Horological Difference and Cultural Understanding

Calendars can be somewhat difficult to assess as structures of cultural unity among what we can putatively refer to as "pre-historical cultures", owing largely to their abstract and generally assumed, pre-reflective forms. Yet there can be little doubt that a calendar wields a substantial power over those who course through life in its wake. The calendar in very many cases stands like a pillar for state unity by defining the regularity of the cadence and the functional contours of the annual and daily life of a given culture; just consider the shopping frenzy which takes place every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas! Countless other examples can be generated.

A calendar thus stands alongside such perennial, core social structures as language, religion, and ethnicity. The reformation of the calendar thus retains a perpetual value as an essential question for all cultures whose members define themselves in the light of that form; for, in the course of history, calendars are born, are reformed, are destroyed and rebuilt, and within such processes, histories are remembered and forgotten.

For one, it can be readily understood, that no regular history would be possible without a calendar. And moreover, the stages of a calendar constitute the presenting and withdrawing of historical truths, a matter that becomes evident as when the human, historical origins of a calendar are lacking, so that instead, the calendar remains merged in a largely mystical and/or mythical cosmogony.  Even the elements of a prior horological reformation can remain for the most part concealed in their historical originality by virtue of the mythical overtones and the cultural modes of horological appropriation exercised by the communities which thereby define themselves.

In South Asia and neighboring regions, the pervasive employment of astrology, in the determination of annual religious festivals and the ritual timing of crucial life events such as marriage and the initiation of religious education, or saṁskaras, signals for us a central issue in Asiatic horology, one which tacitly reveals in its hermeneutical codes, the potential to recuperate historical fact from poetic, narrative fiction. A greater familiarity with the nature of Asian horology, and with its relation to the daily lives and spiritual aspirations—as well as with the Hindu or Buddhist laity's relation to historical memory—clarifies much more than one could even anticipate regarding the idioms of Hindu and Buddhist religious thought; a principled study of Asiatic horology thus provides us with crucial keys for deciphering much of the chaotic panoply of religious icons and symbols found in these pan-Asiatic and increasingly global cultures. This is not to say that such cultures do not contain other important influences or distinctive significations; only that some of the most important and most confusing elements in their abstractions can be traced to a difference in the respective horological practices of the student and the practitioner. Having principled attention to these differences can thus foster understanding across the admittedly somewhat dated "East/West" divide.