Clocking cultures

What is time? The answer varies from society to society.

A If you show up a bit late for a meeting in Brazil, no one will be too worried. But if you keep someone in New York City waiting for ten or fifteen minutes, you may have some explaining to do. Time is seen as relatively flexible in some cultures but is viewed more rigidly in others. Indeed, the way members of a culture perceive and use time tells us about their society's priorities, and even their own personal view of the world.

B Back in the 1950s, anthropologist Edward T Hall described how the social rules of time are like a 'silent language' for a given culture. These rules might not always be made explicit, he stated, but 'they exist in the air'. He described how variations in the perception of time can lead to misunderstandings between people from separate cultures. 'An ambassador who has been kept waiting by a foreign visitor needs to understand that if his visitor "just mutters an apology", this is not necessarily an insult,' Hall wrote. 'You must know the social rules of the country to know at what point apologies are really due.'

С Social psychologist Robert V Levine says 'One of the beauties of studying time is that it's a wonderful window on culture. You get answers on what cultures value and believe in.' Levine and his colleagues have conducted so-called pace-of-life studies in 31 countries. In A Geography of Time, published in 1997, Levine describes how he ranked the countries by measuring three things: walking speed on urban sidewalks, how quickly postal clerks could fulfill a request for a common stamp, and the accuracy of public clocks. From the data he collected, he concluded that the five fastest-paced countries are Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, Japan and Italy; the five slowest are Syria, El Salvador, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico.

D Kevin Birth, an anthropologist, has examined time perceptions in Trinidad. In that country, Birth observes, 'if you are meeting friends at 6.00 at night, people show up at 6.45 or 7.00 and say, "any time is Trinidad time".' When it comes to business, however, that loose approach works only for the people with power. A boss can show up late and just say 'any time is Trinidad time', but those under him are expected to be on time. Birth adds that the connection between power and waiting time is true for many other cultures as well.

E The complex nature of time makes it hard for anthropologists and social psychologists to investigate. 'You can't simply go into a society, walk up to someone and say, "Tell me about your concept of time",' Birth says. 'People don't really have an answer to that. You have to come up with other ways to find out.'

F Birth attempted to get at how Trinidadians regard time by exploring how closely their society links time and money. He surveyed rural residents and found that farmers - whose days are dictated by natural events, such as sunrise - did not recognize the phrases time is money, budget your time or time management even though they had satellite TV and were familiar with Western popular culture. But tailors in the same areas were aware of such notions. Birth concluded that wage work altered the tailors' views of time. 'The ideas of associating time with money are not found globally,' he says, 'but are attached to your job and the people you work with.'

G In addition to cultural variations in how people deal with time at a practical level, there may be differences in how they visualise it from a more theoretical perspective. The Western idea of time has been compared to that of an arrow in flight towards the future; a one-way view of the future which often includes the expectation that life should get better as time passes. Some cultures see time as closely connected with space: the Australian Aborigines' concept of the 'Dreamtime' combines a myth of how the world began with stories of sacred sites and orientation points that enable the nomadic Aborigines to find their way across the huge Australian landscape. For other cultures, time may be seen as a pattern incorporating the past, present and future, or a wheel in which past, present and future revolve endlessly. But theory and practice do not necessarily go together. There's often considerable variation between how a culture views the mythology of time and how they think about time in their daily lives,' Birth asserts.

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

1. Edward Hall used the example of the ambassador to show that

A. people is power are easily insulted.

B. rules of time are different now from in the past.

C. problems can be caused by different views of time.

D. misunderstandings over time cannot be avoided.

2. In his research, Robert Levine measured the speed at which postal workers

A. delivered letters

B. performed a task

C. learned a new skill

D. answered a question

3. Kevin Birth found out that in Trinidad

A. expectations of punctuality vary according to relationships.

B. time is regarded differently from anywhere else.

C. employees as well as bosses may be late for work.

D. people who are punctual eventually become more powerful.

4. Birth studied Trinidadian attitudes to time by

A. asking questions connected with language.

B. asking people how they felt about time.

C. observing how people behaved in different settings

D. collecting phrases to do with time.

5. Birth finds there is often a difference between

A. what cultures believe about time and what individuals believe.

B. people’s practical and theoretical attitudes to time.

C. what people believe about time and what they say.

D. people’s past and present attitudes to time.

Text 2. Read and translate the text. Look up the idioms given below in a dictionary and see which expressions have comparable equivalents in Russian. Is there a common psychological reason for this?