Hall has done fieldwork with Nava

One of Hall's main points is that time is directly related to space. By this he means that the scale of our environment affects our perception of time. He gives this example in an experiment held by a researcher named De Long. He gave his subjects masks which cut off all peripheral view and set them in front of a furnished dollhouse. They were then told to identify with one of the human figures and, without actually moving or touching the doll, see themselves engaged in some type of activity in the house. Then, they were asked to alert the experimenter as to when they felt thirty minutes had passed. The result was that what was experienced as one hour's work in the model was actually one hour's time by the stopwatch the experimenter used to measure time. This was true when the environment was reduced to 1/6 its normal size. When using a 1/12 scale, only five minutes in clock time was perceived as an hour, and so on.

Spending much of his time with Native Americans, Hall was able to explore the differences between theirs and the white man's world. In 1931, the government began a program of building dams designed to help the Hopi and Navajo tribes by providing them with work. As the project progressed, there arose more and more problems about completing the work properly and on time. What the white men did not realize was the tribes were on a completely different schedule. In addition, they did not even bother to consult the tribes as to which drainage could be counted on for runoff and which couldn't. Even feuds were inflamed between the tribes when dams were built on one tribe's sacred land when both were supposed to share it. The white men could not understand why projects were not completed on time and why work did not seem to be completed correctly. In fact, while the white men only lived in "their own" time, they were dealing with many times; these times were those of Hopi, Navajo, the government bureaucratic, and other variants of the white man's time. Work often interfered with religious and farming ceremonies of the tribes, which influenced their attitude toward work. While we, AE (American-European) people, drive our tasks to closure (leaving a job half finished could be seen as wasteful and threatening), Hopi people do not seem to be concerned with scheduling this...unless it involves their ceremonies, which are scheduled. Another difference between the Hopi and the white man is the Western idea that time heals. This does not apply to the Hopi. Their enslavement and rejection of religion still affected them intensely, while the whites were ignorant of it and treated it as "ancient history." If only the white man knew how to relate to these people's sense of time, many conflicts could have been avoided.

Hall, Edward T. 1983. The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

In Hall's first chapter, he describes time to us in the model of a mandala, since it shows the relationship of many ideas to each other in a comprehensive, non-linear, fashion (see fig.1). Here he places biological, personal, physical, metaphysical, sacred, profane, sync, and micro times. Biological time, in the beginning, was all periodic and rhythmic, as are the flow of the tides and the changing of the seasons, and then they became internalized by different organisms that lived on the earth. Biological "clocks" stay in sync with these environmental rhythms. Much like biorhythm, personal time is time is unique to the individual's experience of time. It is more subjective than biological time. An example of physical time is the sun traveling along the horizon from the farthest northern point to the farthest southern point, measuring the longest and shortest days in the northern hemisphere. Many important ceremonies and times for planting and harvesting were calculated by physical time. Metaphysical time involves aspects of an extraordinary dimension beyond our norma

Some common words found in the essay are:
Mozart Beethoven, Midwest Pueblo, Middle Eastern, Edward Hall, PL PL, Dance Life, M-time P-time, According Hall, Hopi Navajo, AE American-European, dance life, anglo woman, eastern cultures, pueblo woman, varies culture culture, past future, ae cultures, hopi white, hopi navajo, white man's, dance life dimension, middle eastern,
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