Time in Cultures, History and Present

This chapter thematizes the general cultural shape of perception and construction of temporal categories. Our approach is not a comprising and in-depth discussion, but a series of hints to the complex phenomenon of cultural determinants of understanding time. The concept of a culture needs to be made precise here. “Culture” is derived from the action of cultivating something. Which means to perform a set of activities, but also to perform them in the framework of a conceptual architecture, culture is practice and theory, also coined as “praxis” in contemporary anthropology. This being, a culture is not a static entity, it is dynamic in space and time, it evolves in complex spatio-temporal coordinates. In our approach, we focus on the origins of cultures, not on their evolution in a global context, which would be a much more complex topic.