But the clock is not omnipotent. Yes, it will get a lot of attention around the globe on New Year’s Eve, 1999, but that is the exception. Many cultures still march to different drummers. Time seems to move faster in Frankfurt than in San Salvador. Monks in Burma know it is time to get up when there is enough light to see the veins in their hands, and showing up on time is cause for ridicule in Mexico. In ““A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently’’ (258 pages. Basic Books. $24), Robert Levine describes these intriguing variations in tempo.
His researchers visited cities around the world to measure the accuracy of public clocks and to time how long it takes downtown pedestrians to walk 60 feet and postal clerks to sell a stamp (table). In Switzerland, clocks are slow or fast by an average of just 19 seconds. In Brazil, one man was more than three hours off when he told Levine it was ““exactly 2:14.’’ At the central post office in Jakarta, Levine was sent outside to street vendors. New Yorkers placed sixth in walking speed, but, Levine admits, that doesn’t take into account their propensity for jaywalking.
Much of the world lives on what Levine calls ““event time.’’ In Paris, you might set a business meeting for 3 p.m., but in Burundi, you might agree to meet when the cows return from the watering hole. In Madagascar, if you ask how long it takes to get to the nearest market, you might get an answer like ““the time it takes to cook rice.’’ Instead of timing sporting events with a watch, the Kelantanese of the Malay Peninsula sometimes use a coconut clock - a half shell with a hole in the center, placed in water; time’s up when it sinks. The Kachins of northern Burma have no simple translation for the word time.
If that sounds appealing, don’t be too hasty to move abroad. Clock addiction is tough to break. Learning a new pace of life is like mastering a foreign language. And there are drawbacks to timeless living. You might be able to show up for work at your convenience. But you could spend a day or more waiting to make a telephone call. You feel slighted in the United States if your lunch date never shows; but in Kenya, a perfectly reasonable excuse is that on the way to meet you, he ran into a friend and decided to join him for lunch instead.
Then there is the clock’s cousin, the calendar. Natives of the Andaman jungle in India don’t have much use for the 12-month one. They rely on the smells of trees and flowers to know the time of year. Devotion to the rhythms of our own cultures runs so deep, Levine points out, that revolutionaries have tried to impose their own time scales on societies. For 13 years starting in 1793, France’s months were divided into three 10-day weeks and days were broken down into units of 10 instead of 24. And for 11 years of Joseph Stalin’s reign, Russians lived under five- and, later, six-day weeks.
Levine seems to think that the West is becoming more devoted to the clock with each passing minute. A new atomic clock is so accurate that it won’t be off by more than a second a million years from now. And clock worship appears to be spreading to the developing world, where vendors hawk watches on city streets. But often they are selling prestige rather than punctuality. On some of their watches, the hands don’t move.
