THE HIDDEN DIMENSION

In The Silent Language, anthropologist Edward T. Hall gave voice to the actions that speak as loudly as words; in The Hidden Dimension he explores ""social and personal space and man's perception of it."" He calls the exercise of this new venture into man's relationship to his world and other people in it ""proxemics."" In his pursuit of the structure of experience as it is molded by culture, he first turns to experiments with animals: Calhoun's Norway rats in a crowded environment committed new acts of aggression, abnormal behavior, and became prey to mass die-off. Similar ""sinks"" in the city take a similar toll in human lives (witness j.d., and, possibly, the Black Death). But what is crowding to Americans is not to the Japanese. Indeed the notions of personal boundaries and consequently, privacy, the play of the senses themselves vary to the point where communications become confused. Americans in the main come off poorly in their sensory life, while the otherwise deprived Eskimos live in a sense-rich existence. The author reveals The Hidden Dimension with an artist's insight and a scientist's system; his vanguard concept offers along with his earlier book a genuinely new perspective in social and psychological science.