Essay from the year 2011 in the subject Cultural Studies – Basics and Definitions, grade: Excellent, The University of Surrey, language: English, abstract: “Time is money” (Franklin: 1864, p.129) – Benjamin Franklin stated those words as an advice to a young tradesman in the book of the same name . It was only one of many pieces of advice Franklin gave in order to achieve success and gain wealth (Carstensen, Busse: 2001). Nowadays, this attitude is still current in some cultures; especially profit-orientated societies, such as the United States, Switzerland, Germany or the Netherlands who see time as “a precious, even scarce, commodity” (Lewis: 2006, p.53). On the other hand, there are cultures which see time in a completely different way – as something that is endless. This exposure to time is culturally dependent; the perception of time, how it is divided and how it is being used varies from culture to culture (Kartarı: 1997).
This work explores the use of and attitude towards time in Germany and Turkey. The working definition of time used in this work, based on Rüsen (1998), is not the physical definition, but the cultural-scientific one: Rüsen defines time as a fundamental determinant of human existence which encompasses the human and its world, thinking and being, internal and external, culture and nature. It is a general and elementary dimension of human life that is being experienced as genesis and decline, birth and death, change and constancy; and which needs to be accomplished as experiences through human interpretations so that human beings are able to orientate themselves within the time in order to meaningfully relate their lives to it. The comparing cultural studies lead to the comprehension that time in form of an anthropological constant which equally correspondents to all people does not exist. In fact, time only has miscellaneous cultural-specific concepts with distinct structures.