Essay from the year 2011 in the subject Cultural Studies - Basics and
Definitions, grade: Excellent, The University of Surrey, language:
English, abstract: "Time is money" (Franklin: 1864, p.129) - Benjamin
Franklin stated those words as an advice to a young tradesman in the
book of the same name . It was only one of many pieces of advice
Franklin gave in order to achieve success and gain wealth (Carstensen,
Busse: 2001). Nowadays, this attitude is still current in some cultures;
especially profit-orientated societies, such as the United States,
Switzerland, Germany or the Netherlands who see time as "a precious,
even scarce, commodity" (Lewis: 2006, p.53). On the other hand, there
are cultures which see time in a completely different way - as something
that is endless. This exposure to time is culturally dependent; the
perception of time, how it is divided and how it is being used varies
from culture to culture (Kartarı 1997). This work explores the use of
and attitude towards time in Germany and Turkey. The working definition
of time used in this work, based on Rüsen (1998), is not the physical
definition, but the cultural-scientific one: Rüsen defines time as a
fundamental determinant of human existence which encompasses the human
and its world, thinking and being, internal and external, culture and
nature. It is a general and elementary dimension of human life that is
being experienced as genesis and decline, birth and death, change and
constancy; and which needs to be accomplished as experiences through
human interpretations so that human beings are able to orientate
themselves within the time in order to meaningfully relate their lives
to it. The comparing cultural studies lead to the comprehension that
time in form of an anthropological constant which equally correspondents
to all people does not exist. In fact, time only has miscellaneous
cultural-specific concepts with distinct structures.
