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Different Concepts of Time

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Clarissa

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People are laughing but this actually explains a lot. If you sit under a tree, waiting for time to happen, you’ll unavoidably end up needing the people who don’t waste time and make the future happen to come in to feed you and bring you medications.

I had a worker from Kenya last year who’d show up two hours late to a job assignment and explain that her culture understands time differently. Strangely, she still expected us, with our “strange” understanding of time, to pay her for not spending hers doing the assigned work.

14 responses to “Different Concepts of Time”

  1. ShadowsCollide Avatar
    ShadowsCollide

    Good Lord, I must be a weird “Hispanic” because I’m early for everything, I joke that I run on German time. But seriously, being early or on time in our society is important unless there’s a serious emergency, being late is a sign of disrespect. This is just an excuse to be lazy and show disrespect to our cultural norms

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      When I was at a working seminar in Germany, the Germans laughed because they were used to arrive before everybody else but with me, I was always already there.

      Germans do know how to organize, bless their souls.

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  2. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    I’ve always understood people being habitually late as either: A) terminal disorganization, or B) an obnoxious assertion of power. Either way, forcing people to wait for you is not ok.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I also noticed that if I make an exception for somebody, as a favor and out of kindness, they often decide this means they are special and start demanding exceptional treatment in everything.

      I allowed one person to teach online. It’s against regulations. We aren’t allowed to do it. I take a lot of flak over the years for this. I still do it because this person has a family situation. But now they expect special treatment in everything. We should have department meetings online because they can’t come in person. That’s against department regulations, I explain. Plus, the other 24 colleagues don’t want that. We all want to come in person. Yeah, but it’s inconvenient. The textbook is inconvenient. The lab hours are inconvenient. But why do I have to, and so on and on.

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  3. Avi Avatar
    Avi

    And is this person with a family situation for whom you made an exception of African extraction? Asking for a friend, you know.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      No, this one is European, actually. Being a very special cookie is popular everywhere.

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  4. PaulS Avatar
    PaulS

    That’s pretty common for workers in SA. The government expects all workers to earn union wages and then wonders why we have the world’s highest unemployment rate.

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  5. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    I’ve read some spicy travel diaries of people who’ve volunteered in africa and this is pretty close to what they’ve described. Planning for the future is an alien concept because it’s not your problem, it’s the problem of future-you who is a completely separate person from current-you. Nothing explains the (lack of) development of africa better.

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  6. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    This is an excellent documentary.

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  7. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    https://shantanoo-desai.github.io/posts/books/the_shadow_of_the_sun_kapuscinski_ryszard/

    From The Shadow Of The Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski:

    Comprehension of Time

    We climb into the bus and sit down. At this point there is a risk of culture clash, of collisions and conflict. It will undoubtedly occur if the passenger is a foreigner who doesn’t know Africa. Someone like that wil start looking around, squirming, inquiring “When will the bus leave?”

    “What do you mean, when?” The astonished driver will reply. “It will leave when we find enough people to fill it up.”

    The Europeans and the Africans have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics. 

    Africans apprehend time differently.

    …

    Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even non-existence, if we do not direct our energy towards it. It is a subservient, passive essence, and, most importantly, one dependent on man.

    In practical terms, this means that if you go to a village where a meeting is scheduled for the afternoon but find no one at the appointed spot, asking “When will the meeting take place?” makes no sense. You know the answer: “It will take place when people come”.

    Therefore the African who boards a bus sits down in a vacant seat, and immediately falls into a state in which he spends a great portion of his life: a benumbed waiting.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This is very uncanny because I was reading this book by Ryszard Kapuscinski in French. Decided to take a break, checked the comments, and saw this one.

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      1. Stringer Bell Avatar
        Stringer Bell

        Wow. Freaky!

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  8. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “waiting for time to happen”

    I think people are misunderstanding the original video. It sounds like classic descriptive anthropology, describing the assumptions that explain behaviors that seem, on the surface, to be irrational and show that, in context, they make sense.

    Many, accustomed to ‘being punctual is white supremacy’ scolds assume that she’s propagating this is as something everybody should do (and AFAICT she’s not). Her affect is cheerful and outgoing, the opposite of the woke Miss Grundies.

    And, it obviously worked for the Bantu who expanded from a small place in modern Cameroon to most of Sub-Saharan Africa (many times larger than Europe).

    It’s an informative, interesting video and I noticed similarities between that and an old Germanic model of time.

    The problem is that, as well as it might work there, it doesn’t work when it has to compete or even co-exist with other approaches.

    Diversity, multiculturalism, globalism…. are all about eradicating differences between groups (except for a few quirky excentricities that make for new lunch options or fun local branding (as long as they’re not taken too seriously).

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I agree that the woman in the video shouldn’t be blamed. Nor should the Africans. They are very much entitled to their own understanding of time.

      The problem is, when Africans die of AIDS or do Rwandan genocides, who’s responsible for treating them, feeding them, protecting them? It’s an unanswerable question. What do we owe them and what do they owe us? If we are obligated to feed them and provide medication, what are they obligated to provide in return? Isn’t it, at the very least, stuffing it with their understanding of time and how cute it all is?

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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