Do modern hunter-gatherer tribes across the world tend to have a "non-linear" concept of time compared to post-agricultural societies, thus affecting their view of death and the afterlife?

Question

When trying to research pre-agricultural beliefs about the afterlife, I came across the idea that time was not "linear" for many HG people today. >But ultimately it is hard to determine to what extent tribal peoples felt existential dread. The way they viewed the world, their entire psyches, were just so, so different from ours. **Westerners view time as a line that marches towards some end; tribal people tend to view time as a circle, or as a non-directional flow**. There isn't even a word for time in the Algonquin language. I'd wager that it's hard to feel anxiety about the future when there *was* no future, at least in the mind of the person. I can see why time itself has some cyclic qualities to a hunter-gatherer. As a HG looks back across their band's premodern oral history, they don't see dramatic changes in how the world works. There was no fall of Rome or American Revolution for them; there was just one continuous foraging band which changed and branched off and moved across distances and encountered other peoples but remained essentially the same. Calendars and distinctions between times of the year were less important for ancient HGs than they are for us because they weren't planting crops and waiting to harvest them. Their daily life lacked the need for very precise time-keeping, at least compared to our office schedules today. But it did rely very strongly on their way to participate in cycles of behavior, cycles of relationships, cycles that run through individuals' lives from beginning to end and informed how they gathered plants, spoke, bathed, cared for children, hunted, etc. Modern hunter-gatherers inherit this worldview even if they have come in contact with others like us. There's no doubt that that can affect how they view time itself. However, anyone who isn't a complete idiot knows events happen in a linear direction in a day-to-day sense. For example, if a man loses his eye, he's not going to magically gain that eye back because time reverses course tomorrow. The survival of humans and animals is predicated on their basic knowledge that effects don't generically reverse themselves, at least in the short term. Hunter-gatherers probably wouldn't gather and hunt if they thought the berries and meat they collected would time-reverse out of their storage containers like an ulting Ekko. Not recognizing "linear time" in this sense results in total and complete insanity. This being the case, a somewhat linear concept of the far future is only one logical step away from recognizing that cause and effect moves in one single direction in daily life, at least as far as I can tell. Perhaps, then, this "cyclic" concept of time has more to do with how history eventually repeats itself or some other thing I can't wrap my mind around. But if anything would make one question a cyclic concept of "overall time," it would be the impending mortality of death, or at least the knowledge that your loved ones grow cold and unresponsive and one day you will, too. Then again, questions about life after death fall squarely into the realm of the hypothetical, and we can only apply our thoughts and worldview to hypotheticals, not day-to-day experience. This makes me question exactly what is meant by a "cyclic" idea of time, and to what extent this different interpretation of how time works is shared among various hunter-gatherer peoples and traditional societies across the world. I feel like I'm just not grasping something here. Each of them might have a different interpretation of time, but maybe they all have something similar running through them that our worldviews don't have? Or is this statement about how time is viewed as cyclic by most traditional societies not correct?

Answer 1

I want to start with what I think are a few misconceptions that may be making this more difficult. People can conceptualize a future, not matter how they view time. If we think of a circle to represent cyclical time, there is still a path ahead of you. Many people worried about winters and illness and starvation, they just knew they had to worry at a certain part of the circle. There are caches where people hid tools for them to come back to as they lived a nomadic life. They did conceptualize a future.

Second, they did have a fairly precise understanding of time. They could track the calendar by the solar events, like the solstice and equinoxes, as well as lunar phases. The stars also change, unless you are exactly on the equator, from season to season. But it wasn't just on a year scale that they understood time. They were more familiar with the sun's position than you or I because we have clocks. Instead of hours, the knew sunrise, sunset, and midday very well.

Third, some of them did have histories. The Maya, for example, understand time to be cyclical and are one of the few Native American groups to have writing. We know the names of dozens of rulers and cities and some of the wars and famines because of their writing, but time was still cyclical.

Now, to the meat of your question. You are partially right by saying history repeats itself, but let's hold off on that for a second. Circles are, by definition, identical to all other circles with the only difference being size. There is a very big circle in time full of smaller circles. All of the circles are the same, but some are the breadth of the universe. Some are a day or a year. Some of are life or the rise and fall of a city.

When people view time as cyclical, it isn't a denial of growing older, but of seeing each day as small version of what happens each year, which is a small version of what happens each life, which is a small version of what happens to the universe. Yes, a man may loose his eye, but that isn't part of the day's cycle; it's part of his life's cycle. His day started and ended with sleep, just as his life starts and ends with the gods, just as the universe starts and ends with what he believes it ends with.

There will be variations in the circle. A detail here or there will be different. The scale is, of course, different, but the main outline is the same, just like the Hero's Journey can be plotted on to an episode of Friends, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, or a historical life.

So, cyclical concepts of time aren't a belief it's groundhog day. It's seeing a beginning, (culturally detailed) middle, and end that starts the beginning again. Does that make sense?