Page 167 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

156 Chapter Six

in conceptions of time and of space) on the one hand, and predominance of
different media of communication and patterns of their control (monopolies
of knowledge) on the other. Let us begin by describing Suzuki’s depiction of
cultures in terms of conceptions of time.
Suzuki judges a society’s conception of time to be “one of the pillars of its
worldview, its shared ideas and images that grant order and meaning to the
universe.” 24 He repeatedly contrasts two disparate notions of time. One,
termed “the pre-scientific conception,” is similar to Innisian “time-bias.” Ac-
cording to Suzuki, the “pre-scientific mind,” which was widespread in Eu-
rope before Copernicus and still characterizes the mind-set of many indige-
nous peoples about the globe, affirms the importance of continuity and in
particular the dependence of succeeding generations on the actions of their
forebears. Some variants of the prescientific mind-set endow humans with re-
sponsibility even for keeping the stars on their courses. 25 The prescientific
mind also pays close attention to recurrent natural rhythms. Some of nature’s
cycles are held to be sacred and steeped in signs and significance, and people
participate symbolically in these recurrences through rituals.
The media of communication that imbue prescientific peoples with mythic
notions of time, Suzuki observed, have traditionally been songs, ceremonies,
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and stories. For the Gitksan of central British Columbia, for example, each
household is the proud heir of an ada’ox—the “body of orally transmitted
songs and stories that acts as the house’s sacred archives and as its living,
millennia-long memory of important events of the past”—an “irreplaceable
verbal repository of knowledge.” It consists in part of sacred songs believed
to have arisen “from the breaths of ancestors.” According to Suzuki and co-
author Peter Knudtson: “These songs serve as vital time-traversing vehicles.
They can transport members across the immense reaches of space and time
into the dim mythic past of Gitksan creation by the very quality of their mu-
sic and the emotions they convey.” 27
Cyclical time, Suzuki continues, bestows the notion that we are all parts of
a seamless web of interconnectivity and interdependence through time and
space—that we live in future generations and they in us.
The opposite conception of time, according to Suzuki, is the western sci-
entific tradition of “time’s arrow”—the idea that time is linear, sequential, and
unidirectional. This resembles Innis’ depiction of time for space-biased so-
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cieties. Suzuki writes that although science recognizes natural cycles and
rhythms—the solar seasons, fluctuations of predator and prey populations,
replication cycles of DNA—these expressions of cyclical time are conceived
to exist only within the grander framework of linear time—for example, the
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relentless increase in entropy and linear chains of cause and effect. Western
notions of linear time, by marginalizing cyclical or mythic time, have helped