Representations by John Bennet;

Author:John Bennet;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789256420
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

‘Representations of time’ in Linear B documents from Knossos and Pylos

Angeliki Karagianni

‘Time’ and ‘social time’

‘Time’ is a perplexing concept that has tantalised people from an early date. It belongs to a class of general concepts, such as space, cause, action, that are regarded as ‘an inescapable dimension of all aspects of social experience and practice’ (Munn 1992: 93). But in contrast to those, time cannot be experienced by itself through the human senses as for example space can. People understand time, and particularly its passing, through the changing events that they observe in the external world around them. However, these are not time. ‘Time is a relationship between events, and without events there could be no concept of time’ (Denbigh 1981: 11).

‘Time’, moreover, is not a unitary or homogeneous concept. Rather, it consists of a complex net of varied conceptions whose forms depend on the different perspectives of individual and societal life, and on the different contexts where their use is articulated and manipulated. At its heart, lies the fundamental philosophical question of whether time is ultimately a construction of the human mind (as it seems that only humans can perceive its ‘existence’) or is something ‘out there’, originating in the external world and independent from human observers (cf. Gale 1968; Zwart 1976; Whitrow 1988). In the fields of anthropology, sociology and archaeology it is widely accepted that social organisation is what ultimately lies behind our conceptions and regulations of time (Adam 1990; Gosden 1994; Gell 1996; Thomas 1996).

Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1965 [1915]), was the first to introduce the notion of ‘social time’, which was adopted and further refined by others in the following decades (cf. Sorokin and Merton 1937; Evans-Pritchard 1940; Bloch 1977). The concept of ‘social time’ broadly embodies the notion that ‘time’ is a representation, and more particularly a ‘collective representation’, created in and by human society, regulated through the periodic recurrences of social activities (such as feasts and public ceremonies) and articulated through calendrical systems (Durkheim 1965 [1915]: 21–30; Gell 1996: 4). The ways societies divide, regulate, spend and manipulate time are largely associated with their environment (natural and social), with the choices and/or established directions and goals that individuals and society as a whole have set for themselves. However, people cannot manipulate and coordinate measures of time at will. They must adapt their ‘rhythms’ of life to the natural cycles and periodicities of the earth and the celestial bodies; namely into phenomena that are universal and independent from social agents (Gosden 1994; Gell 1996; Rosen 2004). It could, therefore, be argued that the observation of time’s passage derives from external to humans and from more ‘objective’ physical stimulants, such as the alternation of day and night, biological age, processes of natural decay, and the like. Whereas its conception is a complex net of varied subjective forms and ideas, and still more its regulation is profoundly influenced by the different needs and the specific contexts in which it is utilised within individual and societal life and practice.

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