We report an ethnographic and field-experiment-based study of time intervals in Amondawa, a Tupi language and culture of Amazonia. We analyse two Amondawa time interval systems based on natural environmental events (seasons and days), as well as the Amondawa system for categorising lifespan time (“age”). Amondawa time intervals are exclusively event-based, as opposed to time-based (i.e. they are based on event-duration, rather than measured abstract time units). Amondawa has no lexicalised abstract concept of time and no practices of time reckoning, as conventionally understood in the anthropological literature. Our findings indicate that not only are time interval systems and categories linguistically and culturally specific, but that they do not depend upon a universal “concept of time”. We conclude that the abstract conceptual domain of time is not a human cognitive universal, but a cultural historical construction, semiotically mediated by symbolic and cultural-cognitive artefacts for time reckoning.
2014. The Role of Cultural Artifacts in the Interpretation of Metaphorical Expressions About Time. Metaphor and Symbol 29:2 ► pp. 94 ff.
Sinha, Chris
2014. Living in the Model: The Cognitive Ecology of Time—A Comparative Study. In Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology [Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, 8], ► pp. 55 ff.
Sinha, Chris
2015. Language and other artifacts: socio-cultural dynamics of niche construction. Frontiers in Psychology 6
Sinha, Chris
2021. Artifacts, Symbols, and the Socio-cultural Dynamics of Niche Construction. In Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, ► pp. 217 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.