Robert V. Levine (1945–2019)

So I picked this book up due to a recommendation from a friend that had been told to read it by another friend. She hasn’t read it yet but it sounded interesting and I went into it knowing nothing beyond the title of the book.
Honestly, I almost put this book down right away, it’s interesting but a lot of the stuff talked about in the beginning of the book is stuff I’ve learned prior to reading it. I would say go into this book open minded though because I got further into the book and show more became horrified at some of the stuff I learned.
I won’t go into too much depth of the book but mention a few things that stood out.
One being the whole herd mentality. People are less apt to help one another if in a large crowd, assumption being that people likely think somebody else is taking care of it, don’t know how to respond. Or they don’t want to react in fear or looking foolish. The author suggests if your ever in need of help to actually point at people and ask them to do things because people by nature do want to help but need the extra push and as soon as one person is helping, others are likely to fall in line as order has been constructed.
I guess this is obvious, think about the things we see all the time but it’s scary to think about. They talk about at one point a girl being murdered and something like 30 people nearby who heard but nobody reacted. I was jaw dropped throughout this and felt a little sick. Lets not let the crowd dictate our actions but reason. Even if you think it might be just an angry couple nearby. I never want to wake up the next morning thinking “what if I’d made that call, would this person be alive” that’s just such a horrifying thought.
The other thing that really stuck out with me was the power authority has over people without realizing it. Another obvious one I guess but he talks about the Milgram Experiment and I was horrified for so many reasons. With the political stuff going on now I really think everyone should be aware of this in ourselves and remember we all have voices and can do our part if something doesn’t feel right. I could go into a whole long story of all the times I’ve seen this happen and all the fears I have of it not being dealt with.
Can we all hold each other accountable to do our best each day to be conscientious of what’s going on around us and have the integrity to do what we can. If you know me and see me fall short, don’t get mad at me but I do appreciate people calling me out on it so I can recalibrate myself to be the best person possible.
All in all this book had some really wonderful parts to it but I don’t think that what I learned was really the overall intent for the book. It makes me a little sad because personally I feel like these things are more important but I do understand the intent of the book. I’d love to find a book more on the two things I pulled out from it though. It was so interesting/sad/horrifying/depressing/enlightening and I’m sure I’ve got more I could take away from it. show less

Perhaps I should be kinder to this book. There are interesting things in here. And yet, when someone uses honor killings as his illustration for cultural relativity... no. Just no. When I want to illustrate that other cultures are different and our way is not the only/natural way? I go to food for examples. There's cultural relativity, and then there's moral relativity.

I had hoped to learn from this book why there is such a big difference in time perception between different cultures. I didn't get a real answer to that, but still enough elements to form an image myself. In any case, Robert Levine shows how great the differences are in sense of time: for example, the time of appointments in the US, Brazil or Japan are interpreted in very different ways at each of those places; his book is peppered with numerous amusing misunderstandings on this.
For an show more explanation, Levine refers to the "silent language" of the cultures, and that is certainly valid, but that is actually merely making a determination: cultures are very different because they are different, and it is important to adapt to each other. That smells a bit like cultural relativism and in that context there are some rather unfortunate passages in this book (among other things an explanation why a man in Pakistan feels obliged to uphold family honor by killing his adulterous sister).
A small part of the book is about empirical research into different life rates, and there the conclusion is that there is a direct connection with modernism (although Levine does not use that word): “People are prone to move faster in places with vital economies, a high degree of industrialization, larger populations, cooler climates, and a cultural orientation toward individualism.” In short, it means that appointments in the Western world are very much oriented towards the clock, while elsewhere it is 'event-time' that determines the pace of life, and that is much less strictly defined. In a brief historical overview, Levine zooms in on the introduction of that all-dominating clock time at the end of the 19th century in the West, as a deliberate strategy, in function of industrialization. In other words, Levine follows a somewhat historical materialistic way of thinking.
In our globalized world, of course, it all turns out to be a bit more complicated, and Levine has to conclude that there can be big differences within every region or culture. For example, the sense of time within the African American community, the Native American community or that of the New York yuppies is very different; and even the citizens of California run at a different pace.
For me, the distinction that Levine makes between living according to clock time or event time is particularly relevant. But the book would have had more persuasive power if it were more stuffed with empirical research than with funny anecdotes. show less

This book is a composite of lots of different time-topics, and a couple of them are really worth your time: his idea of event time vs clock time, his chapter detailing a time ethnography of Japan, and one on how time zones were standardized in the US. Totally cool. This book is low-maintenance and you can feel free to skip chapters at will.