High and low context cultures
Contact is the most important cultural dimension and also immensely difficult to define. The idea of context in culture was an idea put forth by an anthropologist by the name of Edward T Hall. Hall breaks up culture into two main group: High and Low context cultures. He refers to context as the stimuli,environment or ambiance surrounding the environment. Depending on how a culture relies on the three points to communicate their meaning, will place them in either High or Low context cultures. For example, Hall goes on to explain that low-context culture assume that the individuals know very little about what they are being told, and therefore must be given a lot of background information.High-context cultures assume the individual is knowledgeable subject about the subject and has to be given very little background information.
Hall has written that cultural expectations about these spaces very widely. In the United States, for example, 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 fxed and semi-fixed feature space, the terms Hall uses to describe furniture, buildings and cities, every culture has samilar internalized expectation about how these areas should be organized. United states cities, for instance, are customarily set out along grid, a preference inherited from the British, but in France and Spain a star pattern is preferred.
(Nina Brown. Edward T. Hall: Proxemic Theory, 1996)