Our Perception Of Time Is Learned.
It Is Determined By Our Cultures.
By Rick Doble
Wandjina rock art on the Barnett River, Mount Elizabeth Station.
"The Wandjina are cloud and rain spirits from the Wanjina Wunggurr cultural bloc of Aboriginal Australians, depicted prominently in rock art in northwestern Australia. The stories of the Wandjina and the artwork depicting them remain important to the Mowanjum Community of Aboriginal people."
In this article, I want to make a very simple but critical statement.
The way that we humans perceive, coordinate, schedule, plan, and work with time is determined by our cultures.
There is more than one way to understand time and these other ways can work as well as our modern way of telling time. Some are very different from our modern concept of time.
INTRODUCTION
Most people I have talked with assume that time is an absolute that goes forward in unchanging lockstep progression second by second and that there is not much more that can be said. People say, "Everyone gets the same amount of time -- 24 hours each day."
"Time and tide wait for no man."
Geoffrey Chaucer (born 1343 - died 1400),
Prologue to The Clerk's Tale, Canterbury Tales. 1395.
Prague Astronomical Clock
"The Prague astronomical clock was installed in 1410...and is the oldest functioning Astronomical clock in the world."
This 600 year old clock and ones like it became central to European societies. This mechanism was made with gears and gearing that was derived from Ptolemy's astronomy that he developed around about 1200 years earlier. It shows not only the time but the position of the Sun and Moon and the movement of the Zodiac. So both the Aborigines and modern industrial clocks derived their sense of time from astronomical movements.
Furthermore, Astrology was a major part of astronomy at that time, so the position of the Zodiac and its relation to the heavens was also important.
And in a sense that is true. We cannot alter time, we cannot go back in time, we cannot speed up or slow down time. Time is an absolute we live with.
But while time is an absolute, we have learned to manage time. And our understanding of time management has given us more power than any other animal on the planet.
While we cannot go back in time, we can remember and learn from the past. While we cannot speed up a future event, we can imagine that event. We can understand things like preparation, such as the amount of time it takes to get ready for an event and the various steps involved.
These considerations are true for all developed time systems. We, modern people, use clocks while earlier cultures used a variety of methods which included the moon, the tides, and the planets and also the flowering of plants, the flight of birds, and other natural signs.
While we modern people see our lives as part of a grand linear movement of time from the past to the present and into the future, there are other ways to view time. For example, some cultures see time as cyclical such as the regular cycle of the seasons or the repeating phases of the moon.
My point is simple:
Human perceptions and understanding of time can be radically different. They are generally tied to the needs of a particular environment and culture. So an industrial environment uses clocks that are mechanisms. Australian Aboriginal people use astronomy and other natural signs for fishing and gathering food.
Yet most of us in the modern world assume that linear time is the one and only true time. Moreover, this view and management of clock-time has helped build the comfortable modern hi-tech world we live in.
Yet I will make this crucial point: Our modern way of keeping time is not more advanced or better. But it works extremely well in our hi-tech environment. As I will discuss later in an example, Aboriginal people in Australia often find it almost impossible to use clock-time while their own system of timekeeping has worked well for thousands of years.
A MAJOR CHANGE IN TIME UNDERSTANDING
To step back perhaps twenty thousand years, it is my belief that an immediate sense of time was developed and used in the Upper Paleolithic, i.e., the late Stone Age, until the Neolithic era. And this era, changed everything because time was now thought of in very different terms. This new perception was a major factor in these new sedentary farming cultures. The Neolithic Revolution marked the beginning of modern civilization.
"Meillassoux’s work is fundamental here, for he has suggested that farmers must acquire a different sense of time from hunter-gatherers (Meillassoux 1972)."
"The attraction of Meillassoux’s (1972) work for archaeologists was the way in which it suggested that hunter-gatherers and farmers might have possessed a different sense of time and place from one another."
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These quotes were found in this document:
Bradley, Richard. The significance of monuments: on the shaping of human experience in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe. Routledge, New York, NY 10001 (1998).
Available as a PDF file:
The significance of monuments (Bradley 1998).pdf
So absolute time, of course, had not changed, but the perception of time and working with time had changed. Neolithic people had learned to manage time. I like to say they domesticated time along with the domestication of plants and animals. Time was still an absolute that always went relentlessly forward, but now humans could plant, grow, and harvest plants, for example, with a long-term linear forethought.
In the beginning I believe Neolithic people thought of time both as linear and cyclical such as the recurring cycles of the moon and the repeating seasons. Agriculture required long-term yearly planning but each year was a repeating seasonal cycle.
MODERN TIME MANAGEMENT
Fast forward to today. I have pointed out in an earlier article that much of what we learn in school is to plan and schedule and that it takes a young person at least ten years to be taught this, from first grade through high school.
DeconstructingTime article:
As every parent knows children do not naturally acquire a modern sense of time. They have to be taught and taught over and over until it becomes part of their thinking and way of life. So it is the culture that shapes their understanding of time by constantly reinforcing the modern idea of long-term linear time.
Every day you wake up to get to work on time, your bills must be paid on time, and you plan or refer to plans that govern your work or your leisure. Every store receipt is time-stamped. In fact, your whole life is time-stamped in a sense.
Since we are literally surrounded by modern time in our industrial consumer cultures, we may find it hard to believe that their are other ways of perceiving or working with time.
Modern consumer industrial mechanized time is time that is designed to work with our 'developed' machine cultures. Time is synchronized and we live by the clock.
Most of us relish the time when the clock does not rule our lives when we live 'off the clock'. In this case time can be a bit fuzzy such as a backyard cookout that often begins 'around' 4 PM (plus or minus an hour or so) and ends when people leave. It is at these times that people try to loosen the tight grip of regular time that culture has wrapped around us
Furthermore, modern time often is unnatural. The needs of the industrial mechanized world can take precedence over the 'real' time of the natural world. The industrial world often asserts its need for even slices by overriding the actual time of the natural world.
For example, by dividing the globe into worldwide time zone slices, high noon, (the natural highest position of the sun that used to mark 12 PM) is no longer when the sun is at its peak except for a small area in the middle of that zone. The industrial world has decided that the time must be the same throughout the entire time zone, even though the sun's position changes.
World Time Zone Chart 1942
Due to the regularity demanded by the time zone system there are many towns and cities just a few miles apart that are in two different time zones. Also time zones ignore the natural time for High Noon.
The time zone was created primarily for commercial purposes, such as the scheduling of railroads. Railroad schedules were quite confusing before the time zone system was adopted.
Modern industrial time is often not 'true' time as it can have the effect of detaching us from the natural world. It can remove us from our sense of natural time and the natural uneven flow of time. For example, every day of the year is longer or shorter, yet our work is not tied to the daylight hours, it is tied to our work schedule. The phases of the moon keep changing but few of us are aware of this rhythm
The power and the brilliance of industrial time is that it is standardized. Minutes are all the same as are hours and days of 24 hours. This makes calculations fairly easy such as paying a worker so many dollars per hour. But people have mistakenly thought that this standard way of viewing time is time itself. It is one way to work with time but there are others. Consider music where the beat, which is another way to mark time, is variable and often key to the power of the music.
In our industrial world time is very simple. It is linear, mathematical, and unstoppable in its regular "clockwork" "lock step" movement forward. Its linear nature is made of the past, present, and future in an even straight line that goes like an arrow from the past into the future.
If you don't believe me, look at the last receipt you got from a store. The time stamp will show when it was bought in linear time with the year, month, day, and often the hour and minute and even the second -- all of which is now in the past. Depending on who encoded it, it might look like this: 2025-01-17 10:33:14
In my opinion, you should not think of modern time as being advanced or the only correct way to think about time, but rather as a system that is very useful and well-developed for an industrial society.
CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLES OF VERY DIFFERENT WAYS OF UNDERSTANDING TIME
But to truly make my case, I need to work within the rules of science. In this case, I need to find exceptions to the modern way of thinking about time, complete systems that other cultures have developed in sophisticated ways.
In science when an exception to a generally accepted idea is found, then the accepted idea must be revised or expanded to include the exception.
One of the ways I have uncovered new evidence or new ideas in this blog is to ask myself "What if?" Then I would look for new evidence that supported my ideas.
In this case, "What if" there was/is a very different way of timekeeping that was/is used by millions of people for many years? Would that prove that timekeeping and time management come from the culture and were taught by the culture? Since children learn timekeeping from their parents, teachers and culture, the existence of two very different timekeeping systems means that they must have been learned. This is the same as French-speaking children learning French from their culture and English-speaking children learning English from their culture.
In this case, I am talking about the following two very different timekeeping systems: our modern industrial system of clock-time and the thousands of years old Australian Aboriginal system of Dreamtime.
THE MYTHICAL VS. THE SCIENTIFIC?
Aboriginal cultures generally do not perceive time in a linear fashion like a clock, instead, they view it as cyclical and deeply connected to natural rhythms and seasonal changes, meaning they often use the position of the sun, moon, and stars to gauge time rather than relying on a clock mechanism; this concept is often referred to as "deep time" where the past, present, and future are interwoven and not strictly separated.
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Google AI Overview
Phases of the Moon
Aboriginal cultures use the phases and position of the moon to tell time in addition to other natural events.
Modern science often dismisses older systems, such as the Aboriginal, that mix mythology with scientific observations and conclusions. Here is an example of the Aboriginals correctly identifying the connection between the moon and the tides (and the changing time of the tides), enclosed in a mythological idea.
In Aboriginal culture, particularly among the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land, the concept of a high tide "filling the moon" signifies the belief that the moon physically fills with water during high tides, explaining the connection between the lunar cycle and the rising and falling of ocean levels; essentially, when the tide is high, it's seen as the moon "collecting" water, and as the tide recedes, the moon is considered to be "emptying out."
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Google AI Overview
Today's astronomers would scoff at the idea of the moon filling and emptying with water as it is mythological and not scientific. Also, they might see many other such mythical ideas and stories throughout the Aboriginal belief system as 'primitive' and unscientific.
As I was writing this article I realized that while modern scientists may dismiss such 'primitive' mythical ideas, the modern scientific names for planets are based on Roman gods: such as Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Also until Isaac Newton came along astrology and astronomy were intertwined. Myth and the supernatural were part of astronomy,
So I urge my readers to stand back a bit and look at our modern timekeeping system based on clock mechanisms, math calculations, and atomic clocks as having a good deal in common with Aboriginal Dreamtime, the name for the Aboriginal set of beliefs.
Timekeeping and time management are unique to human beings and human societies. No matter which system is used, it allows people to manage time, which no other animal on the planet can do. So even though industrial time and Aboriginal time seem very different, they have this in common. Both manipulate time. They do not live in the ever-present moment as the rest of the animals on the planet do. Both systems allow a degree of control over time. Both systems allow time to be managed.
X-ray saltwater fish - Google Art Project.
A painting between 1000 and 1500 CE.
From the Metropolitan Museum in New York:
The “X-ray” tradition in Aboriginal art is thought to have developed around 2000 B.C. and continues to the present day. As its name implies, the X-ray style depicts animals or human figures in which the internal organs and bone structures are clearly visible. X-ray art includes sacred images of ancestral supernatural beings as well as secular works depicting fish and animals that were important food sources. In many instances, the paintings show fish and game species from the local area. Through the creation of X-ray art, Aboriginal painters express their ongoing relationships with the natural and supernatural worlds.
NOTE: The following paraphrased information about the Aboriginal culture was found in Australian school documents for 5th and 7th grade. Any direct quotes use quotation marks.
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Teacher background information
Year 7 Science Content Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA)
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Aboriginal Knowledge:
Phases of the Moon and Tides
Researching Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander peoples’ understanding of the night sky and its use for timekeeping purposes.
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Teacher background information
The Australian Curriculum
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SOME MAJOR POINTS
-- we are the only animal on the planet that can devise a timekeeping system
-- both modern time and Aboriginal time are derived from astronomical observations
-- Aboriginal astronomy was based on careful observations for thousands of years as was modern astronomy which goes back to Mesopotamia or earlier
-- each system works well for its environment -- in the case of the modern world a high-tech industrial environment, in the case of the Aborigines a hostile environment
-- For example, Aboriginal observations correctly understood that the planets were connected along with the moon
-- and finally in this brief overview, Aboriginals understood the connection between the moon and the tides, just as Isaac Newton proved -- which was quite an achievement. This understanding allowed them to fish more successfully which helped them survive.
Gabarnmang Cave
Australian rock art is among world's oldest - Gabarnmung, also known as Nawarla Gabarnmang, is a sacred Aboriginal rock art site in Australia's Northern Territory. It's home to some of the oldest known rock art in the world.
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AI Overview
Recent carbon dating has confirmed its age.
"The oldest rock art was produced more than 28,000 years ago, making it the oldest securely dated prehistoric art in Australia."
Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander people have had a detailed understanding of complex mathematical concepts including those relating to daily or short time, medium time and long time.
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Australian Student Handout Content
A CLASH OF CULTURES
Because the two ways of managing and perceiving time are so different, Australian companies have had difficulty teaching Aboriginals how to show up on time. This example highlights how two vary different concepts of time can clash and one is not superior to the other, but each is more useful for its own purposes.
When discussing Aboriginal workers not being on time, it's crucial to understand that their cultural perception of time often differs from the Western linear view, where time is seen as cyclical and flexible, which can sometimes lead to discrepancies with strict work schedules that rely on punctuality.
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Google AI Overview
Aboriginal cultures often view time as cyclical, aligning with natural rhythms and events, rather than a linear progression like in Western societies.
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Google AI Overview
Anthropologists have made the point that a clock is abstract and based on numbers that represent a concept of time while Aboriginal time is based on actual events and natural things. So this is another aspect of the difference between modern industrial time and Aboriginal time.
Time for our consumer society is a commodity. You save time, spend time, have time, and waste time. I suspect that this idea of a commodity or resource would be hard for an Aboriginal to understand.
A Modern Digital Clock
This watch tells the time, but it is really a bunch of numbers that only make sense if the person reading it understands industrial modern time. To an Aboriginal it would make no sense at all.
The Aboriginal concept of time differs from the Judeo-Christian perception of time in that Aboriginal people do not perceive time as an exclusively ‘linear’ category (i.e. past-present-future) and often place events in a ‘circular’ pattern of time according to which an individual is in the centre of ‘time-circles’ and events are placed in time according to their relative importance for the individual and his or her respective community (i.e. the more important events are perceived as being ‘closer in time’).
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Janca, A., & Bullen, C. The Aboriginal concept of time and its mental health implications. Australasian Psychiatry, 11, S40-S44. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1038-5282.2003.02009.x
BTW:
There is nevertheless a similar sense of time when talking about events in our modern hi-tech world. People do remember important events such as the birth of a child or the graduation of a daughter. In these cases, most people can remember the specific time. But if you asked someone what they did, ten days ago on a Tuesday, they would have a hard time recalling that.
Today there are almost a million Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia. These cultures have survived and used their concepts of time for thousands of years. So this, in itself, proves that a different concept of time is useful and practical although quite different from industrial time.
A FUNNY LOCAL STORY
While the Aboriginal way of life may appear to be distant from us, an incident occurred in the rural area where I live that was similar to the Aboriginal problems about showing up to work on time. I live in an area where there has been a long tradition of fishing.
A good smart reliable employee worked at a hardware store for almost a year. Then with no warning he did not show up for about a week and the owner could not contact him.
When he did show up, he found that he had lost his job. "Why weren't you here on time?" the owner wanted to know. "Well, I thought you knew. I mean everyone knew. The fish were running."
CONCLUSION
In this article, I have given three examples of societies who have a different sense of time and work and live with time in very different ways. (Please see the third example about the hunter-gatherer Piraha tribe in the Amazon that thinks of time in immediate terms in the Afterword.)
Modern industrial timekeeping:
is based on mathematics such as the invention of the 24-hour day, the 60-minute hour, and the 60-second minute.
Aboriginal timekeeping :
is based on natural events and rhythms such as the tides and the phases of moon.
The Amazon Piraha tribe's sense of time:
(Please see the Afterword for more about this.)
They adhere to what has been called The
Immediacy Of Experience Principle that is clearly expressed in their language. They think of time in immediate terms and refer to recent specific events that they can verify.
A fourth lifestyle that I have not covered in this article is
The contemporary horticultural way of life, i.e., farming communities that live in a way that is similar to Neolithic farmers.
Based on what we know about the Neolithic era their view would be that the cosmos was cyclical, but from year to year seasonal long-term linear time would be used for planting, harvesting, and storage.
Village of Secotan (in present day North Carolina).
"Algonquian village on the Pamlico River estuary showing Native structures, agriculture, and spiritual life, circa 1590.
Americae pars decima / Theodor de Bry. Oppenheimii: Typis H. Galleri, 1619."
This drawing by de Bry was drawn from real life. It depicts an Indian village with a lifestyle that was similar to the Neolithic, with a settled village and abundant agriculture.
It is clear that each society has a complex understanding of time and that it is one that is shared by all in the society. For timekeeping to be practical it has to be a commonly shared concept so that people can correctly schedule and coordinate. A sense of time is often not just an abstract idea, but a working concept that allows people to survive.
This means that each person's sense of time was taught by their culture and that it had to be a common understanding so that groups of people could share information, coordinate, schedule, and work together.
IF TIMEKEEPING IS LEARNED HOW DOES THIS CHANGE OUR THINKING?
If you accept the idea that timekeeping is learned and determined by a culture, this may change our understanding of how timekeeping evolved in the past. And it will also change how researchers view timekeeping in other different societies. Up to now the assumption has been that all time is linear and similar to the modern industrial concept. Time and timekeeping has not been a major concern. But this should change.
Languages in particular should be looked at in terms of their time concepts. An understanding of the various ways the language can express time, share time, and handle time should be something that linguists need to be open to.
It is my guess that if we look as various contemporary hunter-gatherer societies and modern horticulture farming societies, we may find timekeeping that is quite different from what we expected. It may be something that has been there all along, but we did not see it because we were not looking for it.
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AFTERWORD
HOW TIME MANAGEMENT MAY HAVE EVOLVED
I believe our concepts of time evolved over millions of years. But by the Upper Paleolithic people had a sophisticated system of timekeeping.
To make my argument, let me start with the modern idea that ancient Upper Paleolithic people were no different from us in terms of their physical and intellectual development.
During an Introductory course to Anthropology, a professor of mine made this startling statement. "Ancient humans, Cros-Magnons of about 40,000 years ago were no different from us, i.e., modern humans."
And he went further. They had the intelligence, cognitive skills, and physical makeup that meant they would have been able to do anything that a modern person could do such as fly an airplane or drive a car. So in the 1960s, I was presented with this very modern idea, that human cave dwellers were the same as us even although their way of life and their technology was Stone Age.
Trenton Holliday, professor of anthropology in the School of Liberal Arts, has recently made the same point in his book "Cro-Magnon: The Story of the Last Ice Age People of Europe."
“They’re people like you and me,” Holliday said about the titular prehistoric humans. Cro-Magnons, sometimes called “European early modern humans,” were members of our species, Homo sapiens, who lived in Europe at the end of the last ice age. “They had language, they created art."
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Holliday, Trenton W. PhD. Cro-Magnon: The Story of the Last Ice Age People of Europe. Columbia University Press (July 18, 2023). ISBN-13: 978-0231204972
I make this point because I believe these Upper Paleolithic people had a very different conception of time than we do today, but the difference was due to their cultures and not their intelligence.
Based on what we know about modern hunter-gatherers, these people probably had what could be called an immediate sense of time. For example, they ate food as they found it and never stored it for a later date.
One of the best examples of this kind of thinking is the hunter-gatherer Piraha tribe in the Amazon which thinks of time in immediate terms. For them, time encompasses only a few days in the past and a few days in the future. Dr. Daniel Everett who studies their culture and their language, which very few people understand, called it the Immediacy Of Experience Principle. However, do not think of this as unsophisticated since their language is capable of thousands of expressions that reflect this view of time. So this is a workable complex system that views time very differently from our modern way of thinking.
The hunter-gatherer Piraha tribe in the Amazon
These are members of the hunter-gatherer Piraha tribe in the Amazon today who live by the Immediacy Of Experience Principle according to Dr. Daniel Everett.
This means their concept of time is anchored in the near-present and quite different from the concept of time in the modern world.
"Time reference is a universal property of language..."
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Lecarme, Jacqueline PhD, Linguistics. "Nominal Tense and Tense Theory." Published in the 1999, Empirical issues in formal syntax and semantics.
The individual article online or PDF.
An immediate sense of time does not mean that people are less sophisticated. They just have a different view of time. As Dr. Lecarme stated above, all languages refer to time and as Dr. Carey says next, hunter-gatherers had sophisticated languages -- so we can assume that a way of understanding time was also part of their language.
There is no correlation between social complexity and language complexity. So the answer is, hunter-gatherers in ancient times had a very sophisticated language, just like we do and just like hunter-gatherers who live in recent times. The focal vocabulary is different. In the United States, we have many words dealing with technology, but people who make a living off the land have a very large and nuanced vocabulary dealing with the environment that fits their very detailed knowledge of the environment they lived in. Very few people alive have anywhere near their knowledge of the environment that they possessed, and their language would have reflected that.
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Carey, Andy PhD Cultural Anthropology, University of New Mexico. Comment in Quora.com.
Based on Dr. Carey's thoughts, and the fact that all languages include time references, we can be reasonably sure that the Upper Paleolithic societies had a workable understanding of time that they could share as a group. But this understanding might have been quite different from our understanding of time today. It may have even been very different from the Australian Aboriginal view.
Researchers need to be open to the idea that time can be perceived, worked with and shared in a wide variety of ways.
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