Kindle Notes & Highlights
except, perhaps, the buzz of a fly or the whirring of a ceiling fan; every traveller has witnessed forms of patience with which those in speedy societies have grown impatient.
university students who show up for classes whenever they feel like it in Brazil, trains which arrive a day late in India and, in one instance of extreme slowdown, waiting three days for a long-distance phone connection in Nepal.
The Balinese use a lunar –solar calendar, but also a ‘permutational’ one, which consists of ten different cycles, varying in length, of day names
They don’t tell you what time it is; they tell you what kind of time it is.’5 There are good and bad days, apparently, ‘on which to build a house, launch a business enterprise … sharpen cock spurs … hold a puppet show’, etc. In addition, each temple – of which there are also many – has its own day of celebration, or ‘odalan’ – not a
birthday, but a day of ‘emergence’ or ‘appearance’ on which the gods come down from the heavens to inhabit it. This is cultural difference at its most radical.
peasant culture characterised by an almost idyllic harmony with natural rhythms, a philosophical acceptance of time’s passage, and an ability to yield to the flow of experience:
This is comparable to Nepal, no hurry chicken curry!
an attitude of submission and of nonchalant indifference to the passage of time which no one dreams of mastering, using up, or saving … All the acts of life are free from the limitations of the timetable, even sleep, even work, which ignores all obsession with productivity and yields. Haste is seen as a lack of decorum, combined with diabolical ambition … A whole art of passing time, or better, of taking one’s time, has been developed here.’7
But as the essay progresses, Bourdieu goes on to connect this seemingly bucolic state of affairs with the Kabyle peasants’ static social circumstances, and their entire lack of control over them.
the forces which really matter in the shaping of time – as in all else – are economic and power relations. For the Kabyle peasants, the sense of futurity, the ability to plan ahead and exploit time productively, arises from a change in their economic circumstances which introduces the possibility of improvement, and which therefore makes it worthwhile for them to make a concerted, and perhaps not entirely natural, effort.
It is perhaps possible to say that in advanced, complex and constantly changing societies, economic structures and development have to some extent replaced the older categories of culture and custom as the forces shaping behaviour, and individual subjectivity. This is breeding its own complexes of adjustments and reactions. In Bourdieu’s account, the shift from fatalism to futurism is seen as entirely positive.
Modernity has its compelling attractions as well as its high costs. It can be invigorating, as well as economically desirable, to step into more efficiently organised forms of time. Yet cultural constructions are deeply embedded in the psyche, and there is perhaps nothing deeper than the constructions of time. Being prised out of one’s most
inward assumptions and ego-ideals can be disruptive in the extreme (witness, for example, evidence of increased risk of psychiatric disorders among Afro-Caribbean immigrants in Britain, or Surinamese and Dutch Antillean immigrants to the Netherlands). The dialectic between various cultural temporalities can produce fertile tensions; but in its sharp and abrupt versions, it can also lead to more violent reactions, and collisions.
Fast time has its allure, and its liberating possibilities. The Greeks acknowledged a sort of ontological heterechrony by naming two kinds and concepts of time: Chronos, the time of continuity and mutability, and Kairos, the temporality of the auspicious moment, of opportunity or crisis – the kind of heightened and irretrievable instant that we need to grab by the horns, or the head.
