Analysis Of Social Time: The Heartbeat Of Culture

1171 Words3 Pages

Cesar Lopez
Melissa Qualls
Strategies for University Writing
26 March 2014
Time
According to the essay “Social Time: The Heartbeat of Culture” written by Robert Levine, every society throughout the world has a different perception about “time” that can be appreciated by comparing how different people of different cultures behave in different moments of the daily life.
Levine was able to make a research comparing two different cultures while living in Brazil as professor at a small town near Rio de Janeiro. Levine analyzed the behavior of Brazilian Students compared to American students at a University in Fresno (75). Levine’s first comparison was based on the fact that Americans always try to be on time in class, and when they don’t, they feel grieved about it, but his Brazilian students seemed that they didn’t care to be late and just gave him and excuse and briefly apologized. Levine also noticed that when the class was over, while American students were in a hurry to get out of the classroom, his Brazilian students took their time to pick up everything, and they were still asking questions about the class and others were just sitting on their chairs hanging out (76).
I agree with the fact that people of different cultures have different reactions in certain m scenarios. Everybody has a different perception of time. While some people are worried about being always on time and have their day well organized to complete everything they need to do taking advantage of every minute of the day, other people do not show interest on managing their time and usually create their own pace of life, which means that they do not follow a schedule and are open minded on doing several things throughout the day. One day I experienced something...

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... not be as powerful as the fastest ones, but statistics have shown that these are the happiest contries of the world, while the fastest ones are more stressed because of the pressure that they have.

In conclusion, having and organized life were you are always on time and you complete everything that is programmed will make you a successful person, but not happ. I completely agree with Levine and his theory about time perception between different countries, but I don’t imagine myself following and agenda and already know what I am going to do the entire day. That is why these cultures like Japan or China or even America are always stressed and they only think about work. So I would rather make a balance between be on time and do everything I need to do but also have a flexible agenda were I can do things with my life that will make my life happier and relaxed.

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