Defined
The science of proxemics measures types of personal, social, and public space and investigates how changes in proximity affect human experience. The mediating interactions of commercial transactions, social and cultural institutions, education, architecture and product design, environmental stewardship, views of human dignity, and government policy all effect the cultivation of flourishing human community toward the common good in social and public space.
Proxemics and Culture
The science of proxemics measures types of personal, social, and public space and how change relational space effects people. Anthropology, theology, and economics profoundly arrange how that public space forsters human flourishing. Building flourishing civil-society requires a culture formed and shaped by their interactions in social, policitical, religious, and economic systems.
Proxemics Defined
"Edward T. Hall: Proxemic Theory, 1966"
By Nina Brown, Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science
Background Hall, Edward Twitchell (1914--)
The anthropologist Edward T. Hall was born in Missouri in 1914. The foundation for his lifelong research on cultural perceptions of space was laid during World War II when he served in the U.S. Army in Europe and the Philippines. During this time, as well as during his subsequent service as director of the Foreign Service Institute training program for technicians assigned to overseas duty, Hall observed the many difficulties created by failures of intercultural communication. Hall began to believe that basic differences in the the way that members of different cultures perceived reality were responsible for miscommunications of the most fundamental kind. Along with his wife, Mildred Reed Hall, he has published numerous practical and academic books on cross-cultural communication.
Innovation
Hall is most associated with proxemics, the study of the human use of space within the context of culture. In The Hidden Dimension (1966), Hall developed his theory of proxemics, arguing that human perceptions of space, although derived from sensory apparatus that all humans share, are molded and patterned by culture. He argued that differing cultural frameworks for defining and organizing space, which are internalized in all people at an unconscious level, can lead to serious failures of communication and understanding in cross-cultural settings. This book analyzed both the personal spaces that people form around their bodies as well as the macro-level sensibilities that shape cultural expectations about how streets, neighborhoods and cities should be properly organized.
Hall's most famous innovation has to do with the definition of the informal, or personal spaces that surround individuals: Intimate space--the closest "bubble" of space surrounding a person. Entry into this space is acceptable only for the closest friends and intimates.Social and consultative spaces--the spaces in which people feel comfortable conducting routine social interactions with acquaintances as well as strangers.
Public space--the area of space beyond which people will perceive interactions as impersonal and relatively anonymous.
Cultural expectations about these spaces vary widely. In the United States, for instance, people engaged in conversation will assume a social distance of roughly 4-7', but in many parts of Europe the expected social distance is roughly half that with the result that Americans traveling overseas often experience the urgent need to back away from a conversation partner who seems to be getting too close. At the level of fixed and semifixed feature space, the terms Hall uses to describe furniture, buildings and cities, every culture has similar internalized expectations about how these areas should be organized. United States cities, for instance, are customarily set out along a grid, a preference inherited from the British, but in France and Spain a star pattern is preferred.
Hall's work inspired developments in several fields. In the field of anthropology, he was one of the first to consider the "anthropology of space." Today, this is a robust area of research pursued by anthropologists interested in how the built environment expresses culturally shared ideas and sustains relations of inequality between people (Lawrence and Low 1990). Hall's ideas have also had a significant impact in communication theory, especially intercultural communication, where it inspired research on spatial perception that continues to this day (Niemeir, Campbell and Dirven 1998). In geography, Hall's work has inspired geographers to consider the importance of relative and relational, as opposed to absolute, space, and to ask the questions about how different human communities create and make use of space.