Agreeing to Disagree: The Measurement of Duration in a Southwestern Ethiopian Community [and Comments and Reply]

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Abstract

The Mursi are cultivators and cattle herders who live in the Lower Omo Valley of southwestern Ethiopia and whose methods of measuring duration have so far been unaffected by contact with literate cultures. In this article it is shown how the Mursi solve the problem of relating a cycle of seasonal events to a nonintegral series of lunar months, while remaining unaware that this cycle is related, in fact, to the solar year. This analysis leads to three main conclusions which may have some relevance to the understanding of time-reckoning systems in other ethnographic and historical contexts. Firstly, institutionalized disagreement about which month of the year and which day of the month it is, at any particular moment, with retrospective resolution of this disagreement, is revealed as the (unconscious) mechanism of adjustment where by lunar months are kept in step with the solar year. Consequently, the Mursi do not have a calendar which is capable of dating events, since there is no absolute standard to which people can refer to find out what time of the year or month it is. Secondly, while the evidence presented in the article does not support the Durkheimian view that different cultures have fundamentally different ways of perceiving time, it does demonstrate, in a less extreme form, the social determination of knowledge, for it shows that the measurement of duration in Mursi country is as much a matter of public opinion and social consensus as it is of the application of objective criteria of measurement. Thirdly, a discussion of Mursi astronomical observations and, in particular, of their use of the rising positions of the sun to determine the summer and winter solstices leads to a cautionary conclusion about recent attempts to reconstruct, from archaeological evidence and astronomical calculations, methods of time reckoning and their associated social structures in communities about which we know very little indeed. The Mursi evidence suggests that it might be all too easy to reach false conclusions-for example, about accurate solar observations-from evidence which is, of necessity, divorced from its social context.

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