Here we trace the role of anthropologist Edward T. Hall in founding the scholarly field of intercultural communication during the 1951-1955 period when he was at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of States. The scholarly field of intercultural communication was then mainly advanced by university-based scholars of communication in the United States and Japan, and in other countries. The development of intercultural communication in the U.S. and Japan is analyzed here.

The Founding Role of Edward T. Hall
This essay explores (1) the development of the original paradigm for intercultural communication, and (2) how this paradigm was followed by scholars in the United States and in Japan. The term “intercultural communication” was used in Edward T. Hall’s (1959) influential book, The Silent Language, and Hall is generally acknowledged to be the founder of the field (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1990; Rogers and Steinfatt, 1999). Hall was born in St. Louis, but grew up mainly in the American Southwest. As a young man in the 1930s, Hall worked for the U.S. Indian Service, building roads and dams with construction crews of Hopis and Navajos (Hall, 1992, 1994). He earned a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1942 at Columbia University, then one of the most important centers in anthropological study. During World War II Hall served as an officer with an African American regiment in Europe and in the Pacific (Hall, 1947).

After the War, Hall returned to Columbia University for post-doctoral study in cultural anthropology (somewhat of a career shift from his previous specialty in archaeology), where he participated in a seminar with Abram Kardiner, Clyde Kluckhohn, Ruth Benedict, and others on the relationship of psychiatry and anthropology (Hall, 1992). Hall investigated the U.S. government’s post-World War II administration of the Pacific island of Truk (Hall, 1950). Then, while teaching at the University of Denver, Hall conducted a race relations study in Denver for the mayor’s office (Hall, 1992). After teaching at Bennington College in Vermont, with Erich Fromm, a Freudian psychoanalyst, Hall joined the Foreign Service Institute as a professor of anthropology in 1951. Table 1 details the major events in Edward Hall’s life and career.