Abstract

Book Reviews Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures. By Anthony F. Aveni. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Pp. ix + 371; illustrations, notes, index. $24.95. Empires of Time is less about technology and technique than about culture. It deals with what we might call cosmic time, the time of the gods and the links between human societies and the heavens. It says much more about calendars than about clocks, much more about longer periods than about the hours and minutes of everyday life. Anthony Aveni is professor of astronomy and anthropology in Colgate University, but his heart and the heart of this book lie on the side of anthropology. We learn, to begin with, about natural bio­ rhythms, of animals and plants as well as people: about fruit flies that emerge from their pupal case at the same time of day, even if they have been subjected to a constant light environment for generations; about oysters that open their shells for a longer period of time when the sea is high than when it is low (and not because of water pressure, for they continue this pattern long after being removed from their ocean home and then adjust it to the appropriate times for their new location, as though there were an ocean there). The most astonishing example is the lowly potato. According to Aveni, experimental biologists have charted its metabolism by measuring the rate at which it uses oxygen. They removed the sprouting eyes and sealed them away from changes in light, temperature, pressure, and humidity; even so, the eyes kept the same cycle as before, apparently reflecting not only the position of the sun but also seasonal changes and barometric variations. According to these researchers, the potato eyes responded not only to current pressures but to barometric pressures two days later. After this chapter of surprises, Aveni takes us into the world of men, back to prehistoric cave dwellers who may or may not have counted days and calculated lunations; to the ancient Greeks and Hebrews and the builders of Stonehenge, whose intentions have also been the subject of imaginative if not fanciful conjecture; to the definition of nature’s and man’s cycles—the year, the week, the days, in short the calendar. The second half of the book is given over to others—most of it to the peoples of pre-Columbian America: Mayas, Aztecs, Incas. The discussion ends with a brief chapter on China, rather out of place, and an epilogue on the meaning of these attempts Permission to reprint a review printed in this section may be obtained only from the reviewer. 596 TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 597 to make sense of the heavens for the uses of this earth. Aveni sees these attempts as a response to a universal need that even our Western civilization is not exempt from: the need to find regularities in nature that mark (help us predict) the critical points in our own lives—time to sow, time to reap, time to hunker down, time to reemerge. The function of the calendar in each of these earlier civilizations is to establish control or compensate for the lack of it. Aveni also notes the political aspect: that the effect, if not the intent, of calendrical development and time standards is control of the society as well as of nature and the cosmos; that in ancient societies, for example, esoteric temporal knowledge monopolized by a small hieratic elite was an aspect and tool of domination by its possessors. But bad as these societies were, we are worse: “Today the rigid control of human time is still powered largely by the business of making money in a highly industrialized, technological world. . . . Since time must be controlled minute by minute, second by second, in our complicated world, we universalize it so all can march in lockstep. Just as, to survive, we develop systems of population control, crop control, and control in the distribution of wealth, so, too, we have perfected time control” (p. 335). Aveni is one of those—and they are legion— who feel that we in the West have become prisoners of time, have cut ourselves off from natural...

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