»body language«

I so never learn how to greet people in Germany. All the kissing and hugging in foreign countries really messed me up.

Normally I would say shaking hands is appropriate. For sure in business. But already on a semi-professional level or on the border between business and private occassions it does not necessarily seem expected that I reach out my hand.

Plus: then they are shocked about my firm touch. Ups!

Preparing international youth camps we would always do a unit on body awareness.

One of the games was to sort your own body in zones ranging from intimate to "public". A public part for many people would be the hands: shaking hands with strangers for many people does not intrude into their safety zone.

Another game was working with keeping distance in constellations of two. By means of will the participants were asked to negotiate on their personal spatial needs. Which distance from each other is comfortable to talk to with stranger?

Both games give a nice example of the role of context as well: strangers are usually obliged to greater distances than friends or partners.

Hall describes culture to be a screen between man and the outside world. A screen is needed to give structure and prevent "information overload" by organizing what we pay attention to and what we ignore (cp. p.85). While information is simplyfied it loses its characteristics which can only be regained by contextualizing.
Hall compares this to the system of language: one word might mean different things but contexts gives it a specific meaning. This is why translating machines still fail to substitute man: "the problem lies not in the linguistic code but in the context, which carries varrying proportions of the meaning. Without context, the code is incomplete since it encompasses only part of the message." (p.86)
He especially picks out the Chinese language in which - in order to look up a word - you have to know the significance of 214 radicals (a grammatical phenomena not even known in our languages): to find the word "star" you would have to look it up on the sun-radical. (cp. p.90ff)
Another simplified example would be the laws of perception in which it was proven that colors are perceived differently depending on their background. (cp. p.95)
Contexting works the other way round when people are well acquainted to each other and develop their "own" language in which words and sentences are shortened or new words are invented. (cp.p.92)

His example of contexting in a cultural sense goes back on the idea of body movement. "[I]ntrusion distance (the distance one has to maintain from two people who are already talking in order to get attention but not intrude). How great this distance is and how long one must wait before moving in depends on: what is going on (activity), your status, your relationship in a social system (husband and wife or boss and subordinate), the emotional state of the parties, the urgency of needs of the individual who must intrude, etc." (p.98ff) This explains quite clearly why body movement cannot be split into units independent from the context.

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Hall was the first to detect cultural differences in the human need for personal space.
Actually I cannot quite follow his examinations of whole groups (like for example all the kids on the school yard) following a certain inner tune which connects them all together. Nevertheless I agree with his statements of people interacting with each other to be "in sync" with each other. They seem to perform a dance in which eye contact, body signaling, walking, sitting, ... apparently follow a certain pattern (cp. p.71ff). This reminded me of a documentation in which it was shown how subordinates copy and imitate their bosses' behavior: this went as far as the non-smoking subordinate fiddling on his mouth while his boss was smoking. But "in sync" does not necessarily mean to follow parallel movements. It rather defines the subconscious obedience (Einhaltung) to cultural rules of body contact and body movement.
Regarding rhythm Hall reminds the reader of the natural rhythms of day and night or the seasons, as well as of shorter cycles of breathing or the heart beat or yet the rhythms of hunger or sex. He takes women phasing their periods as example to show man's inner strive for synchronizing.
Hall warns that body movement cannot be split in single units and that not one movement means exactly one thing, just like one word can mean different things. Explanations saying that crossed arms mean to shut people out oversimplify things: "The principal defect in the recent popularization of body language is that it is presented as independent of the person, as though it were pasted on, something that can be doffed and donned like a suit of clothes or an item of vocabulary." (p.82) For Hall, what he calls nonverbal cues are "interwoven with the fabric of the personality and into society itself, even rooted in how one experiences oneself as a man or a woman." (p.82)
Not applying the correct body movement and rhythm almost certainly lead to distress and disturbance because it makes people feel uncomfortable. This is especially challenging in cross-cultural encounters because "In new and unknown situations, in which one is likely to be most dependent on reading nonverbal cues (NVC), the chances of one's being correct decrease as cultural distances increase ." (p.76)

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further to chapter six