The experience of time

Our experience of time is conditioned by the constant use of the calendar and the clock, both of which count time in fixed, universally recognised units. Traditional societies, in the sense conveyed in this book, do not necessarily use any calendar, and in most cases know nothing of mechanical timepieces. This denies them the conceptual framework within which we conceive of time. What time does require is the sense of ‘the intrinsic character of an event’ Whitehead (1932: 160). This, being more than just an instantaneous moment, allows time to be conceived of as a succession of intervals, each lasting long enough to comprise the event which defines it. So long as events are chosen so that the intervals do not overlap, this provides the basis for the notion of time as a ‘discontinuity of repeated contrasts’, which Leach (1966: 134) sees as ‘probably the most elementary and primitive of all ways of regarding time’. Here the notion of earlier and later must be taken as a primitive, irreducible concept, – a sort of axiom of time (Whitrow 1961: 288.)

The succession of events is not necessarily continuous: indeed experience of events is essentially discontinuous, as exemplified by the succession of days, with night separating each day from the next. The continuity of time is an abstraction, no more than an indirect deduction from experience.