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Objects of Time

Expert versus Lay Calendars — Thoughts from “Objects of Time”

ObjectsOfTime_cover
Kevin Birth. Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality. Palgrave Macmillan.New York, NY: 2012. While reading Chapter 3, I took time to reflect upon the uncanniness of time in my life in Lancaster County, PA. A lot of fun and the subject for a future post. Thank-you to Kevin for this stimulating book!

A written calendar, then, is not so much as a cognitive tool to assist the reckoning of time, but a cognitive and cultural tool that can either promote social coordination or intersubjective senses of uncanniness, or even both, as in the case of the Jewish calendar. Calendars as artifacts are tools of power and social coordination. There also is an important contrast between complex calendars that require trained experts to interpret them versus simple calendars that almost anyone can use. The former are associated with astrologers. In Hinduism, the ability to chart the multiple cycles in the sky is important and involves trained specialists. In contrast, the Gregorian calendar requires very little specialized knowledge to use. . . . The manner in which the Gregorian calendar mediates the different logics of Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism is to represent holidays in those faiths as moving — a cognitively useful, even if not entirely fair or accurate, representation. Objects of time think for their users, but the manner in which the Gregorian calendar thinks for non-Christians is not always useful to those non-Christians. What is useful in one respect is not functional in another. — pp. 96 – 98.

How do you interact with the Gregorian calendar? [Read more…] about Expert versus Lay Calendars — Thoughts from “Objects of Time”

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How would you describe your “time consciousness?”

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“Objects of Time.” Kevin Birth. Palgrave Macmillan.New York, NY: 2012.

While reading Kevin Birth‘s Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality, I wondered if weekends provide an opportunity to tell time differently.

There is a danger in viewing the clock as necessary for certain cognitive tasks simply because we use it for those tasks. The importance of clock time in twenty-first-century economic practices cannot be used as grounds for assuming that it was necessary for economic practices in the medieval period. This misconception is key to the view of medieval timekeeping as irregular or even nonexistent. As Rothwell points out, the use of clock time to represent the canonical hours of the Middle Ages distorts how time was reckoned, and “is at the root of many misunderstandings about the measurement of time in the Middle Ages” (1959, 241). [Read more…] about How would you describe your “time consciousness?”

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“What, then, is time?”

ObjectsOfTime_cover
“Objects of Time.” Kevin Birth. Palgrave Macmillan.New York, NY: 2012.

As some of you know, I’ve been enjoying ESN blogger/mentor Kevin Birth‘s provocative Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY: 2012).

Augustine of Hippo wrote, “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know” (1997 [ca. 397-98], 256). The question stumps us for quite different reasons. We surround ourselves with cognitive artifacts to tell us what time is, and the time these artifacts represent is demonstrably confused in accuracy. We have hyper-accurate atomic clocks and a calendar that poorly represents the duration of the earth’s orbit. The nature of time’s existence is confused by cognitive artifacts and by the human invention of the time constructs these artifacts indicate. . . . [Read more…] about “What, then, is time?”

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