新编英语教程7课文讲解(综合英语7).doc

A New English Course (Level 7) Unit One Text I English and American Concepts of Space I. About the Author Edward Twitchell Hall (1914 ), U.S. anthropologist, author, and teacher, received his Ph.D. degree in anthropology from Columbia University. He has taught at various institutions, such as Harvard Business School, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Northwestern University. His works include: The Silent Language (1959), a study of nonverbal communication, and The Hidden Dimension (1966), a study of “social and personal space and man’s perception of it.” The present text, a selection from The Hidden Dimension, gives a contrast between English and American concepts of personal space. About the author: Down the drain Edward T.Hall’s The Hidden Dimension, perhaps the scariest book (even scarier than 1984) I ever read. Scary, because it isn’t fiction, but a rather elaborate essay on anthropology and proxemic behavior. If Hall’s right, things as disregard for other cultures, mindless urban development and demographic growth have generated a behavioral sink in which stress, crime, intolerance and physical and psychic disease grow everyday, and to make things worse, our governments take measures that only accelerate the process. We are all going down the drain. Put Ed Hall’s Insights to Work in Your World Ed Hall is one of the preeminent cultural anthropologists of all times. His works, studies, and insights into the rich modern anthropology reflect a life long passion he developed as a teenager in the 1930’s Southwest U.S. assigned to work on white-managed WPA crews alongside Navajo workers whose cultural bearings and world views were vastly different than his own people’s views. Hidden Dimensions examines the cultural contexts of space, how people define their personal and community spaces as part of their cultural norms. How far apart or close do people of a similar culture feel comfortable standing or sitting next to one another and in what circumstances? Whe