A Geography of Time

In this engaging and humorous book, eminent social psychologist Robert Levine explores a dimension of our experience that we take for granted – our experience of time. Taking us on an enchanting tour through the ages and around the world, we travel to Brazil, where to be three hours late is perfectly acceptable, and to Japan, were he finds a sense of the long-term that is unheard of in the West, as well as to remote places in the world where long-term that is unheard of in the West, as well as to remote places in the world where ‘nature time’, the rhythms of the sun and the seasons, is the only time to live by. From the sundials of ancient Greece to the origins of ‘clock time’ in the Industrial Revolution, Levine asks, how do we use our time? Are we ruled by the clock? What does this do to our cities, our bodies? Perhaps, he argues, time as a human construct has come to define and constrain cultures, while instead we ought to function ‘multitemporally’, each of us charting our own geography of time.

In this engaging and humorous book, eminent social psychologist Robert Levine explores a dimension of our experience that we take for granted - our experience of time. Taking us on an enchanting tour through the ages and around the world, we travel to Brazil, where to be three hours late is perfectly acceptable, and to Japan, were he finds a sense of the long-term that is unheard of in the West, as well as to remote places in the world where long-term that is unheard of in the West, as well as to remote places in the world where 'nature time', the rhythms of the sun and the seasons, is the only time to live by. From the sundials of ancient Greece to the origins of 'clock time' in the Industrial Revolution, Levine asks, how do we use our time? Are we ruled by the clock? What does this do to our cities, our bodies? Perhaps, he argues, time as a human construct has come to define and constrain cultures, while instead we ought to function 'multitemporally', each of us charting our own geography of time.