Time In a Bottle

Early in my career in international affairs I made an appointment to meet a government official in a West African country.  I had no problem arranging the meeting over the telephone, and a few minutes before the agreed time I arrived, presented my business card and was shown where to sit.  After waiting thirty minutes, I left.  Looking back on that incident still makes me feel uneasy.

How could I have been so rude?

The answer is both simple and complex. 

The simple part is that I was young, impatient and inexperienced.  The more complex interpretation of my behavior can be summed up by the aphorism “what’s bred in the bone will out”. Like most North Americans, I’m hard wired to react the way I did. (I’m sure there are gender issues lurking in there somewhere as well.)  My sense of time and the manner in which I interact with it forms part of my cultural heritage.  Time sense is an integral part of everyone’s cultural heritage.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall put it very well in his excellent book  The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time  (Anchor Books, 1984) when he wrote that  people are both tied together and isolated by “…invisible threads of rhythm and hidden walls of time”

For the people of Africa and many parts of Asia, along with most of the rest of the developing world, time is like a river.  It flows continuously and one’s family, friends and colleagues are all part of the stream. Life is about going with the flow and taking things as they come.  There is always time for family and friends who may be in need—regardless of whether seeing to them impinges on work schedules or other commitments.  People who experience time in this way are called polychromic.

For North Americans, and Northern Europeans, time is like a firefly caught in a bottle—it attracts and holds our attention.  It can be studied, chopped up, reassembled and reorganized.  It is a tradable good: we can earn it, save it consume it and waste it. Our friends, family and colleagues are all subject to the vagaries of our penchant for managing this scarce commodity. People who experience time in this way are called monochronic.

Being polychromic or monochromic about time represents only one facet of a complex part of ourselves and our societies. In most cultures there are dozens of other factors shaping the way in which people relate to time.

In some countries, non-payment of wages—particularly to public servants—remains an all too common reason for the late arrival or non-appearance of officials. They’re not in their offices because they may be working at their other job—the one that allows them to pay the bills and put food on the table. The African and Asian commitment to the family, usually to an extended family—one of among many family and social obligations that in North America have evolved away from a collectivist approach toward a more individual concept— is another mediating factor that, if misunderstood by a visitor, can lead to frustration and a negative assessment about how non western cultures manage time.

It is more than just a little ironic that in preparing this blog post I am to a large extent limited by the language and concepts of my essentially monochronic self.  In talking about how Africans and Asians manage their time I am putting a North American time obsessed frame around their reality.  On the other hand, it’s often said that gaining an awareness of a problem can in some cases represent the first step in understanding it. And although it’s always advisable to approach the resolution of cross cultural differences carefully and with tact, in the case of time sense, recognizing or identifying the differences between you and your hosts can be a very big step in the right direction.

Among the most common strategies for recognizing that one’s sense of time may not be like that of a colleague or friend is to ask whether the appointment just made should be interpreted using , for example, ‘African Time’,’ American Time,’ ‘Canadian Time’ or ‘Indian Time.’ It’s an approach that when used with people with whom one is comfortable, instantly communicates a mutual awareness of the fact that the people involved view time differently and should, therefore, build-in accommodations.