Content provided by British Council
[1] It flies. It heals all wounds. It can be of the essence, and it can be money. We’re warned not to waste it, since we cannot turn it back – even as we try to make up for it when it’s lost. The methods different peoples and communities have used to track their lives have been shaped by culture, religion, economics, technology and the governing principles both within nations and among them.
[2] “Every measurement of time is arbitrary,” said Elizabeth Cohen, a political science professor at Boston University in the United States who has written about how we chronicle time and how it impacts the way people relate to each other. Take calendars. We use them to give structure to our lives, but the spectrum of what that has looked like has been vast throughout human existence.
[3] Some followed the sun, others the moon and others still a combination of both. Even today, when the main calendar in use globally is the Gregorian calendar, with its 12 months and leap years, other calendars are still consulted for religious or cultural purposes in places ranging from Israel to Thailand.
[4] It’s not just about the how. When we think about how culture evolved around time, there’s also the why. For most of human history, there were ties to the rhythms of the natural world: the phases of the moon, the rising and setting of the sun, the ebb and flow of the tides. And in agricultural societies, the importance of when to plant and when to harvest.
[5] Industrialisation – in the form of the Industrial Revolution that started in 18th century England and spread – pushed people to shift notions of time. No longer was it about the sun’s cycle or the turn of the seasons. Industrial production meant schedules – people paying attention to the clock because they were due for specific shifts. “It was one of the goals of industrialisation to instil in people this regular, unvarying sense of time,” said Michael O’Malley, professor of history at George Mason University in the US.
[6] Time zones themselves “are about politics,” said Kevin Birth, a professor of anthropology at Queens College, also in the US. He pointed out that they are not divided in a standard format. Countries decide their own, and in the US, individual states can decide whether to observe Daylight Saving Time.
[7] A prime example is China, which stretches more than 5,000 kilometres across Asia. It has one official time zone for the country, instituted when the Communist Party took power in 1949, as a form of national unity. The entire country runs officially on Beijing time. However, the reality on the ground is that when the sun rises in eastern China hours before it does in western China, people adjust to their local times for daily life, Birth said.
[8] Time can also be a tool used in a society to manage dissent and protest, Cohen added. She pointed to examples like governments instituting curfews or protesters engaging in slowdowns or strikes. “Time has a lot of power, and people are battling over it to try and impose themselves on others or remove the yoke that has been imposed on them,” she said.
Source: Associated Press, August 14
