BRIDGING: The (Anti)Imperial (De)Assimilation of Time

By: Emma Mazal Mones

Cultural Time Systems as Dimensions of Existence

Time is, of course, socially constructed–but what this really means is it’s culturally constructed. Jay Griffiths, author of Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, asserts, “There is no such thing as the time. There are hundreds or even thousands of times and ways of telling them…Yet GMT imperiously (and falsely) declares its hours to be the standard for all.” Indeed, cultures have kept time in diverse ways for thousands of years, prior to the imperial imposition of the Gregorian calendar and Western clock. Our cultural concepts of time are entire dimensions of existence–the temporal realms in which our ancestors dwell–the fabric through which our cultures are woven. Being divorced from these traditions, and assimilated to the hegemonic clock, is a fundamental, existential displacement. 

In working to reconnect with my culture in recent years, one of the greatest difficulties I’ve come up against is time. Re-syncing myself with ancestral time seems foreign, laborious, and distant–incompatible with the functions of the capitalist, colonial, white Christian supremacist clock. People don’t know our holidays, let alone do we get them off from school or work. There is a choice between living our time systems, vs. living in the “real world”–with finances and opportunity, work, school, and social obligations, often at stake.


In Judaism, as I write this, we are in the year 5782 and the month of Tammuz. Each new moon is a festival (Rosh Chodesh) marking the new month. Our days begin at dusk, not midnight, and the last day of the week is a holy day (Shabbat), wherein we receive a second soul and take refuge in divine rest. Our new year is the first of the month of Tishrei (usually around September/October), though each year actually consists of 4 new years–including the new year for the trees (Tu B’shvat). Most of our holidays and calendar derive from ancient land-based traditions. The calendar operates on a 7 year agricultural cycle, which culminates in a shmita year–mandating rest for the land and debt relief for the people. This is just one cultural time system, and yet it contains a whole world of tradition, culture, sanctity, and perspective–as does each time system of each culture. 

Assimilation, Ecological Alienation, and Capitalist Exploitation“The ultimate expression of white supremacy is control of time itself.” -anthropologist Camilla Power

How did the majority of the world come to utilize the Gregorian calendar and Western timekeeping? The answer, unsurprisingly, is imperialism, colonialism, and supremacy. And this shift is pretty recent history: outmoding centuries and millennia of culture-keeping in just the last few hundred years.

To absorb new peoples into an empire (and to most successfully exploit them upon absorption), these peoples must be uprooted from their cultural, temporal, and/or place-based traditions. Their lives can no longer revolve around the cultural, ecological, or local, but must be assimilated to the overarching imperial functions. This shift not only divorces people from their culture, but also from their land–shifting from local, ecologically-intimate timekeeping, to globalized, ecologically-alienated timekeeping. This ecological alienation, imposed by imperialism’s expansionist aspirations, paves the way (figuratively and literally) to ecological destruction. This temporal assimilation is also essential to capitalist exploitation, as people cannot be converted to laborers until they are converted to a ruling clock and calendar.


As Power says:

“Conquistadors and imperialist freebooters…deracinated native modes of cyclical time, propagating in their place such peculiar concepts as time being ‘wasted’ or ‘spent’, that time was indeed ‘money.’”

Supremacist, not Secular, Time

The Gregorian calendar is by no means universal or secular–it is just so successfully supremacist it seems universal or secular. But the Gregorian calendar is a European Christian time system–with years measured in "Anno Domini"  (AD)  "in the year of Our Lord (Jesus Christ)" and BC “Before Christ.” People of that culture should, of course, be fully entitled to observe this timekeeping tradition. The problem is the universal imposition of one culture’s system–toward the outmoding of all others. Under Gregorian time, people globally can’t count the years without implicit acceptance of the Christian faith. Ultimately, this is connected to a long legacy of ethnic cleansing (of numerous peoples) through Euro-centric Christianization. Whether through the transatlantic abduction and enslavement of Black people, the colonization and genocide of Indigenous peoples, the long history of forced conversion and massacres of Jews, the ongoing missionization efforts globally–the list goes on. Though clocks and calendars may sound trivial, these matters cannot be separated from so many peoples’ battles for cultural survival and sovereignty amidst supremacist violence. 

"Because of them [missionaries] we started to follow the white calendar," says an indigenous Guarani-Kaiowa person in Brazil, reflecting on what he describes as the “cultural extermination” his people have endured.
Loubna Flah of Morocco World News laments how many younger Moroccans are unfamiliar with the traditional, Hegira months of the year. “They use more often the Christian [Gregorian] calendar either in schools or in workplaces,” Flah notes. She recounts a vocational student, Chaimaa, being asked the current Hegira year–attempting to recall the months, Chaimaa “remained confused for some time, at last saying, ‘I really don’t know.’”

Similarly, C.K. Raju (author of The Eleven Pictures of Time: The Physics, Philosophy, and Politics of Time Beliefs), reflects on the situation in India: “The Christian [Gregorian] calendar is the sole calendar taught in our schools…the dates stamped on our certificates and passports…But the Indian calendar is integrally linked to culture…The exclusion of these other calendars alienates people from their culture…Because of the colonial superstition that everything Western is superior and must be uncritically accepted.”

A Call for the De-Assimilation of Time and Self

In Jewish belief, the first thing that the Holy One blessed upon creation was not a place, a person, or a thing–but a time. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (seminal Jewish 20th century thinker, Holocaust refugee, and civil rights activist) stressed this penultimate sanctity of time. He spoke of building “cathedrals in time” through the observance of our traditions–“to be attached to holiness in time…to consecrate sanctuaries from the magnificent stream of a year.” Indeed, as a repeatedly dispossessed people, our time system–our temporal dimension of existence–became the one home, the one holy place, we couldn’t be robbed of. It is from these teachings that I advocate for the sanctity and sovereignty of timekeeping.

Timekeeping is sacred, cyclical, diverse, ecological, cosmic, cultural, and infinitely indescribable. It is not one sterilizing system, or one true reality, but many spiraling galaxies of ancestral imagining. Reclamation of our time systems is not an easy (or universally accessible) task–whether due to the more urgent, daily demands of survival, or the devastating knowledge barriers from cultural destruction. There is so much to materially be done–so many reparations owed–to so many peoples. And, of course, little personal de-assimilation efforts in timekeeping won’t change that material reality. But, as we await, demand, and catalyze the World to Come, perhaps it can do something, however small, for us and our ancestors. Perhaps we can ever so slightly begin to rebuild and revive: to “consecrate sanctuaries” within ourselves–of remembrance, return, resistance, and revolution.

Further Reading: