1. I'm surprised to see "Africa" represented as a unified continent and as
having continent-wide cultural traits, given that it includes Egypt, South
Africa, and much in between. As I type I'm listening to Senegalese musician
Baaba Maal (Firin' in Fouta--great stuff), which like other Senegal music
(e.g., Toure Kunde, Thione Seck) is French-influenced and quite different
from zulu music from South Africa (e.g., the Johnny Clegg bands Zuluka and
Savuka)--someone more familiar with the great diversity in African music
and culture could, I'm sure, provide many more examples. I'm hardly an
expert on this, but always worry about any efforts to essentialize large
and diverse peoples, including "Modern Western" society.
2. Another contribution to the time discussion: I've recently been working
on a case study of a Native American teacher's struggle to work within a
highly structured elementary school, and found the following to be very
useful:
People comment on "Indian time" or "the land of manana," which means there
is a tomorrow because there is a different time consciousness. . . . In the
relief and pleasure of really being taken seriously as a human being, it is
also easy to forget that at the very moment one is being helped to feel at
ease, the healer may simultaneously be putting off someone else for whom
she will then be "late." That kind of time consciousness includes time to
be compassionate and human. Taking time and tuning in. . . .
There are benefits to the highly structured time frame: predictability
(which makes people feel safe, too); an order and harmony of its own; it
can fit and function well in an eight-to-five world. But it does not
create "knowing" and comfort. The more fluid time consciousness has its
own benefits: making real human contact, creating ease, creating comfort
through knowing an "other," and faith. This kind of time does not fit as
readily into an eight-to-five structured world. (pp. 227-8)
Krueger, V. (1989). Reflections: Victoria Krueger. In B. Perrone, H. H.
Stockel, & V. Krueger, Medicine women, curanderas, and women doctors (pp.
225-229). Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
The idea of a "fluid time consciousness" is not culturally specific to
Native Americans, of course, and NA's are a large and diverse group that
include different degrees of assimilation to other value systems. But I've
found the construct useful in understanding how schools are typically set
up according to production-line systems that do not accommodate other ways
of viewing time, and therefore can discourage process- and
relationship-oriented teachers from entering or staying in the profession.
Peter
At 10:15 PM 12/29/98 -0500, you wrote:
>That Benjamin story of the retrograde angel sounds familiar --- didn't
>someone quote it a while back when we were briefly talking about _African_
>cultural views of past, present, future ... I think I had quoted from a
>dissertation on contemporary African music and ritual I was reading, to the
>effect that one faces toward the cumulating past which gives meaning to a
>present moment only as it, too, joins that past ... what meaning can the
>future have except what the past gives it through us? The African model
>seems to be built also on quite a different time scale than our modern
>Western one: seasons and generations, the cohorts of those initiated in the
>same year, back ... or shouldn't I say FORWARD through the ancestors to the
>present generation, whose status and obligations derive/descend from theirs.
>
>On my current hobbyhorse of multiple timescales, perhaps we should give
>some thought to the possibility that we take different orientations to
>past/present/future depending on the timescale in focus ... the proleptic
>orientation of european parents toward their children's futures has a very
>definite ladder of timescales, with very interesting assumptions about how
>the next few moments might make a difference decades hence. Not many
>people, or institutions, think this way about futures centuries hence, or
>millennia. On the long timescales, don't we also mainly face backwards? and
>can we relate this to our 'horizon of control'? that we look to the future
>only insofar as we are concerned about controlling it, or think we can or
>must control it (influence it, contribute to it) ... whereas when our
>concern is with meaning, with the hermeneutics of experience, we face
>backwards on timescales short (as in Mike's example), and very, very long...
>
>Which can take us to issues of identity .... the retrospective narration of
>our past to make ourselves the protagonists, actants with qualities that
>matter to us and others ... as we do with history, just as much as with
>autobiography, projecting an identity by identification: we Americans, we
>Europeans, we inheritors of Greece and Rome, ... but we do not LIVE
>narratively; and indeed for purposes other than simple story identity,
>perhaps we are weavers of hypertexts rather than tellers of tales ... and
>facing to our Future, yes, we fashion possible stories, but these too we
>tell ourselves as if looking backwards from a future time after the
>present's future has become past again ... our real future orientation, and
>the futurist component of identity must be something different, if anything
>at all.
>
>So, to stir the pot -- do we not have different identities, even
>narrative-actant identities, on different timescales? and is not the notion
>of identity meant to encompass more than just narrative identity? what
>notions of identity would be suggested by the paradigm of the hypertext
>weaver rather than the tale-teller? and what basis is there for notions of
>identity that derive from our efforts to control the we-to-be? Foucault
>mentions some ideas about the technologies of the Self, and they are not
>all retrospective ...
>
>Is there any OTHER basis for the construction of identity THAN values ??
>
>jay.
>
>---------------------------
>JAY L. LEMKE
>PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
>CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
>JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
><http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
>---------------------------
>
>