RESOURCE FILES
Chapter 4
Building Order: Culture and History
Time as a Social Construction
Most of us think of time
as uniform and unchangeable. A minute is a minute no matter who you are or where you live.
Time, though, is a human construction.
Some units of timeólike
days, months, and yearsóparallel natural events, such as the movement of the earth and
moon. Others, however, are clearly arbitrary. Seconds, minutes, and hours do not exist in
nature. The 7-day week has been traced to holy numbers, planets, and astrology.1
Although time is measured
in absolute units, it is not perceived the same way in all situations. Think of how time
flies when you're on an enjoyable date but drags when you're in a boring class. The extra
5 minutes of sleep we desire after the alarm goes off in the morning is infinitely more
valuable to us than 5 minutes stuck in traffic.
In some situations, time
is structurally irrelevant. Las Vegas casinos, for example, have no windows and no clocks,
and they operate 24 hours a day.
It would be a mistake to
assume that all members of a large, complex society like ours share the same conceptions
of time. Different regions have their own time rules. In some areas people are described
as "laid back"; in others they're "fast-paced" or "always in a
hurry."
Conceptions of time are
also tied to occupation. Work life is often synonymous with the amount of time you spend
on the job as well as the time you spend preparing for work, getting there, and getting
back. Workdays are punctuated by time demands or deadlines.
In addition, in most jobs
people are paid by the hour. Time has thus become an economic commodity, something that
can be exchanged for money, wasted, shared, or saved.2
Norms concerning the
definition and use of time vary from culture to culture. For instance, cultures differ in
their orientations toward the future and the past. Phrases like "time heals all
wounds" or "that's ancient history" are meaningful only within a culture
that makes significant distinctions between the past and the future. To some people, such
phrases would make neither linguistic nor cultural sense. In many Arab societies there are
only three sets of time: no time at all, now (which varies in duration), and forever (too
long).3
The Hopi of the American
Southwest have no tenses in their language indicating past, present, or future.4
For them time does not proceed in a linear fashion and is not perceived as a series of
discrete instances. Life is cyclical, and events such as meals or ceremonies are not
unique but are accumulated over time.
The idea of living by a
clock is still foreign to much of the world today. In Burundi, for example, appointments
are regulated not by clocks but by natural cycles:
People who grew up in
rural areas…might make an early appointment by saying, "I'll see you tomorrow
morning when the cows are going out for grazing." If they want to meet in the middle
of the day they set their appointment time for "when the cows are going to drink in
the stream."5
Contrast this sort of
scheduling to the clock time that prevails in the United States. Our watches tell us when
it is time to work and when it is time to play. We even let our clocks dictate biological
events.6 We say things like "It's too early to go to sleep" or
"It's not dinner time yet" to override signals we're receiving from our bodies
that we're tired or hungry. Every parent knows that part of training an infant is getting
him or her to eat and sleep on a "regular schedule," which more often than not
conforms to the parents' sense of time.
Americans are acutely
sensitive to time and timing. Our days often consist of a series of precisely scheduled
episodes. Your classes meet at specific times of the day. Perhaps you live in a dormitory
where meals are served only at certain times. If you work, you have "hours" that
you must keep or risk losing your job.
An American ideal is to be
punctual or "on time." So valued are the rules of punctuality that, if you
violate them, you are required to provide an apology and an explanation. Although
individual differences do exist, like the friend who is "always late," and
situational differences arise, like arriving at a party "fashionably late," most
of us subscribe to the notion that one should be on time if at all possible.
Other cultures place a
very different value on punctuality. Terms like late, early, or on time are not universal.
Psychologist Robert Levine studied time norms in Brazil. He noted that Brazilians have
much more flexible conceptions of time and punctuality than Americans do.7 He
wrote of an experience he had while he was a visiting professor at a university outside
Rio de Janeiro:
My class was scheduled
from 10 until noon. Many students came late, some very late. Several arrived after 10:30.
A few showed up closer to 11. Two came after that. All of the latecomers wore relaxed
smiles. . . . Each one said hello, and although a few apologized briefly, none seemed
terribly concerned about lateness. They assumed that I understood.
Back home in California, I
never need to look at a clock to know when the class hour is ending. The shuffling of
books is accompanied by strained expressions that say plaintively, "I'm starving. . .
. I've got to go to the bathroom. . . . I'm going to suffocate if you keep us one more
second." When noon arrived in my first Brazilian class, only a few students left
immediately. Others slowly drifted out during the next 15 minutes. . . . When several
remaining students kicked off their shoes at 12:30, I went into my own
"starving/bathroom/suffocation" routine. Apparently for many of my students,
staying late was simply of no more importance than arriving late in the first place.8
Such cultural differences
in time are not merely amusing or trivial. They tell us a great deal about the nature and
values of a particular society. Brazilians tend to believe that a person who is
consistently late is probably more successful than one who is consistently on time. Lack
of punctuality is a badge of success.
People tend to build ideas
of national character around the pace of a particular culture's way of life. We Americans
admire the Germans and the Swiss because of their ability to "make the trains run on
time." We may characterize some Arab and South American cultures as "lazy"
or "apathetic" because of their apparent disregard for timeliness. We see the
Japanese as aggressive, partly because their pace of life is quicker than ours and because
they are "ahead of us" in other measurable ways.9
Appreciating such cultural
differences in time sense becomes increasingly important as modern methods of
communication put greater numbers of people in daily contact.
1Zerubavel, E. 1985. The seven day circle: The history and
meaning of the week. New York: Free Press.
2Kearl, M. C., & Gordon, C. 1992. Social psychology.
Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
3Hall, E. T. 1969. The hidden dimension. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday.
4Whorf, B. 1956. Language, thought and reality. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
5Levine, R. 1997. A geography of time. New York: Basic
Books.
6Levine, R. 1997. A geography of time. New York: Basic
Books.
7Levine, R., & Wolff, E. 1988. "Social time: The
heartbeat of culture." In E. Angeloni (Ed.), Annual editions in anthropology 88/89.
Guilford, CT: Dushkin.
8Levine, R. 1997. A geography of time. New York: Basic
Books, pp. 78-79.
9Levine, R., & Wolff, E. 1988. "Social time: The
heartbeat of culture." In E. Angeloni (Ed.), Annual editions in anthropology 88/89.
Guilford, CT: Dushkin.
David Newman and Rebecca Smith.
(Created October 7, 1999). Copyright Pine Forge Press.
http://www.pineforge.com/newman. |