Edward T. Hall Quotes
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... while infants will sync with the human voice regardless of language, they later become habituated to the rhythms of their own language and culture ... ... humans are tied to each other by hierarchies of rhythms that are culture-specific and expressed through language and body movement.
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One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.
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. . . how man evolved with such an incredible reservoir of talent and such fantastic diversity isn't completely understood . . . he knows so little and has nothing to measure himself against.
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We should never denigrate any other culture but rather help people to understand the relationship between their own culture and the dominant culture. When you understand another culture or language, it does not mean that you have to lose your own culture.
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The essence of cross-cultural communication has more to do with releasing responses than with sending messages. It is more important to release the right response than to send the right message.
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Culture hides more than it reveals and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from it's own participants. Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own.
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Each organism, no matter how simple or complex, has around it a sacred bubble of space, a bit of mobile territoriality which only a few other organisms are allowed to penetrate and then only for short periods of time.
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Culture hides more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.
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Two points that are very important points to remember and ask: Is it real and does it work?
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The real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own.
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It is never possible to understand completely any other human being; and no individual will ever really understand himself - the complexity is too great and there is not the time to constantly take things apart and examine them.
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We live fragmented, compartmentalized lives in which contradictions are carefully sealed off from each other. We have been taught to think linearly rather than comprehensively, and we do this not through conscious design or because we are not intelligent or capable, but because of the way in which deep cultural undercurrents structure life in subtle but highly consistent ways that are not consciously formulated.
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Because we have put ourselves in our own zoo, we find it difficult to break out.
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Man is used to the fact that there are languages which he does not at first understand and which must be learned, but because art is primarily visual he expects that he should get the message immediately and is apt to be affronted if he doesn't.
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The future for us is the foreseeable future. The South Asian, however, feels that it is perfectly realistic to think of a 'long time' in terms of thousands of years.
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The reason man does not experience his true cultural self is that until he experiences another self as valid he has little basis for validating his own self.
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I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost.
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Each culture has its own characteristic manner of locomotion, sitting, standing, reclining, and gesturing.
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By their very nature bureaucracies have no conscience, no memory, and no mind.
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Behind every piece of paper lies a human situation.
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I have found the study of organisms to be a truly exciting experience, always interesting and sometimes humbling.
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Now, you can't tell me, we have the only God in the whole world. You can't tell me that nobody else has God.
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Culture is not made up but something that evolves which is human.
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Viewing movies in very slow motion, looking for synchrony, one realizes that what we know as dance is really a slowed-down, stylized version of what human beings do whenever they interact.