The many faces of social time: A sociological approach

Abstract

Do all clocks and calendars refer to the same time? EE Evans-Pritchard reported that the Nuer culture divided time into ‘ecological’ and structural temporal categories. Alheit made a distinction between everyday, routinized, cyclical time and life-experience time. Time is capable of devouring everything; it can reach beyond what has already been; it can sunder itself from the past, without turning back. Social time has many facets: it may be very short, short, long or very long. Immobility within life space, as time passes, is tantamount to continuous change in space and time. Finally, a categorization of time might be founded on four modalities: micro-time, meso-time, macro-time, mega-time.