Description
Most of us use space unconsciously, yet it exerts a powerful influence over our lives. A whisper, like a fence, creates a private territory which keeps others out. Panhandlers can be unsettling when they approach us because they enter our private space. Travelers shield their faces with their hands during an airflight to ward off intrusion.
Based on six years of research, in which cameras were left to run in various homes twenty-four hours a day, People Space shows how these hidden rules of behavior influence the way we move our bodies, the size of the chairs we sit in, the arrangement of living room furniture, even the layout of houses, buildings, streets and neighborhoods. Drs. Ashcraft and Scheflen reveal the different ways in which men and women, children and adults, city dwellers and suburbanites, rich and poor, black and white, use space and what results when these people interact. People Space is a brilliant new look at our society and the people who live in it.
Norman Ashcraft is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Anthropology at Adelphi University. Albert E. Scheflen, a psychiatrist, is a Senior Researcher at the Bronx Psychiatric Center and is a Professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
ISBN:0385112297
