Got a call from the dentist’s secretary. Monday morning, February 5, at 8:45. Six-month cleaning and checkup. I’ll go, of course, after brushing and flossing 400 times over the weekend and not eating Oreo cookies just before I enter the office.
What if I were a member of the Tiv of central Nigeria in the 1940s and 1950s? What would the secretary have said? According to a report in The Southwestern Journal of Anthropology by Paul Bohannan, she would not have referenced a month, date, day of week, or time of day. Instead, “When it is necessary to place an incident in time, as it often is, Tiv do so by referring it to a natural or a social activity or condition, using solar, lunar, seasonal, agricultural, meteorological, or other events. Tiv ritual is not associated with a calendar, and for this reason ritual events are not usable as time indicators as they are in many societies.”*
So, I guess in Tiv society a dentist’s secretary might have said my appointment would be shortly after the sun rises on the day after the Super Bowl and three days after Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow. That seems awkward to you, doesn’t it? Of course, we do have something a little similar, but no one really uses it. That’s the date for the moveable feast we call Easter. It falls on the first day named after the sun after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. See. You don’t use that.
And that’s because you have a rather abstract way of thinking about time that you learned. In a society run by a cesium atomic clock tied to the digital clock on your smart phone, numbers and time are bound together. You correlate events and numbers. In contrast, the Tiv in the study correlated events and occasions.
Probably the closest westerners come to the Tiv notion of time is embedded in the future perfect tense: Before the train arrives, I shall have bought my ticket. Isn’t it interesting that in using language, even in using it to express a fundamental dimension of our universe, we really don’t think about how our use relates to phenomena.
Bohannan says that “Tiv are much less specific about time during the night.” For example, “The time between dusk and about 10 o’clock is called ‘sitting together’.” Do we have some similar way of thinking? In a way.
“I’ll meet you at the Irish Festival.” “I’ll see you at the party.” But even those might have a quantitative element. We have the general “showing up late to make an entrance” that we joke about, but showing up late implies that we know when, numerically, we should show up to be early or on time. And meeting someone during a three-day art festival in South Florida is chancy. Would we meet when the sun is higher in the sky? Just about to set?
Why should we even bother to think about how we measure our personal and social lives? In western culture we exert a strong pressure on ourselves that might derive from there being so many of us in so many disparate societies with merged backgrounds. Do you know the details of your neighbor’s profession? Live in a suburb? Watch all the workers depart for points only generally known to do jobs only generally understood? Do you think at seven A.M., “It’s the Leaving” and at six P.M. “It’s the Returning”? Those numbers on the clock and calendar connect us. I’d like to say more, but, sorry, appointment. I have to meet the hygienist at the reclining beneath the dental pick.
*Bohannan, Paul. The Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 9 (3), 1953, 251-62.
What if I were a member of the Tiv of central Nigeria in the 1940s and 1950s? What would the secretary have said? According to a report in The Southwestern Journal of Anthropology by Paul Bohannan, she would not have referenced a month, date, day of week, or time of day. Instead, “When it is necessary to place an incident in time, as it often is, Tiv do so by referring it to a natural or a social activity or condition, using solar, lunar, seasonal, agricultural, meteorological, or other events. Tiv ritual is not associated with a calendar, and for this reason ritual events are not usable as time indicators as they are in many societies.”*
So, I guess in Tiv society a dentist’s secretary might have said my appointment would be shortly after the sun rises on the day after the Super Bowl and three days after Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow. That seems awkward to you, doesn’t it? Of course, we do have something a little similar, but no one really uses it. That’s the date for the moveable feast we call Easter. It falls on the first day named after the sun after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. See. You don’t use that.
And that’s because you have a rather abstract way of thinking about time that you learned. In a society run by a cesium atomic clock tied to the digital clock on your smart phone, numbers and time are bound together. You correlate events and numbers. In contrast, the Tiv in the study correlated events and occasions.
Probably the closest westerners come to the Tiv notion of time is embedded in the future perfect tense: Before the train arrives, I shall have bought my ticket. Isn’t it interesting that in using language, even in using it to express a fundamental dimension of our universe, we really don’t think about how our use relates to phenomena.
Bohannan says that “Tiv are much less specific about time during the night.” For example, “The time between dusk and about 10 o’clock is called ‘sitting together’.” Do we have some similar way of thinking? In a way.
“I’ll meet you at the Irish Festival.” “I’ll see you at the party.” But even those might have a quantitative element. We have the general “showing up late to make an entrance” that we joke about, but showing up late implies that we know when, numerically, we should show up to be early or on time. And meeting someone during a three-day art festival in South Florida is chancy. Would we meet when the sun is higher in the sky? Just about to set?
Why should we even bother to think about how we measure our personal and social lives? In western culture we exert a strong pressure on ourselves that might derive from there being so many of us in so many disparate societies with merged backgrounds. Do you know the details of your neighbor’s profession? Live in a suburb? Watch all the workers depart for points only generally known to do jobs only generally understood? Do you think at seven A.M., “It’s the Leaving” and at six P.M. “It’s the Returning”? Those numbers on the clock and calendar connect us. I’d like to say more, but, sorry, appointment. I have to meet the hygienist at the reclining beneath the dental pick.
*Bohannan, Paul. The Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 9 (3), 1953, 251-62.
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