Towards a critique of the concepts 'space' and 'time' in a dynamic thery of the social sciences

Abstract

Every culture has an implicit or explicit conception of space and time. The difference between non-modern (or non-capitalist) and modern communities, in essence, is how they conceive life (own life and the environment) spatially and temporally. Non-modern communities have symbolic rational stories that regulate life, the generality of them is to conceive space and time as sacred, therefore they have holy places and the time of the festival. Space and time are alive, so the relationship that prevails is that of Subject-Subject; divinity manifests itself in a material ‘thing’ of nature, but that ‘thing’ is actually an Other, actually a subject. The celestial spheres and the stones, the water, the earth and the vegetation are manifestations of the divine (Eliade, 1981; 1986); living forces in the world that interact with the human being (López Austin, 2001). In these cultures there is a strong interrelation of cosmology and daily life, since there were no clear distinctions between astronomy and astrology (as a prediction system), their relationship with the economic system (the measurement of time for agricultural activities or commercial), the political justification that the stars gave to the rulers and even the war against another community. In general, for these cultures there are two ways of living time and space, one is cyclical and the other linear.