Copenhagen
Time and Society in Modern Asia
As the millennium approaches, questions of time are increasingly appearing on the agenda of philosophers and social scientists. The so-called millennium bug may be absorbing the attentions of systems managers, but scholars also have their own preoccupations: just what are the implications of the different conceptions of time that are held in different societies, for the functioning of those societies in particular, and for society in general?By Robert Cribb and Ian Reader
A group of eighteen scholars from ten countries gathered in Copenhagen, 18-20 June 1998, to discuss the place of time in modern Asian societies. They heard a fascinating range of papers, covering East, Southeast, and South Asia, written from within the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, and social psychology. The meeting built on the results of a workshop held in Leiden in November 1997 on the Changing Pace of Life in Southeast Asia, and was in some respects the forerunner to a workshop in Amsterdam in November 1998 entitled 'Time Matters'.The workshop opened with a vigorous discussion of the question of whether different cultures can be said to have fundamentally different conceptions of time. This issue has been debated for at least two centuries, and although we did not appear to move much closer to a resolution of the question, it did become clear through our discussions that the differences which appear at the philosophical end of this debate are not always the differences which appear at the sociological end.
Most of the papers were in fact focused on the sociological end of the debate. We heard discussions of social and political strains over telling the time of day in Indonesia, Taiwan, and Xinjiang, and over habits of punctuality and regularity in daily life in Japan and India. Residents of Xinjiang have to manage both official time - that of Beijing - and unofficial local time. The Japanese in Taiwan systematically introduced 'modern' systems of time-keeping and punctuality as part of a system of colonial discipline. The trains of Bombay, always there but never on time, impose their own temporal order on the city's inhabitants. Japanese share the Western view that rising early in the morning is better for soul and body than additional sleep. Perhaps the boldest of all the papers was one which attempted to compare the pace of life in different Asian countries and the basis of careful timing of different activities such as buying a stamp in a post office. The results were fascinating, but inevitably raise the question of whether useful comparisons can be made when social circumstances (not to mention postage rates) are different in every country.
We also learnt more than most of us suspected about the diversity of calendars still in use in Asia. In parts of India, for example, the use of different calendars seems mainly to have the effect of marking the temporal nature of different kinds of activities, whereas in Sumatra the imposition of an Islamic calendar on the rhythm of agriculture marks the growing dominance of men and of orthodox Islam in one local society.
Several papers also examined longer-term questions of progress, especially the perception that particular localities can be places where time has 'stood still'. Hongkong's 'Walled City', now demolished, was one such place, but the issues apply to entire societies, such as Tibet, which are caught up in a tense race towards different kinds of modernity. For Japan, apparently unique amongst the countries of Asia in this respect, nostalgia has become a powerful way of ordering the relationship between past and present, tradition and modernity. As we know in the West, selecting the anniversaries which should be celebrated is a highly political act and instances of such selectivity and of the utilization (and manipulation) of the notions and processes of memory were likewise illustrated and discussed with regard to Asian societies.
With one exception, none of the participants in the workshop were professionals in the field of time studies - all came to their topics through broader sociological, anthropological, and historical interests. It was to be expected, therefore, that the meeting would produce stimulation in several different directions and suggest further avenues of discussion and possible research. One of the most promising of these lines of investigation, however, is the idea of competing time regimes. Delay, punctuality, order and duration are all elements in the competition for dominance in different sectors of society. Exploring this topic seems to offer many possibilities for understanding time not just as a dimension within which social activity takes place but as an element in the social order.
The workshop was originally selected by the ESF Asia Committee for funding and was sponsored by the IIAS-NIAS Strategic Alliance.
Robert Cribb (Director) and Ian Reader (Senior Research Fellow) are both attached to the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS).