No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
This book is about "proxemics", a label coined by its author for the study of people's experience, perception, and use of space. The book reflects a broad span of attentionwhich may be characteristic of anthropologists -focussing at all levels from the micro to the macro, and mingling findings and ideas from a variety of disciplines with the author's own observations and speculations. The discussion opens at the "infracultural" level with spacing and distance regulation mechanisms in birds and animals, and the possibility of an "endocrine servomechanism" evoked by the stress of overcrowding mediating population control. We move on to the "pre-cultural" level and what we know from recent work in psychology and physiology about human perception. Various kinds of space are distinguished.-visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile and thermal -and the insight offered by art and literature, particularly the spatial imagery in language, is used to support these distinctions. At this point, we are introduced to a classification system, in need of clarification and development. The "microcultural" level consists of "fixedfeature", "semi-fixed feature" and "informal" space. Since the latter is defined in terms of four distances ("intimate", "personal", "social", "public") for interperson interaction, I assume the other two categories refer to interaction with physical features of the environment. Dr. Hall culminates his discussion with what seems to be his specialist field, that of socio-cultural differences in spatial concepts, contrasting the American with the European and Eastern. Finally, implications are drawn for man's future, particularly in the USA, if stress symptoms and cultural distinctions (the "hidden dimension") continue to be ignored in building and community planning programmes.
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