Hall, Edward Twitchell, Jr.

Hall, Edward Twitchell, Jr. (1914–  ) cultural anthropologist; born in Webster Groves, Mo. Educated at the University of Denver and Columbia University (Ph.D. 1940), he began studying communications among the Hopi and Navajo Indians in the 1930s. After army service during World War II, he taught at Bennington, Illinois Tech, and Northwestern. He developed his theories of nonverbal communication and popularized them in Silent Language (1959). Other important works were Beyond Culture (1966) and The Dance of Life (1983). With his wife, he operated a consultancy that interpreted foreign cultures for business and government officials by drawing on his knowledge of gestures, body movement, and other types of nonverbal "languages."