#low-context

We all learn to communicate from within our own cultures, and we may well live our whole lives without realizing how deeply this affects the way we process words, sentences and texts, or the expectations we bring to reading. When faced with a text from another, different culture, we may be inhibited from truly grasping the meaning of this text if we are unaware of how communication processes develop and differ based on social settings. In his 1976 book "Beyond Cultures", anthropologist Edward T. Hall identified two types of societies: High-context and Low-context.

Low-context cultures produce written documentation that is highly detailed, descriptive, and without much scope for imagination. These tend to be societies "of law" such as the United States and much of Northern Europe. They also tend to be more diverse, more individualistic; places where the shared-experiences upon which communication is built can differ greatly between a single generation and the next. The precision and detail with which these societies communicate is perhaps due in part to the need to communicate across ethnically and socially diverse groups. One of the downsides of a low-context culture is that you tend to find, for example, a jar of peanuts with the warning label "may contain nuts". We are providing people with information we don't need, patronizing them, often extending to law-making.

On the other hand, high-context cultures, found in much of Asia, the Mediterranean and the Middle-East (as well as elsewhere), often contain more shared perceptions and behaviourisms as a result of lower diversity and greater collectivist and relational tendencies. There may be greater tradition and shared history allowing for better communication between generations. These societies produce texts that leave more open to the imagination and in which fewer things are detailed or spelled-out. This can have the unfortunate affect of not providing enough information, "mystifying" the reader, leaving them searching for "hidden meaning". 

So how does somebody from a low-context culture interpret correctly, a text from a high-context culture? This is the problem many Western, low-context readers of the bible face, as the bible was the product of a high-context culture. The "gaps" that a low-context reader, used to greater detail and exposition, might find in the bible are often filled-in with anachronisms and ethnocentrisms. Eventually these anachronisms and ethnocentrisms that have been added to the text build up and become ingrained in the reading. The only way to demystify the text is to try and understand the culture and social system / environment in which it was created--to try and read outside of our own context and within another. Though this will never be fully achievable, that should not prohibit the attempt.

Hall, Edward T., Beyond Culture. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1983).