Time and Culture

On the occasion of completing his tenure as director of the DIJ after ten years, Florian Coulmas gave a lecture entitled, ‘About Time. Globalization, Chronoethnology, and Japanese Culture.’ He argues that conceptions of time, time regimes and temporal patterns of events and activities constitute a rich base for cultural analysis. Drawing a wide canvas from the adaptation of the European mechanical clock in the sixteenth century to scheduling public transport in one-minute intervals nowadays, he shows how technological and social progresses interact, sometimes modulated by culture.