An Investigation of Proxemic Behavior among Acehnese in Public Places

Rusma Setiyana, Nyak Mutia Ismail, Endah Annisa Rahma, Faizatul Husna

Abstract


It is assumed that Acehnese do not make use of personal space during interactions. This study aims to investigate the proximity levels used by Acehnese people when communicating with other people. The observation approach was used to collect data with people who were in natural interaction in public places as the participant. The data were pictured and kept anonymous in regards of ethical codes maintained in research. The results show that there are three conditions obtained from this study. First, mostly, Acehnese people use intimate level of proximity, which is less than 0.46 meter eventhough when they are interacting with strangers. However, this condition only applies if the interactions taking place is male-male interactions or female-female interactions. Second, in a condition where the stranger interaction is male-female, the proximity employed by the people is in the level of personal—which is 1.2 meter.  Lastly, men maintained farther distance compared to women. In conclusion, the farthest proximity level that Acehnese applied was social level (1.2 m to 3.7 m); yet, the main influencing factor is genders.

Keywords


proxemic behavior; level of proximity; gender interaction; non-verbal interactions; proxemic investigation.

Full Text:

PDF

References


Agnus, O. M. (2012). Proxemics: the study of space. IRWLE, 8(1), 1-7.

Ballendat, T.,Marguardt, N., & Greenberg, S. (2010). Proxemic interaction: designing for a proximity and orientation-aware environment. In the proceedings of ITS, November 7-10, pp. 121-130. Saarbrucken, Germany.

Celik, S. (2005). Get your face out of mine: Culture-Oriented Distance In EFL Context-A Helpful Guide for Turkish EFL Teachers. TÖMER Language Journal, 128, 37-50.

Clark, (2006). Anonimysing research data. Leeds: ESRC National Center for Research Methods, University of Leeds.

Eresha, G., Haring, M., Endrass, B., Andr, E., & Obaid, M. (2013). Investigating the Influence of Culture on Proxemic Behaviors for Humanoid Robots. In the proceedings of the 22nd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, August 26-29, pp. 430-43, Gyeongju, Korea.

Gharaei, F. M. N., & Rafieian, M. R. (2013). Investigating Cross-Cultural Differences in Personal Space: Kurdish and Northern women in Iran. Journal of Asian Behavioural Studies, 3(8), 70-78.

Hall, E. T. (1963). A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior. American Anthropologist, 65(5), 1003–1026. doi:10.1525/aa.1963.65.5.02a00020.

Hall, E. T. (1990). The hidden dimension. New York: Garden City.

Hall, E. T. (1991). A First Look at Communication Theory. In E. M. Griffin (Ed.), A First Look at Communication Theory. New York: McGraw Hill.

Ismail, N. M. (2017). “That’s the biggest impact!” Pedagogical values of movies in ELT classrooms. Studies in English Language and Education, 4(2), 216-225.

Miles, M.B., Huberman, A.M., & Saldana, J. (2013). Qualitative data analysis. London: SAGE publications.

Ningrum, P. (1998). Personal space pada mahasiswa (Studi pada kelompok mahasiswa di Kantin Fakultas Sastra Universitas Indonesia) [Personal space for students (Study in a group of students in the Canteen of the Faculty of Literature, University of Indonesia)] (Unpublished bachelor thesis. Universitas Indonesia, Jakarta). Retrieved from http://lib.ui.ac.id/opac/themes/libri2/detail.jsp?id=20286939&lokasi=lokal

Parker, L., & Leo, T. (2011). Proxemics distance and gender amongst Australians. Griffith working papers in pragmatics and intercultural communications, 4(1), 19-25.

Pasaribu, T. A., & Kadarisman, A. E. (2016). Coding logical mechanism and stereotyping in gender cyber humors. Celt: A Journal of Culture, English Language, Teaching & Literature, 16(1), 22-48.

Prawitasari, M. (2009). Pengaruh kualitas ruang terhadap intimate distance berdasarkan gender [The effect of room quality on intimate distance based on gender] (Unpublished bachelor thesis, Universitas Indonesia, Jakarta).

Sameer, I. H. (2017). The analysis of speech acts patterns in two Egyptian inaugural speeches. Studies in English Language and Education, 4(2), 134-147.

Suprihadi., & Rokhayani, A. (2016). Relationship between gender, subject preference and learning styles. Celt: A Journal of Culture, English Language, Teaching & Literature, 16(2), 242-270.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.24167/celt.v18i2.1272



Copyright (c) 2018 Celt: A Journal of Culture, English Language Teaching & Literature



| pISSN (print): 1412-3320 | eISSN (online): 2502-4914 | web
analytics View My Stats