Space and Time
Studies of time tend to lose sight of the fact that rhythms and routines have spatial qualities and characteristics. In their contribution Güliz Ger and Olga Kravets describes the teabag’s arrival in Turkey and the havoc it wrought in relation to established distinctions between slow and fast consumption. The teabag speeded up what had been a reliably time-consuming ritual, creating new and different associations between tea and time. It disrupted the daily gatherings, events and spatial movements of people which had been based on the samovar and the continual availability of tea in a particular spot. Other spatial temporalities crop up across this volume, for example in the circulation of seed catalogues across the USA; in efforts to synchronize social and spatial coordinates in rush hours and commuting; and in discussions of where as well as when practices are enacted. In this collection, Ted Schatzki addresses the integration of timespace head on, demonstrating how these dimensions of social life constitute each other. In his words, ‘timespaces form a kind of infrastructure through which human activities coordinate and aggregate’ – an infrastructure that is itself made by the activities in question.
Implications
A greater focus on multiple rhythms and on the processes of producing time is a promising way to start unravelling the complexity of social difference in space and time. This is particularly relevant for those pondering how to promote lifestyle change and more sustainable behaviour, but it concerns all agencies seeking to change the temporal order of everyday life, from education and transportation to working and shopping routines. Most discussions of time poverty and stress have been future-orientated: are we becoming a rat-race society? Is our behaviour making life unsustainable? While raising sensitive, thorny questions that deserve debate, these lines of inquiry are of limited value in helping us think about the future, since they have – as we have shown – a restricted and typically unsatisfactory understanding of the evolving rhythms underlying social practices, past and present.
Introduction
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