culture and time

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Wed, 30 Dec 1998 16:56:56 -0500

As Peter S. notes, there is always cultural diversity, esp. if we refer
loosely to large areas like Africa or Native America, not to mention
hybridity, esp. in postcolonial times between european cultures and others.

My recollection about 'african time' was of a previous posting that
specified the details (Maragoli, Kenya) and the basis for generalizations
(a large literature by African as well as other scholars on common features
in views of time and music across a larger number of traditional
sub-Saharan African cultures). The disseration I relied on, by M. Gillian,
gives quite an extensive review of the literature, including critiques of
Western over-generalizations about African music and views of time.

It does seem important to me that we try to place our modern Western views
of time in cross-cultural perspective, precisely because they seem so
naturalized to us, and so infallibly grounded in the success of our
technology and its scientific views about time. All that we take for
granted about the notion of time dissolves into arbitrariness and mystery
under serious critique, even in physics. Not only does our dominant culture
(by gender, class, and age at least) not 'take time' for much that is
valued by all of us, but it is theoretically anti-time, uncomfortable with
instability and dynamics that surprise, and deeply wedded to synoptic views
in which truths are timeless and time is only a routine for numbering
successive moments of stasis.

If ever culture was a prison, we are the prisoners of narrow and arrogant
notions about time. JAY.

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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>
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