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The article discusses results of a study of proxemic behavior by female Canadian students. It informs that the study was an examination of comfortable, proxemic distances assumed by the interactants, female Canadian students. It further informs that previous studies were consistent with psychologist E. Hall's cultural model only when the interactants were from the same cultural group. When they were from different cultural groups, however, the cultural model was not adequate. The findings were more consistent with a symbolic interactionist interpretation, namely, that a negotiation takes place, and the comfortable distance is adjusted to that of both groups. In this study, cultural group and sex were held constant and introduced the problem of the interviewer's retreat from the original comfortable distance established by the subject. In all cases, the subject re-established a new comfortable distance that was a compromise between the one originally chosen and the distance assumed by the interviewer.

The suggestion that students at present day universities participate in magic at exam time may seem unusual. This study views magic" as behavior directed toward achieving an outcome, involving many everyday and commonplace acts, but seeming to rely for success on some mystical element. Hundreds of personal accounts from students describing their exam-related behaviors provide the basis for a classification system of their "magical practices." The classification yields findings regarding the use of magic for luck and the avoidance of bad luck. Student magic is found to be idiosyncratic, inconsistent. and never malevolent as it often is in preliterate societies. Such differences between preliterate magic, other modem forms, and student magic are related to the complexity and heterogeneity of the larger society, the cultural norms, and the degree of collective action involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]