The Arab World Edward T Hall Summary

In the article, “The Arab World", anthropologist Edward T. Hall discusses how Arabs have a different concept of space and boundary than westerners for public and private places and how this can help explain certain aspects of how Arabs behave. As a renowned anthropologist who has written prolifically and has conceived several important theories in anthropology, Hall is quite qualified to write on the topic of cultural differences and his propositions might be considered extremely credible. Despite possessing such qualifications and writing a well-organized and logical essay, Hall’s arguments in the article are quite lacking because of a biased tone, a lack of evidence, an overreliance on ethos and the use of some logical fallacies.
The article basically tries to ascertain how and why Arabs behave differently than people from the west based on “proxemics research”. The author makes five assertions throughout the article to illustrate why Arabs behave differently. The author initially claims that Arabs do not have a concept of personal space in public and every space in public is available for whoever is able to get it by force. Hall subsequently claims that Arab notion of privacy significantly differs from the west and Arabs do not emphasize upon physical privacy. Hall further claims that Arabs set their distances and

Even though Hall studies cultural relations, he did not have a long experience in his personal life that would give him the credible authority to depict Arabs and the way they behave. Thr author’s short term experience does not give his arguments the effectiveness to convince the reader about the stereotypical Arabs that he used to see. In the “Arab World”, Hall states that, “For an Arab, there is no such thing as an intrusion in public’. (1966). This statement was a generalization of all the Arab’s informal behavior only from the minority of Arabs that Hall was involved