The Cultural Patterning of SpaceLike time, space is perceived differently in different cul

The Cultural Patterning of Space

Like time, space is perceived differently in different cultures. Spatial consciousness in many Western cultures is based on a perception of objects in space, rather than of space itself. Westerners perceive shapes and dimensions, in which space is a realm of light, color, sight, and touch. Benjamin L. Whorf, and his classic work Language, Thought and Reality, offers the following explanation as one reason why Westerners perceive space in this manner. Western thought and language mainly developed from the Roman, Latin-speaking culture, which was a practical, experience-based system. Western culture has generally followed Roman thought patterns in viewing objective "reality" as the foundation for subjective or "inner" experience. It was only when the intellectually crude Roman culture became influenced by the abstract thinking of Greek culture that the Latin language developed a significant vocabulary of abstract, nonspatial terms. But the early Roman-Latin element of spatial consciousness, of concreteness, has been maintained in Western thought and language patterns, even though the Greek capacity for abstract thinking and expression was also inherited.

However, some cultural-linguistic systems developed in the opposite direction, that is, from an abstract and subjective vocabulary to a more concrete one. For example, Whorl tells us that in the Hopi language the word heart, a concrete term, can be shown to be a late formation from the abstract terms think or remember. Similarly, although it seems to Westerners, and especially to Americans, that objective, tangible "reality" must precede any subjective or inner experience, in fact many Asian and other non-European cultures view inner experience as the basis for one's perceptions of physical reality. Thus although Americans are taught to perceive and react to the arrangement of objects in space and to think of space as being "wasted" unless it is filled with objects, the Japanese are trained to give meaning to space itself and to value "empty" space. For example, in many of their arts such as painting, garden design, and floral arrangements, the chief quality of composition is that essence of beauty the Japanese call shibumi. A painting that shows everything instead of leaving something unsaid is without shibumi. The Japanese artist will often represent the entire sky with one brush stroke or a distant mountain with one simple contour line—this is shibumi. To the Western eye, however, the large areas of "empty" space in such paintings make them look incomplete.

It is not only the East and the West that are different in their patterning of space. We can also see cross-cultural varieties of spatial perception when we look at arrangements of urban space in different Western cultures. For instance, in the United States, cities are usually laid out along a grid, with the axes generally north/south and east/west. Streets and buildings are numbered sequentially. This arrangement, of course, makes perfect sense to Americans. When Americans walk in a city like Paris, which is laid out with the main streets radiating from centers, they often get lost. Furthermore, streets in Paris are named, not numbered, and the names often change after a few blocks. It is amazing to Americans how anyone gets around, yet Parisians seem to do well. Edward Hall, in The Silent Language, suggests that the layout of space characteristic of French cities is only one aspect of the theme of centralization that characterizes French culture. Thus Paris is the center of France, French government and educational systems are highly centralized, and in French offices the most important person has his or her desk in the middle of the office.

Another aspect of the cultural patterning of space concerns the functions of spaces. In middle-class America, specific spaces are designated for specific activities. Any intrusion of one act

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