western science and Western thought as more advanced than other systems of thought. This position is epitomized by Yale University's Leonard Doob, who has written extensively on time in the cross-cultural context. Doob views time as an absolute, rejecting the seminal anthropological studies of Africanists E. E. Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer and Paul Bohannan on the Tiv with regards to time. Doob's contention is that the time system is unrelated "to other cultural developments." I hold the opposite opinion: that time has everything to do not only with how a culture develops, but also with how the people of that culture experience the world. The English anthropologist E. R. Leach holding still another view of time in relation to culture, says: ". . . we create time by creating intervals in life. Until we have done this, there is no time to be measured." Implicit in this approach is the old Newtonian view of time as an absolute. As we shall see in the course of this book, making time contingent on measurement only accounts for one or at the most two of the many kinds of time and eliminates from examination people like the Hopi and the Sioux, neither of whom even has a word for time in their vocabulary. Each has time, however. The Hopi sun priests make accurate observations of the solstices and maintain a calendar of religious ceremonies. It is not necessary to belabor this point, but to deal with time according to Leach's view not only results in an oversimplification but also eliminates some of the more interesting, as well as basic, considerations of time.

My goal in this book is to use time as a means of gaining insight into culture, but not the reverse. In fact, I am not sure that the latter is possible; or if it is possible, then it is so only in a narrow sense. This has rather deep implications for our view of culture, as well as for mankind in general. There is a basic point that must be introduced here, because most of what follows subsumes it; namely, there is an underlying, hidden level of culture that is highly patterned---a set of unspoken, implicit rules of behavior and thought that controls everything we do. This hidden cultural grammar defines the way in which people view the world, determines their values, and establishes the basic tempo and rhythms of life. Most of us are either totally unaware or else only peripherally aware of this. I call these hidden paradigms primary level culture. Primary level culture (PLC), core culture, or basic level culture (I have used all these terms) is somewhat analogous to the hardware of a computer. Conscious, explicit, manifest culture, the part that people talk about and can describe, is analogous to the software---the computer programs. The computer analogy is oversimplified, but it will suffice for the moment. Carrying the analogy a step further: most intercultural relations are conducted as though there are only slight differences in the software and none in the hardware, as though the only differences are those which are representative of explicit, manifest culture, while all of the underlying PLC are identical (i.e., "people are all the same underneath"). The results of treating members of other cultures as though we are all programmed in the same way can range from the humorous through the painful to the tragic and even destructive.

Primary level culture has core components which pattern our thinking and which give us sets of underlying assumptions for arriving at the "truth." This was brought home to me recently while discussing the Japanese with a friend, a brilliant man with an unusually fine mind. I realized that not only was I not getting through to him, but nothing of a substantive nature that I had said made sense to him. He was operating on one set of assumptions---which we shared but which he also had never questioned---and I was describing a culture based on an altogether different set of assumptions. For him to have understood me would have meant reorganizing his thinking.

It was as though I had suddenly imposed a new language with an entirely different grammar. It would have meant, for the moment at least, his giving up his intellectual ballast, and few people are willing to risk such a radical move.

One of the principal characteristics of PL culture is that it is particularly resistant to manipulative attempts to change it from the outside. The rules may be violated or bent, but people are fully aware that something wrong has occurred. In the meantime, the rules remain intact and change according to an internal dynamic all their own. Unlike the law or religious or political dogma, these rules cannot be changed by fiat, nor can they be imposed on others against their will, because they are already internalized.

There are at least three different levels at which culture can be seen to function: (1) the conscious, technical level in which words and specific symbols play a prominent part; (2) the screened-off, private level, which is revealed to only a select few and denied to outsiders; and (3) the underlying, out-of-awareness, implicit level of primary culture (PL). Language plays a prominent part in the first two but is secondary in the third. This does not mean that PL culture is entirely nonverbal, only that the rules have not yet been formulated in words. As a consequence, many cultures that appear quite similar on the surface, frequently prove to be extraordinarily different on closer examination.

These underlying differences are what I set out to examine when I returned to the study of time after almost two decades devoted to proxemics (the study of people's use of space as a cultural artifact, organizing system, and as a communication system).

There have been many times in my life when luck and good fortune have been on my side, and the study of proxemics was one. If it hadn't been for years spent with my feet more or less firmly rooted in the unconventional but solid soil of the primary culture of space, I doubt I could have survived with my intellect intact while trying to make sense of the massive literature on time. Unlike the study of territoriality, where the British ornithologist N. E. Howard opened up new vistas and avenues of approach, I found the world of time closing in on me. Of course, there was a vast and important body of data on biological clocks, but somehow it was different from the biological data on crowding. It didn't yield the same results that the ethologists' study of territoriality did. There were no mass deaths from people being pressured by time (or were there?). In addition, the biologists and ethologists who have done such an extraordinary job recording the spatial and territorial behavior of other life forms haven't come up with comparable material on time. If there ever was a body of work governed by words which epitomizes Western thinking, it is time. In fact, if one reviews the field not for insights into the nature of time, but as a giant case study of Western thought, then things begin to make sense.

Behind these highly articulate endeavors to define the nature of time there lies a firm but virtually unexamined foundation of assumptions accepted as reality that have been neither questioned nor tested. Many of these are simply artifacts of our own implicit, primary level culture.

Human beings have reached the point where they can ill afford the luxury of ignoring the reality of the many different cultural worlds in which humans live. Paradoxically, for the Westerner, the study of contrasting cultures can be an exercise in consciousness raising, which is one of the purposes of this book. As long as human beings and the societies they form continue to recognize only surface culture and avoid the underlying primary culture, nothing but unpredictable explosions and violence can result. My thesis is that one of the many paths to enlightenment is the discovery of ourselves, and this can be achieved whenever one truly knows others who are different.

Today's world is dominated by two great but completely different traditions and, if Robert Ornstein and Tadanobu Tsunoda are correct, each emphasizes different areas of the brain. I am not referring to Capitalism and Marxism, or to great political doctrines such as totalitarianism and democracy. I mean the linear, externalized logic that began with the Greek philosophers in the fifth century B.C. and culminated in Western philosophies and today's Western science, and, on the other hand, the inward-looking, highly disciplined Buddhist philosophies in which Zen plays a prominent part. Each has entered into a powerful transaction, molding man and, through man, nature. But each works in radically different ways. Nevertheless, the two traditions have much to gain and learn from each other.

Fritjof Capra's book The Tao of Physics is a courageous attempt to deal with this issue on the level of physics, philosophy, and mathematics, and it can be helpful to those who look to physical science for inspiration. However, my approach is somewhat different, and while I have great respect for the powerful theories of physical science and what they have taught mankind about the physical world, and for the many advances that science and technology have made, I am constrained to remind myself that life itself, and particularly life for the human species, is the ultimate value against which all else should be measured. Without people, technology means nothing. If the world's problems are to be solved, it will be by human beings, not by machines; the machines are only here to help us. Technology is an inevitable result of mankind's propensity to evolve outside his body. The record on this score is impressive, but it is now time for the human race to begin again to direct attention to human beings and the social institutions that make this technology possible. By focusing our attention outward, we have been diverted from the real task of life: the understanding and mastery of life itself. This is where our two great but very different philosophical traditions become increasingly relevant.

Our purpose should be to facilitate human interaction, to begin to turn ourselves around, and to loosen the unconscious grip of culture so that instead of being controlled by the past, human beings can face the future in quite a new and more adaptive way. In setting these objectives, I do not mean to give the impression that our task will be easy. On the contrary, it is probably more difficult than anything the human species has thus far attempted. Paradoxically, the individual steps to cultural and personal comprehension are not inevitably difficult. It is the changing of behavior, and the integration of new patterns that lead to greater self-knowledge, that tax us most. In this sense, the Zen masters are right.

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