Abstract
Though I have spoken of time and units of time the Nuer have no expression equivalent to ‘time’ in our language, and they cannot, therefore, as we can, speak of time as though it were something actual, which passes, can be wasted, can be saved, and so forth. I do not think that they ever experience the same feeling of fighting against time or of having to co-ordinate activities with an abstract passage of time, because their points of reference are mainly the activities themselves, which are generally of a leisurely character. Events follow a logical order, but they are not controlled by an abstract system, there being no autonomous points of reference to which activities have to conform with precision. Nuer are fortunate.1
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Notes
E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991) p. 15.
Anthony Purdy, ‘From Defoe’s “Crusoe” to Tournier’s “Vendredi“: The Metamorphosis of a Myth’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, vol. XI, no. 2 (June 1984) pp. 216–35.
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1957, 1972) pp. 66–103.
Jean Baudrillard, Le Miroir de la production (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1985 [1973]).
Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) p. 173.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, intro. Anthony Giddens (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976) p. 48.
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1992 [1974]) p. 335.
Mircea Eliade, Le Sacri et le profane (Paris: Gallimard, Collection Idees, 1965) p. 62
Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1983), especially chapter 3.
Diana Spearman, The Novel and Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966) p. 166.
David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1989) p. 170.
Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, David Frisby (ed.), Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (trans.) (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) p. 477.
Michel Tournier, Le Vent Paraclet (Paris: Gallimard, Collection Folio, 1977) p. 222.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), book v, lines 377–9.
Helene Cixous, Jours de Van (Paris: Des femmes, 1990) p. 55.
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© 1996 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Purdy, A. (1996). ‘Skilful in the usury of time’: Michel Tournier and the Critique of Economism. In: Spaas, L., Stimpson, B. (eds) Robinson Crusoe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13677-3_14
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