562 high and low context

In studies of communication, Eduard Hall (1967) made a distinction between ‘low context’ communication with precise, explicit, logical, coherent use of words, and ‘high context’ communication, which is ambiguous, context-dependent, using body language, expression, relying on trust, and aimed at maintaining the relation concerned (Ramos, 2014). What is the relation with other insights from theories of communication and language?

Buber’s ‘Ich-Du’ relations and Rosa’s ‘resonance’, discussed in earlier items in this blog, require ‘high context’ communication. There also appears that there is a connection with Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1979) distinction between ‘langue’, and ‘parole’, also discussed previously. In Langue, language is public, shared by all in a culture, logical and precise. Parole is based in part on personal experience and contact, is more vague, emotion-laden, including non-verbal elements. Langue covers universals, parole is individual.

This, in turn, rhymes with the ‘hermeneutic circle’, an exchange between a ‘paradigmatic axis’ of established, common, shared, reasonably stable, universal  concepts, and a ‘syntagmatic axis’ of sentences, in action contexts, where the abstraction of general concepts become concrete, in interaction with other concepts in the sentence and context at hand. A ‘chair’ in langue and the  paradigmatic axis covers many different chairs, but in parole it becomes the specific armchair that is now being ripped apart by my cat. This experience may become part of the general notion of ‘cat’, now including their ripping of furniture. The interaction between the two axes yields a dynamic of shifting meanings. That is how language and meaning develop.

European and American culture are largely low-context, and Latin and Eastern cultures are more ‘high-context’, giving rise to misunderstanding when Westerners visit. In the East explicitness is rude, uncouth. However, the difference is mostly not so strict: in most cultures there is a mix, depending on the context and on the relation.

Hall, E.T. 1967, Beyond culture. Anchor.

Ramos, S. 2014, Profile of Man and culture, Google

Saussure, F de 1979, Cours de Linguistique Générale, Paris: Payotèque, Payot