Perhaps an Other Time
An Interdisciplinary (Re)Consideration of Historical Anthropology in View of the Cognitive Science of Time, Cultural Models Theory, and the Stems and Branches Chinese Calendrical System
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.22649Keywords:
Cognitive anthropology, behavioral anthropology, religion and cognition, calendars, time, temporality, cognitive alterabilityAbstract
In this article it is argued that conceptions of time have important cognitive and behavioural effects on historical agents, and that in ancient China at least one such conception tied fundamentally with the traditional Chinese calendar, the Stems and Branches system, is significantly different than the worldwide dominant modern conception of time in ways that deserve wider acknowledgement and exploration. The article relies on cognitive science literature, Takayama’s method of uncovering ancient cognition, and Bradd Shore’s Cultural Models Theory, to make its case. By examining the underlying qualitative and calculative structures of the calendar(s) in use by the humans we study, we can begin to see just how potentially different these views of time were and are in ways so fundamental to being in the world as to warrant new (re)considerations of historical actors cognizing about in and about their respective conceptual frameworks of time and the behaviours they engage in as a consequence.
References
Achelis, Elisabeth. 1955. Of Time and the Calendar. 1st ed. New York: Hermitage House.
Ambasciano, Leonardo. 2017. “What Is Cognitive Historiography, Anyway? Method, Theory, and a Cross-Disciplinary Decalogue.” Journal of Cognitive Historiography 4 (2): 136–50. https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.38759
Eidinow, Esther, and Luther H. Martin. 2014. “Editors’ Introduction: Journal of Cognitive Historiography.” Journal of Cognitive Historiography 1 (1): 5–9. https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.v1i1.5
Bain, Lisa J., Clare Stroud, and Institute of Medicine. 2015. Forum on Neuroscience Nervous System Disorders, Sponsoring Body. Enabling Discovery, Development, and Translation of Treatments for Cognitive Dysfunction in Depression: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
Baird, Benjamin, Michael D. Mrazek, Dawa T. Phillips, and Jonathan W. Schooler. 2014. “Domain-Specific Enhancement of Metacognitive Ability Following Meditation Training.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143 (5). https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036882
Bear, Laura. 2014. “Doubt, conflict, mediation: the anthropology of modern time.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20 (S1): 3–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12091
Block, Richard, and A. Zakay. 1997. “Prospective and Retrospective Duration Judgments: A Meta-analytic Review.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 4 (2): 184–97. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209393
Craig, A D Bud. 2009. “Emotional Moments across Time: A Possible Neural Basis for Time Perception in the Anterior Insula.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 364(1525): 1933–42. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0008
Cytowic, Richard E. 1993. The Man Who Tasted Shapes: A Bizarre Medical Mystery Offers Revolutionary Insights into Emotions, Reasoning & Consciousness. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.
Duara, Prasenjit. 1995. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226167237.001.0001
Everett, Caleb. 2013. “Independent Cross-cultural Data Reveal Linguistic Effects on Basic Numerical Cognition.” Language and Cognition 5 (1): 99–104. https://doi.org/10.1515/langcog-2013-0005
Fabian, Johannes, and Matti Bunzl. 2014. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/fabi16926
Feuchtwang, Stephan. 2001. Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor. New Ed. ed. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon.
Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2nd Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books.
Gard, Tim, Britta K. Holzel, and Sara W. Lazar. 2014. “The Potential Effects of Meditation on Age-related Cognitive Decline: A Systematic Review.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1307 (1): 89–103. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12348
Gell, Alfred. 1992. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images. Explorations in Anthropology. Oxford; Providence: Berg.
Heidegger, Martin, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. 2008. Being and Time. New York: Harper Perennial/Modern Thought.
Heilman, Kenneth M., and Stephen E. Nadeau, eds. 2019. Cognitive Changes and the Aging Brain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108554350
Hoskins, Janet., and NetLibrary, Inc. 1993. The Play of Time Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History, and Exchange. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Hunter, Scott J, David Gozal, Dale L Smith, Mona F Philby, Jaeson Kaylegian, and Leila Kheirandish-Gozal. 2016. “Effect of Sleep-disordered Breathing Severity on Cognitive Performance Measures in a Large Community Cohort of Young School-aged Children.” American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 194 (6): 739–47. https://doi.org/10.1164/rccm.201510-2099OC
Kastanakis, Minas, and Benjamin Voyer. 2012. “Cultural Effects on Perception and Cognition: Integrating Recent Findings and Reviewing Implications For Consumer Research.” Advances in Consumer Research 40: 966.
Kjaerulff, Jens. 2019. “Situating Time: New Technologies at Work, a Perspective from Alfred Gell’s Oeuvre.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, give vol/issue/page refs. https://doi.org/10.1086/707928
Klein, Esther Sunkyung. 2019. Reading Sima Qian from Han to Song: The Father of History in Pre-modern China. Studies in the History of Chinese Texts; v. 10. Leiden; Boston: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004376878
Martzloff, Jean-Claude. 2006. A History of Chinese Mathematics. New York: Springer.
Matthews, William. 2017. “Ontology with Chinese Characteristics: Homology as a Mode of Identification.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 265–85. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.020
Ota, Miho, Junko Matsuo, Ikki Ishida, Kotaro Hattori, Toshiya Teraishi, Hidekazu Tonouchi, Kinya Ashida, Takeshi Takahashi and Hiroshi Kunugi. 2016. “Effect of a Ketogenic Meal on Cognitive Function in Elderly Adults: Potential for Cognitive Enhancement.” Psychopharmacology 233 (21/22): 3797–3802. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-016-4414-7
Puett, Michael. 2004. “Forming Spirits for the Way: The Cosmology of the Xiang’er Comentary to the Laozi.” Journal of Chinese Religions 32 (1): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1179/073776904804760020
Radd-Vagenas, Sue, Shantel L Duffy, Sharon L Naismith, Bruce J Brew, Victoria M Flood, and Maria A Fiatarone Singh. 2018. “Effect of the Mediterranean Diet on Cognition and Brain Morphology and Function: A Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials.” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 107 (3): 389–404. https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqx070
Raphals, Lisa Ann. 2013. Divination and Prediction in Early China and Ancient Greece. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511863233
Richards, Edward Graham. 1999. Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History. Hardback ed. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Severn, Andrew, ed. 2018. “Cognitive Changes after Surgery in Clinical Practice.” In Clinical Practice (Springer (Firm). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75723-0
Shore, Bradd. 2012. “Egocentric and Allocentric Perspective in Cultural Models” in Ron Sun Grounding Social Sciences in Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Silva, Jéssica Bruna Santana, Eva Dias Cristino, Natalia Leandro De Almeida, Paloma Cavalcante Bezerra De Medeiros, Natanael Antonio Dos Santos, and Kevin Paterson. 2017. “Effects of Acute Alcohol Ingestion on Eye Movements and Cognition: A Double-blind, Placebo-controlled Study.” PLoS ONE 12 (10): E0186061. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0186061
Spadaro, Kathleen C, and Diane F Hunker. 2016. “Exploring The Effects Of An Online Asynchronous Mindfulness Meditation Intervention with Nursing Students On Stress, Mood, And Cognition: A Descriptive Study.” Nurse Education Today 39: 163–69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2016.02.006
Takayama, Zenko. 2018. “How Does Knowledge Bring One to the State of Immortality in Early Upanisadic Philosophy? A New Perspective on the ‘Magical’ Way of Cognition.” Religion 48 (4): 594–615. https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2018.1466002
Teiser, Stephen F. 1988. The Ghost Festival in Medieval China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tobin, and Grondin. 2012. “Time Perception Is Enhanced by Task Duration Knowledge: Evidence from Experienced Swimmers.” Memory & Cognition 40 (8): 1339–351. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-012-0231-3
Tsur, Reuven. 2017. Poetic Conventions as Cognitive Fossils. Cognition and Poetics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Van Wassenhove, Virginie, Marc Wittmann, A. Craig, and Martin Paulus. 2011. “Psychological and Neural Mechanisms of Subjective Time Dilation.” Frontiers in Neuroscience 5: 56. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2011.00056
Watson, Burton. 1963. Ssu-ma Ch'ien, Grand Historian of China. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wittmann, Marc, and Philippa Hurd. 2018. Altered States of Consciousness: Experiences out of Time and Self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11468.001.0001
“Woman Still Hopeful Congress Will Adopt Her Calendar Reform.” 1966. The New York Times.
Yang, Mayfair Mei-Hui. 2011. “Postcoloniality and Religiosity in Modern China: The Disenchantments of Sovereignty.” Theory, Culture & Society 28 (2): 3–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276410396915
Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. 2020. Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478009245
Zakay, Dan. 2015. “The Temporal-relevance Temporal-uncertainty Model of Prospective Duration Judgment.” Consciousness and Cognition 38: 182–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2015.10.006
Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1982. “The Standardization of Time: A Sociohistorical Perspective.” American Journal of Sociology 88 (1): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1086/227631
