A Nearly Final Review: The Silent Language

A Nearly Final Review: The Silent Language
Edward T. Hall (1959)

In the chapter "Space Speaks", Hall notes how all living entities have carefully defined physical boundaries suitable to their environments. However as organisms evolve into greater forms of complexity he defines proxemical spaces as similar to individual territorial fields of space and attempts to elaborate upon the finely tuned senses of space in its human variation from one cultural norm to another. His first example has to do with the way dogs perceive territorial spaces particularly in rural environments. What I have always observed about dogs in general is that there is some truth to the saying that dogs often look like their owners. So I would suggest that dogs which appear to be defending even whole portions of road or track with great yapping ferocity at times may be similar to their owners and somewhat confused regarding the concepts of private versus public roads and their intended use by any passersby. One may even find along the self-same roads other dogs with possible attendant tenants or landowners which have more discreet territoriality and allow mere pedestrians, bicycle riders or the like to pass with impunity and blissful silence. These are the dogs and neighbours whose discrimination I highly favour.

Hall notes many other animals which defend territoriality and I remember almost fondly an Australian, grouse-like fowl which pecked about upon the lawns and scattered about with a fearful chicken-like scrambling away from walking gaits in their general directions but upon breeding and nesting time became a frighful and loathsome beast of the air which would routinely dive bomb any interlopers, brandishing ripe yellow missles and poison darts upon its wingspans and fearful screams, swooping and attacking to nestle its fowl brood. So this type of territoriality in seemingly retiring and urbane creatures extends the elements of instinctive proxemics perhaps even to that part of the human animal which retains its lizard-like workings within its composites folds of layered brains. Hall sets out to explain that proxemics exist ona highly technical level in cultural underpinnings and are often intrinsically based. His example of the territoriality which students often set up within a classroom environment is often strictly adhered to and difficult to manipulate.

Fortunately I believe it is condusive to learning, especially the learning of language, to routinely reorganize groups, pairs, and lumpings of individuals in a classroom. At times, yes, with draconian delight I insist on separating the jelly-fish of associations in the classroom, often with brute force of "the countdown". I remind students that participation is a grade I give based upon their willingness to follow my instructions, and considering my various leniences, I can only ever be ferocious about this one particular issue. In reorganising groups to my own satisfaction I re-establish teacher territoriality to students who often believe polyps and tentacles of association shall reign in the land of the octopus, man, and orchid. If they do so, then my students do not ever seeme to get the point. As in, studying in class is meant mostly for future, undetermined usage outside of it. One may not "choose" who one needs to speak to in survival communication situations. This is the point of breaking up cliques.

Hall says in learning and growing one learns spatial cues and conditioning through a myrid of ways and those which one becomes first affixed with, as a mosaic upon bare stone often colours and effects reactions and successful or unsuccessful integration with or through other cultural proxemics standards. One man's spatial norm is another man's cue to aggression and anger. This is particuarly relevant to my own experiences in some foreign lands. Canadians have a lot of wide open spaces, of note in rural settings. Not only is their view of life and the world fairly broad, possibly widely tolerant of other cultures as a result intellectually. However their senses of personal space is also fairly broad, and perhaps easily tweaked to anger or aggression due to tail-gating, crowding, elbowing, and so on. Imagine the difficulty in navigating cultures where personal space is often a premium, and even perhaps disconcerting. The boredom urban Asians often feel in rural settings is not due to a lack of things to do, but perhaps a lack of movement, flurry, rampant change, or even the instilled silence of quite places, also perhaps unfamiliar and thus not a key facet of their own personal culturally tuned proxemical understanding.

Hall notes that urbanites tend to have little or no knowledge of rural spaces geographically or spatially, let one say proxemically. As a result perhaps they are easily marked out of the crowd by locals upon their arrivals on the scene simply by the way they navigate, or fail to navigate through space. Especially, if one spends one's life narrowly negotiating the ever spinning wheels, enticing bits of cheese, or hallways and passageways , whiskers forever testing the airs for threats or danger, would not one be fairly ill at ease when such realities are altered? Hall notes that spatially, children develop their sense of space from family norms to ever expanding understanding of greater and greater orbits of proxemics.

But one fails to appreciate the variations in cultural norms in areas of proxemics if one expects them to all hold the same values or creep ever closer to uniform or standard ones without the influence of manufacturered goods and new technologies. That there are probably better, more efficient ways to interact with technologies such as this information age has found us now, scrabbling and clattering over cobbles of letters and keyboards to interact with language, will only be determined through further research essentially on what new terms of proxemics cultures are willing to adapt themselves to. All changes in proxemics probably evolve through necessity and as they are intrinsic one could say such changes on cultural levels would also be very difficult to track. Anyone who has stood in the special darshan lines in Tirupati can agree that western concepts of proxemics spare the feet, toes, quarters, and limbs from the excessive pressing of strangers bodies, as equally valid in the passageways and catacombs of Seoul's wiggly subway lines and crushings of bodies together upon sweltering carriages.

It is difficult to say at what point a westerner actually ameliorates a sense of personal space invasion in any of a number of foreign nations under the terms of proxemics. But becoming more aware of the elements of such values systems, might one consider them to be associated with what one could consider in other perspectives as "ego"? One can appear excessively particular to natives of foreign lands when one insists upon space rules which break those locally. Physical privacy, along with its emotional concepts of well-being, also proxemically imbued on a culturally filtered level are arranged and ordered fairly differently in many foreign nations. A real expression of islands in the stream. Hall should be credited for really establishing these concepts of space and time and how intricately they are linked to cultural values. Such realisations, and the experience of living them in foreign or expatriate cirumstances are always challenging and increasingly fascinating.