"Hall, whose Beyond Culture and The Silent Language won a wider
readership, has written a ground-breaking investigation of the ways we
use and abuse time, rich in insights applicable to our lives. Business
readers will enjoy the cross-cultural comparison of American know-how
with practices of compartmentalized German, centralized French, and
ceremonious Japanese firms." --Publishers Weekly
In his pioneering work The Hidden Dimension, Edward T. Hall spoke of
different cultures' concepts of space. Now The Dance of Life reveals
the ways in which individuals in culture are tied together by invisible
threads of rhythm and yet isolated from each other by hidden walls of
time. Hall shows how time is an organizer of activities, a synthesizer
and integrator, and a special langauge that reveals how we really feel
about each other.
Time plays a central role in the diversity of cultures such as the
American and the Japanese, which Hall shows to be mirror images of each
other. He also deals with how time influences relations among Western
Europeans, Latin Americans, Anglo-Americans, and Native Americans.