Edmund Leach wrote that "the oddest thing about time is surely that we have
such a concept at all." ¹ The conception of time is indeed somewhat ineffable:
time is experienced, but not with our senses. "We don't see it, or touch it, or
smell it, or taste it, or hear it," Leach notes. Although, as we noted at the beginning
of Chapter 5, the capacity for perception oriented by space and time seems to be
innate to the human being, ² the production of an idea like that of time, "like the
idea of God, is one of those categories which we find necessary because we are
social animals rather than because of anything empirical in our objective ex-
perience of the world." ³

What is the relationship between social conditions (and conditioning) and the
way particular societies understand time? Durkheim argued in his Elementary
Forms of the Religious Life that the divisions "in relation to which all things are
temporally located, are taken from social life. The divisions into days, weeks,
months, years, etc. correspond to the periodical recurrence of rites, feasts, and
public ceremonies. A calendar expresses the rhythm of the collective activities,
while at the same time its function is to assure their regularity." ⁴ If, as Durkheim
claimed, "cosmic space was primitively constructed on the model of social space,
that is, on the territory occupied by society and as society conceives it," so too
is time a social product, for "time expresses the rhythm of collective life." ⁵

More recently, David Pocock noted the difference between an empirically
based "duration"--the simple passage of time, which is "a fact of experience"--
and "time-reckoning," which presupposes social life and social categories: "If I
am alone I am not the creature of my society's system of time-reckoning. My

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