BOOK REVIEW : ‘Empires’ Takes Keen Look at How Time Passes Us By

Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures by Anthony Aveni (Basic Books: $24.95; 371 pages; illustrated)

One of the growing realizations--and controversies--of recent decades is the degree to which we impose knowledge and order on the data of experience. It may well be that the structures with which we view things exist more in our heads than in the things themselves.

Consider time. It certainly seems to exist independently of us, moving along from day to day, month to month and year to year quite apart from how we measure it and put it together.

Yet, as Anthony Aveni demonstrates in “Empires of Time,” though the basic facts of time go on without us, different people at different times and in different places have thought about it very differently indeed and have put it together in ways that are just as natural and meaningful as our own.

“Time is not conceived in the same way by all human minds, nor is it reckoned by all peoples of the world in precisely the same manner,” says Aveni, an astronomer and anthropologist at Colgate University. He has merged his two fields of study into an eye-opening account.

“Human culture emerges as the great processor of time,” Aveni writes. “Like the rest of the biological world, our ancestors began by sensing the orderly biorhythms of natural time. . . . We grabbed hold of the controls; we changed the order. We manipulated time, developed and enhanced it, processed, compressed, and packaged it into a crazy-quilt patchwork to conform to our perceived needs: greater efficiency in dividing up the day means more earning power for both corporate head and his workers.”

This season’s intellectual fad is “The End of History,” whose author, Francis Fukuyama, argues that we have reached the pinnacle of mankind’s ideological evolution and that Western liberal democracy is the final form of human government. His thesis assumes without question that history--time--involves progress.

Aveni’s book challenges that assumption (though, of course, it was written before last summer, when Fukuyama’s article appeared). It’s not just that some cultures, which Aveni describes, view history as cyclic while others, such as our own, view it as linear. He implies that the very idea of history--an ordered sequence of events--is constructed by us.

“Empires of Time” teaches much about its subject and about the larger subjects that it illuminates. Like many aspects of culture and thought, time involves an interaction between the stuff in the world and the stuff in our heads.