The Diplomatic Origins of Intercultural Communication

A review of Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture, Doubleday 1976.

Edward T. Hall played a founding role in the establishment of intercultural communication as an academic discipline. Although intercultural communication is now taught in business schools and communication departments, it was formed in the context of training programs for diplomats going abroad and, more specifically, it emerged out of the teaching and conceptualizations by Hall and others at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute in the early 1950s. Intercultural communication found a particularly fertile ground in Japan, where it was used both by Western businessmen who needed to adapt to a very different cultural environment, and by Japanese who espoused the subject enthusiastically and who continue to hold its founder Edward Hall in very high esteem. Beyond Culture, published in 1976 and which stands besides The Hidden Dimension and The Silent Language as Hall's most popular essay, reflects on the author's connexion with Japan, which it graphically evoked on the book cover with the ukiyoe picture of a geisha. It also builds upon Hall's experience at the Foreign Service Institute, and points towards his major intellectual influences in establishing the new field of intercultural communication.

Hall was born in St. Louis in 1914, but grew up mainly in the American Southwest. As a young man in the 1930s, Hall worked for the U.S. Indian Service, building roads and dams with construction crews of Hopis and Navajos. This is how he was first confronted with the issue of cultural difference: "the fact that the white man had schedules for all sorts of projects that the Hopi did not, caused considerable tension" (p. 145). He was also introduced to the difficulties of intercultural communication: "When I was working with the Navajo and the Hopi Indians in Arizona, there were continual struggles and misunderstandings because the cultural gulf separated three systems (Navajo, Hopi, and white American). None of them made sense to the others" (p. 215). During World War II, Hall served as an officer with an African-American regiment in Europe and in the Pacific. Again, this experience confirmed to him the differences in speech patterns and bodily attitude between cultures: "Each culture has its own characteristic manner of locomotion, sitting, standing, reclining and gesturing" (p. 75). According to Hall, "such unconscious differences may well be one of the sources of what blacks feel is the basic racism of white society" (p. 74).

Hall earned a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1942 at Columbia University, then one of the most important centers in anthropological study. During his graduate and post-graduate work, he was particularly influenced by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, as well as by Edward Sapir and other scholars who applied Boas's insights to linguistics. This is how Hall presents the advances in the field: "Franz Boas and followers Leonard Bloomfield and Edward Sapir discovered as they studied American Indian languages that the generalizations about language (up to that time based on Indo-European languages) were not universally applicable. Boas's insight led to the still only partially accepted practice of approaching each culture anew, as though absolutely nothing was known about its structure." (p. 164) Ruth Benedict took the approach one step further by identifying "culture patterns that make life meaningful and really differentiate one group from another" (p. 14). Drawing from Boas's intuition, the ethnolinguists analyzed the way language structures human thought and predates sensory experience: "Nothing happens in the world of human beings that is not deeply influenced by linguistic forms" (p. 31). Again drawing from personal experience, Hall writes: "Having lived and dealt with Navajos for a number of years, I have no doubt not only that they think very differently from the white man, but that much of this difference is at least initially traceable to their language" (p. 16). Or, quoting Edward Sapir: "categories such as number, gender, case, tense, mode, voice, 'aspect' and a host of others (...) are not so much discovered in experience as imposed upon it" (p.15).

Hall draws several lessons from the work of anthropologists and linguists. The strong emphasis on cultural relativism by Boas and Benedict is evident in his work. Also, like Benedict, he thinks that anthropological understandings should be applied to and inform government policies. What Benedict did for Japan in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Hall did on a much more modest scale for the South Pacific atoll of Truk, which was under U.S. trusteeship after having been occupied by the Japanese during World War II. Benedict saw each culture as defined by a dominant pattern. Similarly for Hall, "a given culture cannot be understood simply in terms of content or parts. One has to know how the whole system is put together" (p. 222). For the Trukese, the defining trait of their society as identified by Hall was "a system of vengeful warfare that they were unable either to circumvent or stop until outsiders intervened when the islands were annexed by the Spanish and later the Germans in the nineteenth century" (p. 147). Hall also draws a lot from the ethnolinguists; but he thinks that Edward Sapir and his disciples overplayed the role of language, whereas Hall brought attention to nonverbal forms of communication. Following Freud, Hall listened closely to "the silent language": to everything that is said when one doesn't say anything, to the lapses and breaches in communication that sometimes tell more than long speeches.

Hall did not accept certain important aspects of anthropological perspective, however. Rather than covering an indigenous society or culture as a unitary whole, Hall's approach focuses on the micro-level interactions between people of different cultures. He is also more interested in material things, bodily culture, and the organization of space and time than were the early anthropologists. As he recalls, "A low aptitude with words coupled with great curiosity and a practical mind kept me from being swept up and preoccupied with the main stream of philosophical and theoretical anthropology as developed by many of my colleagues" (p. 173). Hall was also more eclectic than the average scholar. He read extensively in the natural sciences, and often refers to articles published in Science or to popular science books. His interest, particularly in animal behavior, is evidenced in Beyond Culture, especially in the chapter on action chains, a concept borrowed from ethology. His examples includes references to animal intelligence; to brain science; to behavioral psychology; to information theory; and to psychiatry and psychoanalytic theory.

His debt to Freud is dutifully acknowledged: "Freud educated us to the complexities of the psyche, helping his readers to look at dreams as a legitimate mental process that exists quite apart from the linearity of manifest thought" (p. 9). The unconscious level of communication was a strong influence on Hall and other pioneers of intercultural communication, and manifested itself in their conception of nonverbal communication. "The cultural unconscious, like Freud's unconscious, not only controls man's actions but can be understood only by painstaking process of detailed analysis" (p. 43). Hall found a great potential for convergence of psychiatry (particularly psychoanalysis) and anthropology. But he remained wary of approaches that treat theory as an end and that do not stem from personal experience or careful observation. This led him to pay more attention to the material culture, to nonverbal forms of communication and thinking, to bodily forms of memory, or to man's use of space and time.

Hall's eclecticism, coupled with a keen sense of observation, led him to propose several theoretical constructs and concepts, which are commonly identified as his main contribution to the theory of intercultural communication: high context vs. low context culture, monochronic time vs. polychronic time, kinesics (the interpretation of body language), proxenics and chronemics (man's use of space and time), personal space and territory, the situational frame, extension transference, action chains, synchrony, nonverbal communication, the cultural unconscious, situational dialects, linear vs. comprehensive thinking, situational frames as contexts for action, basic archetypal situations, etc. These concepts are not self-explanatory: you need to go through their definition and a few examples to begin to grasp their meaning. It doesn't help either that Hall systematically moves to the abbreviated form when using these concepts: "M-time" and "P-time" for monochronic and polychronic, "ET" for extension transference, etc. The risk here is to fall into the trap the author himself warns against when introducing the "ET factor": "mistaking the symbol for the thing symbolized while endowing the symbol with properties it does not possess" (p. 29). However, taken as a whole, Hall's battery of concepts provide a useful grid that can be used to chart cultures and understand the interactions between them.

The Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Department was the matrix where the principles of intercultural communication were first formulated. Hall worked there from 1951 to 1955, teaching a workshop on Understanding Foreign People and adapting the tools and lessons of anthropology for a public of American diplomats. Anthropology courses were coupled with language education in order to give American diplomats a practical outlook. This was a far cry from traditional language education as practiced at the time: "When an American tries to use his high school French in France, he can neither understand nor be understood. People just don't speak the way he was taught" (p. 130). Hall's colleagues were determined to remedy this state of play. One of them, Charles Ferguson, was "working at the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department, where it was felt that at least a few U.S. personnel could benefit from being able to speak `the language of the people'" (p. 32). He chose to teach colloquial Arabic instead of the classical Arabic that educated Arabs learn at school, but only seldom use. He had to establish rules and grammar for this spoken Arabic, since he was faced with "the common belief among Arabs that colloquial Arabic was not a language at all and that it had no structure" (p. 32). According to Hall, speaking the language of the people was only a starting point: one had to "move to the local rhythm and conform to the local beat" (p. 71). Hence his insistence on implicit rules, nonverbal expressions, and body syncing.

However, Hall was soon faced with bureaucratic inertia at the State Department, and the window of academic creativity that had flourished in the beginning of the 1950s was soon closed. Training sessions for diplomats moved to more conventional approaches, and the anthropologists had to find other teaching jobs in universities. In a way, there was something inevitable in the chasm between the anthropologists and the diplomats. As Hall notes, "the Foreign Service keeps people moving precisely so they won't establish lasting relationships with the local people" (p. 53). Fieldwork is an activity that remains alien to desk workers, who are not encouraged to go to the field and mingle with the people. Instead, the incentives faced by diplomats reinforce isolation and conventional thinking: "With few exceptions, no matter where one looked, custom and fashion determined what was to be reported to Washington and what was not, to say nothing of what was made public" (p. 221). Nonetheless, Hall gained useful classroom examples of intercultural communication from his trainees, many of whom had extensive international experience. Further insights and reaching examples were obtained by Hall's travels to visit his former trainees in their overseas assignments, from Iran to Latin America and to Japan.

Japan holds a peculiar place in the field of intercultural communication. As mentioned, Hall is still revered as a great teacher in Japan, and he himself devoted considerable interest for this country. It is only natural that Japan is the first country where the challenge of intercultural communication was stated most forcefully. As Hall writes, "I can think of few other countries Americans are likely to visit and work in in significant numbers where it is more difficult to control one's inputs and where life is more filled with surprises than Japan" (p. 57). Japan is America's significant other: it confronts the U.S. government official and the business executive with a radically distinct culture, where notions of hierarchy, face, pride and honor, shame and guilt, acquire a different meaning. This can create serious misunderstandings: "it is difficult for hard-nosed American businessmen to deal with indirection and accustom themselves to the fact that in Japan verbal agreements are binding and much preferred to the ironbound written contract of the West, which can always be nullified or abrogated anyway" (p. 45). On a lighter note, the author recalls his puzzlement when he was "being moved around in hotels and even from one hotel to another without any warning or word from the management" (p. 161). The hotel clerk simply assumed he belonged and could be treated as a regular or family member, "a relationship in which one can afford to be relaxed and informal and not stand on ceremony" (p. 65). Only when joining the inner ring or circle ('wa') can one find true harmony ('wa')...

(Written on May 25, 2012)