What Is Time Essay Research Paper Book

What Is Time Essay, Research Paper

Book Report

What is time. Well, since it is almost impossible for anyone in any culture to define, the more appropriate question may be how many kinds of time are there. This is the title of first chapter in Edward T. Hall s The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time. According to Hall, experiences and conceptualizations of time are defined and formulated by one s culture, whether it is conscious or unconscious. This book deals with the most personal of all experiences: how people are tied together and yet isolated from each other by invisible threads of rhythm and hidden walls of time (3). As humans, we orient our behaviors around definitions of time much like the way our thoughts and ideas are shaped by the language we speak. Time organizes, categorizes, and measures all of our experiences. Since experiences and behaviors compose 90% of the communication between people (language the other 10%), Hall poses the question of how it is possible to maintain a stable world in the absence of the feedback from the other 90% of communication (4). Hall describes to us his experiences with time in various cultures and shows the differences between the definitions in each of them.

Hall has done fieldwork with Navajo, Hopi, Spanish-American, European, Middle and Far Eastern societies. He has spent 30 years living an active, outdoor, ranch life in parts of Arizona and northern New Mexico, where he currently resides. Through these experiences, he has been able to gain first-hand experience of the role time plays in different cultures. It is important to note that Hall, taking the position that time and culture are virtually inseparable, finds himself on the opposite side of a high fence from many Western social scientists who hold that Western philosophical scientific models are applicable to all cultures (5). He does not see time as constant, but rather it has to do with the way culture develops and how people of a specific culture experience the world. His main goal in this book is to use time as a means of gaining insight into culture, but not the reverse. He has set out to examine the underlying differences in cultures that are found at what he calls the primary level (PL). This PL is what sets cultures apart, though we may think of them as very similar. The conscious, technical level that includes words and symbols, and even a private, screened-off level, known to only a select few, can be put into words, unlike the PL culture, which is entirely nonverbal.

In Hall s first chapter, he describes time to us in the model of a mandala, since it shows the relationship of many ideas to each other in a comprehensive, non-linear, fashion (see fig.1). Here he places biological, personal, physical, metaphysical, sacred, profane, sync, and micro times. Biological time, in the beginning, was all periodic and rhythmic, as are the flow of the tides and the changing of the seasons, and then they became internalized by different organisms that lived on the earth. Biological clocks stay in sync with these environmental rhythms. Much like biorhythm, personal time is time is unique to the individual s experience of time. It is more subjective than biological time. An example of physical time is the sun traveling along the horizon from the farthest northern point to the farthest southern point, measuring the longest and shortest days in the northern hemisphere. Many important ceremonies and times for planting and harvesting were calculated by physical time. Metaphysical time involves aspects of an extraordinary dimension beyond our normal experience of reality. Experiences of this king of time are those of “d ja vu” for which there is no explanation. Sacred time is an imaginary type of time; it is reversible and unchanging. For example, in Native American ceremonies, the participants are in the ceremony’s time and any other time is suspended, or no longer exists. Profane time is prominent in out daily lives. In the western world, minutes, hours, days, etc. mark this explicit time. We are not conscious of the rules of micro time and its uniqueness to each culture. It is one of the basic building blocks of culture, very similar to the patterns of M and P times, which have numerous variations. An example of sync time is that of a newborn infant synchronizing its movements to its parent s voice. Even each culture has its own beat–its own sync. We each experience all these times in our daily lives.

Spending much of his time with Native Americans, Hall was able to explore the differences between theirs and the white man’s world. In 1931, the government began a program of building dams designed to help the Hopi and Navajo tribes by providing them with work. As the project progressed, there arose more and more problems about completing the work properly and on time. What the white men did not realize was the tribes were on a completely different schedule. In addition, they did not even bother to consult the tribes as to which drainage could be counted on for runoff and which couldn’t. Even feuds were inflamed between the tribes when dams were built on one tribe’s sacred land when both were supposed to share it. The white men could not understand why projects were not completed on time and why work did not seem to be completed correctly. In fact, while the white men only lived in “their own” time, they were dealing with many times; these times w