Edward Twitchell Hall papers
Photographs of unidentified man, undated.
Collection area: Borderlands
Collection dates: 1930-1996
The collection contains Hall's correspondence, field notes, research, writings, and typescripts beginning with his college studies at the University of Arizona and continuing up to 1996. Correspondents include Marshall McLuhan, Ralph Linton, Margaret Mead, Erich Fromm, Robert Sommers, and Humphrey Osmund. Along with Erich Fromm's correspondence, is a handwritten essay by Fromm entitled "Age of Anxiety."
Hall's studies of dendrochronology and early Southwestern pottery include school papers, field notes, charts, photographs of pottery sherds, and typescripts of two field reports. One is The Dating of Awatovi, from the Peabody Museum Awatovi Expedition of 1937-39; the other is Early Stockaded Settlements in the Governador, New Mexico, from the Columbia University Governador Expedition, 1941.
Reports, logs, notebooks, maps, charts, and snapshots of people and landscapes document Hall's work, Economy of the Truk Islands, 1946. Hall's research in intercultural communication and proxemics is included, as well as papers by others. Most of Hall's writings concern the relationship between culture and communication. Also included are articles, essays, and lectures; as well as typescripts and multiple published copies of his books:
Hall was born in Webster Groves, Missouri on May 16, 1914 and grew up in Sante Fe, New Mexico.
Between 1933 to 1937, Hall lived and worked with the Navajo and the Hopi on Native American reservations in northeastern Arizona, the subject of his autobiographical West of the Thirties. He earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Denver in 1936, a master’s degree from the University of Arizona in 1938 and a doctorate from Columbia University in 1942.
During the 1950s he worked for the United States State Department, at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), teaching inter-cultural communications skills to foreign service personnel, developed the concept of "high context culture" and "low context culture", and wrote several books on dealing with cross-cultural issues.
Throughout his career, Hall introduced a number of new concepts, including proxemics, monochronic time, polychronic time, and high-context and low-context cultures. He published several books on these ideas and concepts such as The Silent Language, The Hidden Dimension, Beyond Culture, and The Dance of Life.
He died at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico on July 20, 2009.
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