The silent language

Edward Twitchell Hall

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 ways in which people talk to one another without the use of works. 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 animalʼs instinctive defense of his lair and is reflected in human society by the office workerʼs 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 Eastern vagueness, Is revealed by the businessman who pointedly keeps a...