READING

Exercise 1. Read and listen to Part6 of the series about culture using the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/webcast/tae_whoonearth_archive.shtml

Although we may not be aware of it, time and space are closely related concepts for all of us. The way we package the notion of time is important. In order to describe it and manage it we divide it up into manageable periods - so there are days and years, seasons and weeks and so on - but we also divide it up into periods of time that are cultural so we can have periods between festivals or the periods of festivals such as Ramadan or Easter or Hanukkah. We also divide it into individual time so we have the periods between birthdays or when our first children or our second children are born. Time also has depth – that is history – so that countries like America or Australia are modern or young in terms of history whereas cultures such as China and Arab cultures have histories that last for thousands of years. So time has meaning to us as individuals but it also has meaning to us as cultures.

The first person to identify time and space as important elements in the study of culture was the North American anthropologist, Edward T. Hall. In looking at cultural attitudes to time, Hall made an important distinction between cultures where people like to do “one thing at a time” - ‘monochronic’ cultures - and ‘polychronic’ cultures, where people have no problem doing several things at once. Monochronism tends to go with cultures where people value individuality, personal space and personal time. Time is linear and time is moving forwards and time is money. So for both North Americans and British people and other people from monochronic cultures, time is equated with doing something, being active, but usually doing one thing at a time. And one of the by-products of this is that we think that doing nothing is wasting time.

Polychronic cultures have an attitude to time that's different to this. They don't structure their time in the same way - they're much more able to be doing several things at once. So in cultures which tend to be more polychronic such as Arab, Turk, Spanish, Indian cultures people can be talking to more than one person at a time, they can be interacting with more than one person at a time, they can be living with several people at a time as well. To people from monochronic cultures this can seem a very chaotic way of living. The way we think about time is a reflection of our ideas about order and organization.

Exactly the same sort of considerations and differences can be seen in the way cultures like to organize space. Take public spaces, for example. In Arab cultures a public space is a place where people can come together, often in very large numbers, to talk, do business, socialize. These are often very busy, active places, with lots of things going on at once. This is not really the same in, say, modern British or American towns, which are often built around a long thin main street where people can’t gather in groups in quite the same way. The differences in the design and use of these public spaces are cultural differences. And we can see these differences even more clearly in the way we design and use the spaces in our houses. Even the organization of our cities and our villages and our housing can be a reflection of our cultural requirements for space. British culture, for example, separates rooms into different functions so that you have the kitchen for cooking in the dining room for eating in the bedroom for sleeping in and we're very protective of our individual spaces so we love to have our own bedrooms and we have our own chairs and we have our own secret drawers. This is very different in other cultures. The Japanese, on the other hand, don't have much physical space - they have very small apartments and houses. But what they do with the space is very clever. The spaces are multifunctional. So during the day they will have a sitting room where at night they will remove all the furniture and it becomes a bedroom. Arabs don't have much space in public but they love to have big spaces inside their houses. They idealize large empty rooms with not much furniture because they don't like to be alone - they like to be with each other inside these big spaces.

Personal space is such an issue for Westerners because they highly value their privacy and their right to privacy. In the Middle East that is just not a value that people hold. Interestingly in Arabic they use the same word for lonely and alone therefore meaning that if you've chosen to be in a solitary state there is a problem with this, you must be unhappy.

Broadly speaking, monochronic cultures - where people like to do one thing at a time - also seem to be those that value privacy and individual space, whereas cultures that are happy to do several things at once - polychronic cultures - seem to favour spaces where people can come together in groups.

Exercise 2. In pairs take turns to answer the questions.

1. What manageable periods is time divided into?

2. What important distinction between cultures did the North American anthropologist make?

3. What do people from monochronic cultures value?

4. What attitude to time do polychronic cultures have?

5. What differences can be seen in the way cultures like to organise space?

6. Why is personal space so important for Westerners? What about people from the Middle East?

Exercise 3. Retell the text.

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