The cultural cognition of time
Some anthropological perspectives
This chapter presents an overview of some recent work in anthropology on how
time cognition works and on the human measurement of time. It attempts to
demonstrate how language, mind, social process and ecology interact to underpin
the ways in which different cultural groups experience, use and understand
time. I review how time is constituted as a domain, examining different kinds of
unit by which time is divided, and thereafter consider the logics through which
the organization of time is integrated. These problems include the juxtaposition
of cyclical and linear notions; the intrinsic complementarity of idioms of
space and time; whether ‘time as such’ is a cognitive domain and conceptual
universal beyond the particularities of local culture experience; whether the
architectures of dualism and cognitive economy are integral to our understanding
of time; the extent to which memory and narrativity are crucial to human
constructions of time; and whether certain aspects of time organization depend
entirely on its encoding in language. The chapter concludes by agreeing with
Stephen Levinson that the contribution of anthropology to understanding the
language cognition of complex domains such as time is through its emphasis
on grounded ethnography, an insistence on holistic approaches, on comparison
and on the implications of integrating data from the extremes of cultural
diversity.
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