Douglas Raybeck contrasts Western ideas of time and the understanding of time among the villagers in Wakaf Bharu. The aborigines also share a different concept of time. Compare and contrast these three cultural settings of time and explain why you think variation occurs.
As mentioned in the previous essays, language and culture influence each other to determine how we think about the world around us. Time is included in this viewpoint. In Western culture, time is viewed as occurring in a straight line, progressing from past to present to future, moving without change. For students in Western cultures, perceiving time as anything but a forward progression can be incredibly difficult, because our language and culture reinforces this idea so strongly. Not only that, but American culture specifically is very concerned with timing as well. Punctuality is a highly coveted attribute. We adhere to rigid schedules that determine when we must go to work, go to class, visit the doctor, etc;. We make appointments for nearly everything. In fact, one could view a class schedule as consisting of several pre-scheduled appointments.
All Kelantanese, according to Raybeck, and the villagers of Wakaf Bharu specifically, have a much looser, present-time oriented understanding of time in which schedules are flexibly scheduled around the Islamic prayer times, which are themselves flexibly scheduled around the work schedule. This seems confusing at first, but really only demonstrates how ultimately unimportant time is in Wakaf Bharu culture when compared to Western culture. Activities that must be done are not hastened, but leisurely completed at the pace of the villager, as he or she is able to accomplish them. As Raybeck learned, scheduling an appointment with a villager could result in the villager appearing anywhere from half an hour early to two hours late, this range appearing to be culturally accepted as punctual.
However complicated the idea of time may seem in Wakaf Bharu, it is even more complicated among the aborigines of Australia, at least at first glance. According to the aborigines, there is no past, present, or future, but rather all of time occurs simultaneously, operating together. Part of this is because of the aboriginal concept of the Dreaming, the time period spanning the beginning of all time to the time right before human memory. The Dreaming encompasses everything in the cosmos, including time. Through the Dreaming, all things work in concert and are completely integrated, and from this we can see clearly where this integrated, simultaneous nature of time originated.
These three very different perspectives of time are very interesting to compare and contrast. Why did these ideas of time evolve the way in which they did? Variation in beliefs and ideas in human beings is often the result of regional, economic, and industrial factors. For instance, peasant villages like Wakaf Bharu have a smaller, more limited economy than many of the first-world Western cultures. They also lack many of the industrial benefits – which we think of as being modern – of those cultures. The aborigines are the same, but their regional history differs from that of Wakaf Bharu in that they existed largely isolated until the 1800s, uninfluenced by other cultures, while the Kelantanese did not have that luxury.
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