Finding Time: Studying the Concepts of Time Used in Daily Life

Abstract

Time is a fundamental dimension of human experience, but its study presents special challenges, including the methodological problems of how to get people to talk about time and how to recognize discourse and actions that reveal cultural conceptions of time. In addition to classic ethnographic approaches that related conceptions of time to social organization, the growing concern over time-space compression in the study of globalization adds an additional set of concerns in the social scientific study of time. Through recounting some of the author’s own mistakes and efforts at studying time in Trinidad, this article makes suggestions for how to ethnographically approach the topic of time in order to understand the connections between cognition, cultural conceptions of time, social organization, and the relationship of global influences and local actions.