How many hours did civil servants work a hundred years ago and did they experience stress? What did the introduction of a weekly day of rest mean for crowd control in the Roman bathhouses? How did sex workers in early modern Japan manage to charge by the hour? And how did merchants schedule their business ventures during the insecure period of the Black Death? These are just a few examples of the questions addressed during the international Lived Time conference held here at Amsterdam from 26 to 28 November 2024.
For three days, 16 international experts discussed with our project team aspects of Lived Time: Routines, Temporal Norms and Identities from Antiquity to the Modern World. This gathering of specialists from different countries and different fields of expertise (history, sociology, religious studies, archaeology, literature studies, etc.) and with specialisms ranging geographically from Britain to Japan and chronologically from ancient Egypt to the present) offered a vivid illustration of the surging academic interest in temporality (how people are in time or experience time) in the humanities. This so-called ‘temporal turn’ has led to a wave of new publications on people’s relation with time in the last 15 years or so, building on a pre-existing and more gradually developing philosophical and sociological interest in this topic. The specific focus of the Lived Time conference was on everyday experiences of time: how people’s routines and everyday responses to societal norms about the timing of activities affect their performances of the self and the workings of societies.
The conference started with a general introduction and case study by the project team (Sofie Remijsen, Eugenio Garosi), followed a more conceptual introduction to the structures of social time by the experienced sociologist of time Ignace Glorieux. The remainder of the conference was organized around thematic clusters: the experience of time during historical epidemics (Jeroen Puttevils, Kristine Johanson), festivals (Stefan Feuser, Elsa Lucassen), rhythms of bathing and the lack thereof (Uta Heil, Anna Geurts), work schedules (Daniel Soliman, Gerrit Verhoeven, Mark Hailwood, Renate Dekker), sleep and idleness (Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Brigitte Steger, James Ker) and instruments for timing (Matthew Champion, Angelika Koch). The final session looked at modern experiences of time connected to the use of fossil fuels (On Barak, Peter van Dam).
In each session, as well as across the sessions, there were interesting points of convergence in the research of specialists from different fields. Daily rhythms, for example, persist and turn out to be quite conservative despite societal change. This has been observed in modern time use studies but is equally visible in the slow take up of Sunday rest or in what is now increasingly interpreted as a continuity in the hours spend in the early age of industrialization. Both in the first Egyptian monasteries and in the daily work of civil servants around 1900, to give another example, leaders allowed scope for individual adaptations to – at first sight rigid – institutionalized work schedules. Resemblances where also noticed in how people experienced the special qualities of non-active time.
Much has been written about our modern relation to time as a unique distinguishing feature. Rather than confirming this opposition between ‘modern’ and ‘premodern’ time, the diachronic nature of the conference allowed for identifying recurring elements in everyday experiences of time across cultural divides as well as the cultural specificities of each temporal experience. One of the central conclusions is, no doubt, that studying temporality is not (only) a goal in itself. It offers a new lens to sharpen our image of the cultural norms prevailing in historical societies and of the ways such norms and societies change.
Sofie Remijsen
