It's a very interesting dissertation (I'm examining it, so it has to remain
anonymous for the time being) about African funerals as a context for the
dynamics of social and cultural change in a post-colonial society (rural
Kenya).
Part of it discusses African views of time (or at least some such views),
and the gist of it seems rather close to Pirsig's account for ancient
Greeks (who themselves claimed that most of their culture -- though they
meant 'high culture' -- came from Africa; a viewpoint not very congenial to
eurocentrism, of course).
Traditional African views of time, in these accounts, have time as
something that is made by actual events. Only events that are happening,
and events that have become sedimented in the historical continuity of the
society, go to make up Time. Facing time is facing from the present
happenings that will become Time toward the long cumulation of past events.
Events which are about to happen with some certainty, and those which are
part of natural cycles, occupy a sort of ante-chamber to real time, being
about to become part of Time, about to be made part of Time. It takes time
to make events part of Time, they become in a sense more real, more
embedded in Time, as they are remembered and celebrated and re-told, and
followed by their consequents.
Some Western writers characterize this as a view in which time flows
backwards, or in which time come up on us from behind, as we face Time,
that is, from the European viewpoint, towards the past. This makes Time
more like our notion of historical reality, and not really like our notion
of The Past (which is very much defined for us as part of a view which is
future-oriented).
It is quite possible that Europeans in modern times have come to adopt a
minority position regarding the human perspective on time, and that the
African and Classical views are more representative of the widest range of
human cultures. It is one of the peculiar limitations of disciplines like
anthropology that basically they do not pose questions about culture from
the perspective of cultures other than the modern european one. If they ask
about time, they are mainly asking how indigenous views of time compare to
ours, and not how they compare to one another. I think a lot of
ethnocentric nonsense has been written, by quite intelligent people, about
the marvellous advantages of such cultural practices as eurocultural
attitudes to time (or technology, or literacy). No doubt there are
connections among the internal features of a culture, but it's rather hard
to delineate them if they only comparative framework available has a fixed,
eurocentric center.
I'd be interested in hearing what's known, or conjectured, about other
cultural views of time ... if we're going to make it central to a model of
social analysis, we may as well benefit from the insights of more than one
cultural perspective on the issues.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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