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In 1959, a groundbreaking study of nonverbal communication, The Silent Language, was published to international acclaim. Written by Edward T. Hall, a cultural anthropologist, it was one of the first books to examine the complex ways people communicate with one another without speaking. More than thirty years later, The Silent Language has never been out of print, has been translated into several languages, has sold more than 1.5 million copies in the U.S., and remains the definitive book in its field. Today, Ned Hall is a world-renowned expert in intercultural communication, sought after by government agencies, businesses and universities throughout the world for his expertise in interpreting the hidden meanings behind what people are saying to one another.
Now, in a remarkably candid and personal book, he tells the story of the first fifty years of his fascinating life. Although it began inauspiciously when he was virtually abandoned by his parents to the care of others, his early exposure to diverse cultures started him on his path toward decoding the deeper, hidden layers of human behavior. By the time he was in his early twenties, he had lived in Missouri, New Mexico, France, Germany and on Indian reservations in the Southwest. Building dams with the Hopi and Navajo, he began to realize the very deep differences in these two dissimilar cultures and our own as to a how each viewed time, space, bargains and other aspects of daily communication. While serving in the army during World War II, he perceived how the formal army culture differed from the informal one, adding further weight to the new theories he was developing. Working for the State Department under President Truman, he trained foreign service officers who were being sent to underdeveloped countries. Hall's message to them --- that there were profound disparities in the attitudes of different cultures toward time, space and relationships --- was considered almost heretical at the time. Today, Hall's books are required reading for the Peace Corps.
With charm, warmth, and wit, Ned Hall tells of years filled with adventure, glory, pain and disappointment, discovery and achievement. Throughout his life and in the pages of his autobiography, he incorporates his belief that decoding hidden meanings will help people to discover "the anthropology of everyday life."
EDWARD T. HALL is also the author of The Hidden Dimension, The Dance of Life, Hidden Differences (with Mildred Reed Hall), and Beyond Culture. He is a fellow of the American Anthropological Association and of the Society for Applied Anthropology, as well as president of the Anthropological Film Research Institute and a founding director of the National Building Museum. He received the first Edward J. Lehman Award from the American Anthropological Association for demonstrating anthropology's relevance to government, business and industry. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, co-author and partner, Mildred Reed Hall.
CONTENTS
Introduction PART I. EARLY DAYS
1914-1931
Growing Up in the Twenties TWO: The Mueller and Los Alamos Schools THREE The Aspen Ranch School Living with the Artists Impressionism in New Mexico SIX Something Alive PART II: INDIAN COUNTRY IN THE THIRTIES
1932-1935
Spider Woman EIGHT The Navajo and the Hopi NINE Nature's Classroom PART III: TRANSITIONS
1935-1949
TEN The Hispanics ELEVEN Army Life The Micronesians THIRTEEN Academia: University of Denver Academia: Bennington College PART IV: WASHINGTON, D.C.
1950-1963
FIFTEEN The Diplomats at State SIXTEEN Definitions of Culture The Devil's Name Was Time EIGHTEEN The Psychiatrists NINETEEN Broken Idols The Underlying Truth Notes Bibliography INTRODUCTION THIS BOOK is a record of one of the several stories of my life. There are other stories and I hope that someday they will be written also. I wanted to be sure this one got told because at age seventy-six I find that my life goes faster with every year and I know that one of these days I will reach a velocity sufficient to overcome the pull of the earth and fly off into the unknown.
In the perspective of the years I can see that mine has been an unusual life---in fact, a remarkable one, endowed with a luminosity. Not that I had all that much to do with its overall design. There were events that were served up to me: years on the Navajo and Hopi reservations in Arizona in my youth, the Depression, World War II where I did service in a black regiment, my training for and working as an applied anthropologist, working for the State Department during the McCarthy years in Washington, and my psychoanalysis. But it was from my association with different ethnic and professional groups that I have learned the most.. For me, life has been an ever-changing environment made up of people who came across as searing hot deserts, fertile plains, alpine meadows, mountains, impenetrable jungles---each person imposing his or her own laws and rules of survival, so that while I have not always done as well as I would have liked, I have learned, and because I learned, I survived. But I have only recently reached a point where I can understand how atypical my life has been---atypical and productive enough to warrant telling.
This has been the most difficult of all my books for me to write. Ordering my thoughts and writing about ideas has never been easy. But describing the evolution of my own deep true self as reflected in the mirror of everyday life has been even more difficult. It is a task much like excavating a prehistoric Anasazi kiva: you must work with agonizing care because not only do you not know what you will find buried in all that debris but you must be mindful not to damage anything in the process of discovery, and, even more important, you must have the proper respect and reverence for what you are uncovering---a sacred record of the past.
Some remarks concerning where I stand philosophically are necessary for those of my readers educated only in the legacy of Western thought. My approach to life and to the study of culture is metaphilosophical, alien to philosophies growing out of the analytic, word-based tradition of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. When it comes to philosophy, all of us inhabit at least two worlds: the world of explicit statements---an outgrowth of scholasticism, learned in schools, which makes up the corpus of what is thought to be our "cultural heritage"---and the ever evolving unconscious world of everyday behavior which guides all informal activities of daily life. The latter is so much a part of us that, like culture, it is not thought of as anything special, but simply the way we are.
My study (and hence my philosophy) has been rooted in this overlooked, often disdained, uncultivated soil. Because this soil has rested undisturbed over the centuries, built up by successive generations of living, it has proved to be phenomenally rich. Working in these pastures requires special techniques and skills. Instead of controlled experiments to test a hypothesis, it is more important to guard against projecting one's own habits and worldview onto others, and to pay less attention to what people tell you and more attention to what they do. The architect Mies van der Rohe was fond of saying "God is in the details," and it is my emphasis on the details of everyday life over theory, or even policy, that distinguishes my work from that of most anthropologists of my generation. It is the details of the rules underlying common behavior that govern the world.
Therefore, my philosophy, if it can be dignified by such a term, is that of the vernacular, rooted in the unstated rules of everyday life. It is the infinitely varied philosophy of the grass roots---reminiscent of the "dust of history" school of the French---in which there is no judgmental statement of what should and should not be, only an observation of what is. Paralleling my work are the pioneering studies of J. B. Jackson on vernacular landscape, which he contrasts with the crafted landscape of the establishment. Jackson and I agree that the products of everyday life have been neglected in favor of the more prestigious, traditional, ordered, and controlled world of the manifest culture of institutions. But to discover the order (and there is order) in the vernacular is the wave of the future.
As I said before, this is only one of my stories. It is the nucleus of what was going on in my life from childhood until early middle life---the soil out of which my ideas grew. It is also the story of the men and women who encouraged me to see beyond or behind the mask of explicit, learned culture into that much more vast, less artificial world acquired in the deeply personal process of life as it is lived by human beings as they interact naturally with each other with neither thought nor artifice. It is a story of my gradually increasing awareness of the richness of the grammar and vocabulary of everyday culture, the unwritten rules that provide what order there is to daily life.
It is my hope that my story will reveal to others something of the vast world of unconscious culture in its relation to the unconscious self. In the process, perhaps some of my readers can not only begin their escape from the oppressive walls of culture, but can also see through the manipulations and violations of culture's tacit rules when they are used against us by others. As they inevitably will be!
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