Musings on the mañana mentality, how different cultures think about time

In Britain we have borrowed mañana, the Spanish word for tomorrow, to describe that relaxed approach to timekeeping that becomes more apparent as you travel south in Europe, a characteristic that some would say only strengthens as you continue in the direction of the tropics. Once you cross the Mediterranean it mutates into the Arabic, “boukra in sha Allah” (tomorrow God willing), that delightful method of politely declining all future commitment by outsourcing the occurence of all events to the whims of the Creator, not your own bone idleness or lack of enthusiasm to engage with someone. The racist overtones that might at times be applied to the usage of the term mañana in implying certain races are lazy and feckless were echoed historically in Arabic thought – scientific ideas in centuries past believed that a climate’s temperature affected how the foetus was “cooked” in the womb, in the cold of the north it being underdone and in the heat of Africa it being overdone, hence affecting the resultant temperament of the people. The fact that Arabia was just as hot as anywhere in Africa clearly didn’t occur to the proponents of these ideas, having no more legitimacy than those ideas Europeans created to explain their own perceived superiority.

There is no doubt however that you can find markedly different attitudes to time keeping and organisation between hot and cold places. Who the fuck wants to be rushing round like an idiot in the blazing heat? Not me, that’s for sure. But how much any of this is simply down to ambient temperature rather than a host of cultural factors is another matter entirely?

What studies demonstrate is that people tend to move faster in places with more highly developed economies, a high level of industrialisation, bigger populations, colder climates and individualist cultures. The greater the economic wellbeing of the population the higher the tempo of life, represented by factors like walking speeds and concerns with punctuality. Rather than any deep, underlying cultural or genetic influences, it was the Industrial Revolution that brought about the single biggest change in the determinants for speed of life. It wasn’t just the changes to working life, but before the advent of railway networks time was a far more localised and flexible concept than it is today: trains required everyone to be on the same time and understand the rules of a timetable. In the pre-industrial era the average number of days holiday per year in Europe was 115. The Dark Ages don’t seem quite so dark now with all that spare time hanging out, quaffing ale and slapping wenches bottoms or whatever else was regarded as acceptable behaviour on your days off. Traditional societies often have strict rules to limit the number of working days – once the essential tasks of securing food and shelter are done, life is meant to be enjoyed and I can’t help but feel they have a point.

Scholars can’t quite agree precisely on why people go slower in hot climates: is it simply energy-saving common sense; how much is one’s body clock affected by temperature or did traditional societies just need to do less without the demands of winter upon them, such as making warm clothes and preserving food?

Societies that place an importance on individualism put more emphasis on achievement rather than relationships, which in the industrial age led to a time is money mindset, in turn reinforcing individualism and boosting the economy, only perpetuating the idea that time is money. All of which were only boosted, or should I say exacerbated, by the effect of time and motion studies in the twentieth century.

Societies can also be classified as either monochronic, where tasks are performed linearly, one after another, or polychronic, where people balance a number of tasks, moving between them as mood or circumstances dictate. We say that the former, more typical in the West, operate on clock time and tend to individualism, while the latter work on event time and tend to a cooperative approach.
Many languages and cultures do not regard time as a quantitive entity so may not have concepts like early and late or would accept that time can be “wasted”. For them, relationships are what is valued rather than what might be regarded as the intrinsically, abstract notion of time.

My most recent destination of Brazil offers some suitable examples of time culture. It’s a country where the majority of the population are of “organised” European descent, relocated to the tropical heat; along with Africans who have generally embraced a more abstract approach to time and the indigenous population for whom, traditionally time wasn’t of much concern at all. The Amazonian Piraha tribe for example live entirely in the present, their language requiring no past tense or numbers with which to quantify time anyway. Once something can no longer be perceived it effectively no longer exists.

In a survey of the pace of life in 31 countries, Brazil came near the bottom, typical of hot places, with European countries and Japan filling up the top ten. The same concept of mañana certainly exists, using the Portuguese, “amanha” and large discrepancies between the hour indicated by different clocks and watches elicits little concern. Judging by the wonderful mix of faces on Brazilians, the different populations must have got down to some serious DNA exchange action over the last couple of centuries, so by now they might have developed a fairly coherent genetic basis for cultural attitudes, if such a thing exists. A majority of the indigenous peoples have become Christian which would have facilitated the adoption of other foreign cultural traits, but I can be fairly confident in saying that none of the 180 indigenous languages have a word for timetable.

As an English traveller, inevitably laden with the handicap of genetic Germanic conditioning of a tendency toward ruthless efficiency, it is difficult not to express at least a hint of exasperation when trying to deal with Brazilian local bus services. Many years of experience with West African travel have mercifully however, permitted me the ability to mostly relegate these frustrations to the deeper regions of my neural circuitry. Unlike African buses, the Brazilians have succeeded in putting numbers and destinations on the vehicles but this has not extended to sharing that information with bus stops or even, at times considering placing some kind of indication that a bus stop exists at a certain location. Although some services did seem to operate under a vague notion of regularity, which would imply the existence of a timetable, I can only assume that this information was kept firmly under lock and key, safely protected from public consumption. Asking members of the public about the whereabouts of a bus stop for a particular service or when it may arrive was about as productive as consulting the patterns in goat entrails. The important thing is, at least for Brazilians, that the system somehow works, even if the exact nature of the system is, at best obscure, but one way or another you’ll get where you need to go at some point.

At least from my tourist’s eye view traveling up the Amazon, the defining cultural expression of time management has to be the siesta: lunch is got out of the way early, around midday so people can get down to some serious inaction instead of steam-baking in the stifling humidity. I for one have fervently embraced this practice, happily rejecting my English, genetic, colonialist imperative to keep a stiff upper lip and endure the tribulations of tropical heat – a practice eloquently satirized long ago by Noel Coward in Mad Dogs and Englishmen, where only, “mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun”. Even during non siesta periods, people have mastered the art of lounging around outside their houses, to the extent that in some towns it was difficult to ascertain how the local economy functioned when much of the population remained largely inert for such long periods. For me, this elevation of social interaction over the tiresome mundanitites of work seems a most laudable of qualities. One that time obsessed westerners would do well to learn from.

The casual, organic Brazilian approach to organisation expressed itself admirably one evening in the small riverside town of Alter do Chao, popular with Brazilian tourists. On one corner of a small crossroads, Gloria’s Snack Bar was hosting an evening of traditional, Chorinho music. In between chats with friends the musicians gradually assembled and got under way once a suitable, critical mass was ready. Over the period of a few songs, the remaining musicians gradually joined in, sometimes swapping instruments. Members of the public would pick up some form of percussion or other accompaniment and play along for a few songs, only to be replaced by another bystander when they decided they’d done their bit, all with no objections from anyone else. Gradually passersby accumulated around the event, eventually numbering about two hundred, filling up the whole junction; an impromptu cocktail bar appeared on a plastic table in the middle of the road, courtesy of an enterprising local, later to be joined by another; the cafe opposite absorbed the excess of trade overflowing from Gloria’s place and the road became a dance floor. The arrival of a police car only resulted in sufficient shuffling of feet to allow it to pass, its occupants seeing no need to get out and control any aspect of the proceedings. A thoroughly splendid time was had by all without the need for alcohol and entertainment licences, permission to close the road, specialist insurance, consultation with the local council and police or any of the other tedious rigmarole that we find necessary in so much of the West.

We cannot simply transplant these differing manifestations of culture from one place to the next: ruthlessly efficient, timetabled bus services to Brazil or spontaneous street parties to northern Europe. These things are to some degree mutually exclusive, that’s not to say that they can never happen on occasion but that each derives from within its own culture. Over time that culture may evolve but in doing so it will inevitably lose one thing in order to gain another.

Judging other cultures as lazy, ill-disciplined or apathetic is enforcing your own cultural beliefs on others. We have to recognise that our ideas may appear just as ridiculous to other cultures as theirs may be to us. Without understanding the culture that motivates someone’s actions and the context in which they occur, we don’t have the information to make a proper value judgement.

As travellers, we need to embrace the good in cultures we encounter, remaining philosophical about the aspects which may be less to our tastes, without judging solely by our own culture’s criteria. I might prefer to have Germans build a house for me but I’d want Brazilians to organise my birthday party once I’d moved in. The converse may not be a disaster by any means but I’d rather praise the good things in each culture than spend too long dwelling on the negative. Hopefully we can take a little bit of the spirit of those positive aspects back home with us and in the process leave a good impression about what our own cultures have to offer in the places we have been.