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diff --git a/reading notes/rn the geography of time .txt b/reading notes/rn the geography of time .txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..3368a27 --- /dev/null +++ b/reading notes/rn the geography of time .txt @@ -0,0 +1,52 @@ +tags: refx, #readingnotes +book: The Geography of Time +author: Robert Levin +date: 2014-07-25 22:15 +--- + + +It has been observed that the Chinese character for “crisis” is composed of the character for “danger” plus that for “opportunity.” And the word “crisis” in our own language derives from the Greek word for “decision.” In a similar vein, the fruits of individualism and hard work provide the potential for both psychological wealth and disaster.11 Ultimately, how we structure our time is a choice between alternatives. A rapid pace of life is neither inherently better nor worse than a slow one. + +p159 + +-- + +The well- prepared visitor should seek out homework assignments that utilize on-site practice. Innovative teachers have been known to devise rather elaborate practice conditions. Anthropologist Greg Trifonovich of the East-West Center, for example, used to prepare Peace Corps volunteers and teachers for conditions in rural Pacific societies by creating a simulated village. One of the behaviors that Trifonovich taught was how to live without clock time. He showed students, for example, how to tell time by observing the sun and the tides.18 Whatever your technique, realize that mastering the language of time will require rehearsal, and mistakes. +
But be assured that it is well worth the effort. Cross-cultural training produces a wide range of positive skills. Research has shown, for example, that people who are well prepared for transcultural encounters have better working relationships with people from mixed cultural backgrounds; are better at setting and working toward realistic goals in other cultures; are better at understanding and solving the problems they may confront; and are more successful at their jobs in other cultures. They also report more pleasurable relationships with their hosts, both during work and free time; are more at ease in intercultural settings; and are more likely to enjoy their overseas assignments. The most astute of cross-cultural students also seem to develop a more general interest and concern about life and events in different countries—what has been called a general “world-mindedness.”19 + +Trifonovich, G. (1977). On cross-cultural orientation techniques. In R. Brislin (ed.), Culture Learning: Concepts, Applications and Research, 213–22. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii.
19. Brislin, R., and Yoshida, T. (1994). Intercultural Communication Training: An Introduction. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage. + +p202 + +-- + +Almost by definition, cultural behaviors signify something very different to insiders than they do to the visitor. When we attribute a Brazilian’s tardiness to irresponsibility, or a Moroccan’s shifting of attention to their lack of focus, we are being both careless and ethnocentrically narrow-minded. These misinterpretations are examples of what social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error—that, when explaining the behaviors of others, there is a pervasive tendency for people to underestimate the influence of the situation and to overestimate others’ internal personality dispositions. For example, when I hear strangers lose their temper, I infer that they must be angry people. When I lose my own temper, I blame it on the situation—perhaps the other person was being annoying or the situation was frustrating. After all, I know that I rarely lose my temper, so there must be something unique to this situation that set me off.
An important ingredient in the fundamental attribution error is how much information you have about the person you are judging. The less familiar you are with others, the more likely you are to resort to explanations that reside inside the other person. When we enter foreign environments—which are, by definition, alien—the fundamental attribution error is an accident waiting to happen.
The careful observer would be wise to attend to the advice of Clifford Geertz: “cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses.” Without fully understanding a cultural context, we are likely to misinterpret its people’s motives. The result, inevitably, is conflict. + +p203 + +-- + +Vicente Lopez, when describing his former Chicano commuter culture, argues that his fellow time travelers have done more than master the two cultures’ times; they have developed their very own time sense, one unique to their own subculture—what Lopez calls an “estuary” culture. In nature, an estuary is the wide mouth of a river into which the tides flow, an area where the fresh water of the river and the salt water of the sea mix together. “In an estuary,” Lopez observes, “nature creates a set of organisms which are not from one side or the other, but completely different. In the same way, people who live on the Tijuana border have this kind of estuarian time. It’s not a Mexican time. It’s not an American time. It’s a different time. The Chicanos are not Americans and are not Mexicans. They live by their own set of rules and have their own unique values and time and pace of life.” +
And how could it be otherwise? As Oswald Spengler once wrote, “It is by the meaning that it intuitively attaches to time that one culture is differentiated from another.”21 When a new culture is born, so too is a singular time sense. + +p206 + +-- + +It is they who have developed the idea of psychological androgyny. Psychologically androgynous people combine both traditional masculine traits (such as assertiveness) and feminine traits (such as nurturance) in their personality repertoire. The androgynous person is not a psychological neuter who falls midway between extreme masculinity and femininity, but one who has both strong masculine and feminine attributes at his or her disposal.
A number of studies have demonstrated the value of psychological androgyny. Whereas masculine types do better in traditional “male” situations and feminine types excel in “female” situations, experiments have shown that androgynous people—both men and women—are more likely to succeed at both masculine and feminine tasks. It has been demonstrated, for example, that masculine and androgynous personalities are better than feminine types at resisting group pressure to conform, but that feminine and androgynous people do better on tasks such as counseling a fellow student with problems.20 Androgynous and feminine spouses—both husbands and wives—also tend to have happier marriages.21 The androgynous person, in other words, has access to the best of both worlds. +
The pace of life moves in an analogous pattern. “The question is not just what floor of the building you’re living on,” as the transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber puts it, “but how many floors you have access to as you negotiate your way through life.”22 Many situations are best met by a temporal approach requiring a rapid pace of life: speed, attention to the clock, a future orientation, the ability to value time as money. Other domains in life— rest, leisure, the incubation of ideas, social relationships—are more adequately met with a relaxed attitude toward time. The per- son, or the culture, who combines both modes in a temporal repertoire—or even better, who can draw upon a multiplicity of modes—is more likely to be up to all occasions. Jeremy Rifkin speaks of the dangers of temporal ghettos. People who are con- fined to rigid and narrow temporal bands are unprepared to determine their own futures and political fates.23 Multitemporality is the ticket out of these temporal ghettos. To have the ability to move quickly when the occasion demands it, to let go when the pressure stops, and to understand the many temporal shades of grey may be the real answer to the question of “Which pace of life is best?” + +As Lewis Mumford wrote:
Though our first reaction to the external pressure of time necessarily takes the form of the slow-down, the eventual effects of liberation will be to find the right tempo and measure for every human activity; in short, to keep time in life as we do in music, not by obeying the mechanical beat of the metronome—a device only for beginners—but by finding the appropriate tempos from passage to passage, modulating the pace according to human need and purpose.24 +
Like the psychological androgyne, the truly multitemporal person and culture does not simply fall in the average range, but has the ability to move as rapidly or slowly as is needed. Not surprisingly, another significant result of the University of Michigan study was that personal flexibility (versus rigidity) was an effective buffer against stress and job dissatisfaction no matter what one’s occupation. The European who works hard enough to achieve, but who can decelerate to enjoy la dolce vita, the fruit of his or her labors, possesses an element of this multitemporality. The Japanese worker who excels at both speed and slowness also understands the skill. This is hardly to say that all European and Japanese workers have mastered multitemporality. If anything, in fact, the data highlight the price that many in these countries are paying for their rapid pace of life; it is no coincidence that coronary heart disease rates in Western Europe are some of the highest in the world and that suicide is a serious problem in Japan. But the traditional values in these cultures offer potential templates—recipes of a sort—that illuminate paths by which the mindful individual may take control of his or her time.
Joyce Carol Oates wrote, “Time is the element in which we exist . . . We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.” How to be productive enough to be comfortable, to minimize the temporal stress on which this achievement is built, and to simultaneously make time for caring relationships and a civilized society—this is the multitemporal challenge. + +p218-220 + +-- + +While planning what was to turn into my twelve- month trip around the world, it seemed as if every seasoned and/or frustrated traveler I met offered words of advice. These ranged from lists of places that I absolutely had to visit or avoid, to graphic descriptions of what would happen to my body if I even thought about drinking the water. But the single most prophetic wisdom came from an unlikely source. While sitting in the chair of a rather unworldly dentist, my mouth stuffed with the usual un- pleasant objects, he offered the longest nondental communication that ever passed between us: “I went to another country once. You learn a lot about yourself.” + +He was right on the money. After a year of vagabonding across some twenty countries on three continents, visiting every marvel in touring distance from the Great Wall of China to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, having collected multinational data on what would turn out to be the focus of my professional research ever since, what I mostly carried home with me was a new point of view. +
My most lasting insights, those that continue to make a difference in how I live my life, always seem to hover about the theme of time. When people live on the road for extended periods, there seems to be a point when they shift into the consciousness of a transient. Most travelers I have questioned about this transition re- port that the critical cutoff seems to occur sometime around three months. After that, the days of the week and even the months of the year—especially for those who have the good sense to follow the warm weather—meld into one another. Expectations and plans for the future become stunted, or nonentities. +
There is something about the frequent, swift, and often dra-matic changes that are the fabric of long-term traveling—deciding in the middle of breakfast to pack up and head for another country before check-out time; ending a seemingly intimate affair be- cause one partner is inspired to head east while the other selects west—that usually leaves no alternative other than to live from day to day. The force is so strong that it feels more somatic than a volitional choice. I know that personally, by the end of each extended excursion, it felt as if I was physically incapable of fixing my thoughts on either the future or the past. This is not to presume that I had transcended time to some idyllic Zen present-connectedness; more often than not I was, as we say in psychology, simply out to lunch. It was temporal limbo. Having spent most of my life until then as a future-oriented person—a future often defined by the expectations of others—I found it almost comical to observe how my mind was unable to focus on what was coming tomorrow, even when it might be an event that I had been anticipating for months, such as my first visit to the Great Pyramids. But it was definitely the beat of my own clock. As the philosopher Johann Herder once wrote, “everything transient has the measure of its time within itself.”
So when I arrived home to resume my role as a university professor it was with the sensibility of a vagabond. My intellect was temporally unavailable, and I was disoriented from many of the usual ingredients of culture shock. Many long-term travelers will tell you that the shock of returning home is often more jarring than that of leaving. I believe this is because we return with the dangerous illusion that, having arrived home, it is at last permissible to let up, to cease the hard work of coping with constant change. (It is for good reason that the word “travel” is related to the French “travail,” meaning hard work and penance.) But social psychologists will tell you that it is at those very moments when people hold an “illusion of invulnerability” that they are really the most susceptible targets. + +p220-221
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