Text and temporality: Patterned-cyclical and ordinary-linear forms of time-consciousness, inferred from a corpus of Australian Aboriginal and Euro-Australian life-historical interviews

Journal/Book: Symb Interact. 1999; 22: 100 Prospect St, PO Box 811, Stamford, CT 06901, USA. Jai Press Inc. 121-137.

Abstract: It is argued that autobiographical texts, such as life-historical interviews, provide the richest possible source of information about a person's temporality and a culture's historical past. It is proposed that lime-consciousness can be inferred from such texts. To this end, ethnographic and other studies of Australian Aboriginal time-consciousness were used to construct a seven-part model of patterned-cyclical time-consciousness. Turning these seven attributes of patterned-cyclical time-consciousness into their opposites yields seven features of one-dimensional, ordinary-linear time-consciousness, thereby establishing a structured temporal polarity. A lexical-level, content-analytic methodology, Neurocognitive Hierarchical Categorization Analysis (NHCA) is introduced, in which folk-concepts of time from Roget's international Thesaurus were used to construct wordlist indicators for 9 of the 14 definitional components. Then, using NHCA for a comparative analysis of texts consisting of life-historical interviews, earlier results of an empirical study were briefly re-presented. Australian Aborigines, compared to Euro-Australian controls, used a significantly smaller proportion of words for an index of ordinary-linear time bur a higher proportion of words for an index of patterned-cyclical lime, indicating a time-consciousness that is primarily patterned-cyclical rather than linear. Females were less linear and more patterned-cyclical than males in both cultures. These cross-cultural results contribute predictive validity to the proposed polarity of time-consciousness. Implications for the culture-and-cognition paradox and its resolution in dual-brain theory are addressed.

Note: Article TenHouten WD, Univ Calif Los Angeles, Dept Sociol, POB 951551, Los Angeles,CA 90095 USA

Keyword(s): RIGHT HEMISPHERICITY; CHILDREN; CULTURE

Zurück | Weiter