The Silent Language
About this audiobook
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 words.
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 animal’s instinctive defense of his lair and is reflected in human society by the office worker’s 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 client waiting, or a person who murders his neighbor for an injustice suffered twenty years ago.
About the author
Edward T. Hall (1914–2009) was a widely traveled anthropologist whose fieldwork took him all over the world—from the Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest to Europe and the Middle East. Dr. Hall was born in Webster Groves, Missouri. He received an AB degree from the University of Denver, and MA from the University of Arizona, and a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University.
Stephen Thorne trained at RADA and played several seasons with the Old Vic Company and the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford and London. He has worked extensively in radio, with over two thousand broadcasts for the BBC, including Uncle Mort in the Radio 4 comedy series and the part of Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings. His television work includes EastEnders, Boys from the Bush, Death of an Expert Witness, and David Copperfield.
