About time

August 3, 2015 9:13 AM

Looking for something I read ~2012 (+/-) on the blue *I think*... Had to do with different cultures' experience/perception of time.

Time moves forward, the future is ahead of you. We might generally perceive time as linear and ourselves as chugging along its horizontal axis.

The piece(s) I'm looking for described other people and cultures whose experience, perception, or descriptors of time vary from the above. For example, the past is ahead of you, of course, for you've already seen the past, therefore you are facing the past with the future at your back. Or, a linear experience of time, but widely perceived (within the culture) as a vertical line.

Now that I think about it, I believe the article also talked about left and right, and how people mirror each other?

Oh, god it was interesting. I've been wanting to reread for quite some time, but I knew I'd be crap at articulating the question.

Any help?

posted by little_dog_laughing to MetaFilter-Related at 9:13 AM (10 comments total)

Well, I don't know if this is what you're thinking of, but there's a book called A Geography of Time, which deals with this topic

That leads me to this metafilter post.
posted by dfriedman at 9:27 AM on August 3, 2015

I wonder if you may be talking about Tuvan folks, and the words Songgaar [go back/the future], and burungaar [go forward/the past]: you may be remembering this recent article (with beautiful images as usual for NatGeo) on vanishing languages... it highlighted Tuvan in among others, including, I think, several languages of the American continent, which could be where that idea is coming from (I wrote this comment and never posted it about a year ago, and just dug it out).

Not sure if it was here.
posted by infinite intimation at 10:03 AM on August 3, 2015

"Tuvans believe the past is ahead of them while the future lies behind. The children who flock to this bungee-cord ride outside the National Museum of Tuva look to the future, but it’s behind them, not yet seen."

I'm really hoping there was a post about this, and that I can read it!
posted by infinite intimation at 10:04 AM on August 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Very interesting, the Aymara have very similar temporo-conceptual phrases.

Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans -- a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies' orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind -- the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.

Appearing in the current issue of the journal Cognitive Science, the study is coauthored, with Berkeley linguistics professor Eve Sweetser, by Rafael Nunez, associate professor of cognitive science and director of the Embodied Cognition Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego.

"Until now, all the studied cultures and languages of the world -- from European and Polynesian to Chinese, Japanese, Bantu and so on -- have not only characterized time with properties of space, but also have all mapped the future as if it were in front of ego and the past in back. The Aymara case is the first documented to depart from the standard model," said Nunez.

I'm not sure why the words I mentioned before aren't addressed in the quote above, but I will be glad to learn more about these ideas and their place in linguistics—the Tuvan words seem to be nearly the same conceptually. I wonder if the supposed 'lack of human diversity in understanding time' lies more in a lack of global inter-cultural understanding and lack of inter-linguistic communications, rather than with "reality not being diverse".

This was here on Mefi at "Backs to the future" very interesting, glad you asked here, I hadn't seen that post. Could that one be it?
posted by infinite intimation at 10:46 AM on August 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Here is a fascinating AskMe about personal conceptions of time.
posted by Rock Steady at 11:46 AM on August 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

Metafilter has had many, relatively decent discussions about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. For example, here's a good comment from Ivan Fyodorovich from around 2012 about this in the context of some really terrible non-linguistics, though I suspect from the question, this isn't the perspective you are looking for:

The piece(s) I'm looking for described other people and cultures whose experience, perception, or descriptors of time vary from the above. For example, the past is ahead of you, of course, for you've already seen the past, therefore you are facing the past with the future at your back. Or, a linear experience of time, but widely perceived (within the culture) as a vertical line.

You might get some insight from reading about the now-debunked work of Benjamin Lee Whorf from the 1940s on the expression of time in Hopi. A lot of this kind of talk about time and culture in popular writing is heavily influenced by these ideas, even though evidence of any sort for a deep causal connection between native language and culture/thought is extremely thin.
posted by advil at 2:16 PM on August 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

Jogging my memory a bit more, it was probably a 2011 post, assuming it was metafilter, and the piece also mentioned some people with an inherent feel for north, south, east, west-- The way direction was communicated. Survey of lots of people, not one particular culture.
posted by little_dog_laughing at 9:24 PM on August 3, 2015

Jogging my memory a bit more, it was probably a 2011 post, assuming it was metafilter, and the piece also mentioned some people with an inherent feel for north, south, east, west-- The way direction was communicated. Survey of lots of people, not one particular culture.

My guess would be this FPP then.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 11:06 AM on August 4, 2015

I remember this too. There's a great book, Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception that I recalled hearing about somewhere on mefi. I bought it on Amazon on Sept 27, 2013. I just checked my favorites and found this thread from Sept 14, 2013, "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." Could that be it?
posted by selfmedicating at 9:15 PM on August 4, 2015

selfmedicating-- 'fraid not. FPP was from before I joined mefi, so 2013 is too late (link in that FPP is broken for me, but the comments are off anyway, plus, yeah, it was earlier).

Not finding it here but thanks for the suggestions everyone!
posted by little_dog_laughing at 8:56 AM on August 9, 2015