Proxemics in Greetings between Different Cultures



Proxemics in Greetings between Different Cultures

Introduction

Proxemics refers to the distance between two people when they interact. The term was coined back in the year 1963 by Edward T. Hall. Proxemics has an impact on communication as well as greetings. To understand this, a very broad relationship between the two is described hereunder (Widhalm, 2005). During communication, any two bodies are like a pair of gravity and this gravity has an inversely proportional relationship with the square of the distance between the two bodies and sometimes with the cube of the distance between them.

Proxemics is a very important concept in greetings and studies the special concept of greetings. The paper discusses the concept of proxemics as it relates to social greetings and how these greetings differ among people belonging to different cultures. For this purpose, the paper will shed light on the empirical nature of proxemic behavior, and the study of moving bodies and acting selves.

Personal space

The space between a body and the posture it assumes is a function of the fluctuations and shifts in the sensory organs of the body. As concern the personal space of a person, there are four zones discussed hereunder.

Intimate distance - this refers to a distance as close as less than 6 inches in which a person can whisper to another person, embrace them or even touch them (Dorsa, 2007).

Personal distance - this refers to a comfortable distance between family members and good friends. The closed phase in the personal distance category can be anything between 1.5 to 2.5 feet.

Social distance - this refers to the distance that can be seen when two acquaintances are interacting with each other. This distance means 4 to 7 feet of distance.

Public distance - this refers to distance that is there when a person is speaking publicly and ranges anywhere between 12 to 25 feet.

These are very broad categories and differ across cultures. For instance, in Latin cultures, the above zones are marked by even smaller distances. Two people who may be talking publicly or even to a stranger would be very comfortable standing close to each other. On the other hand, if we look at the Nordic culture, we know that this is the opposite of the Latin culture. These differences are important to be studied as they help minimize the sense of non comfort between people belonging to different cultures and countries and improves cross-cultural understanding (Herrera, 2010). The comfortable distance can vary not only by religion, culture and country but also on the basis of a person's own preference. If a person tries to invade this personal space of another person then this can be taken either as the display of power or as a display of display of domination over the year.

Proxemic Communication

This refers to the communication with a person and the relative position of the bodies of the two people interacting with one another.

Geographic territory

Geographic territory refers to primary territory, secondary ...