In what contemporary society calls ‘time’, [Norbert] Elias identified one of the central
points of reference as that set of internal self-control mechanisms that civilized
people adopt in every aspect of their lives. The ‘civilized’ temporal habitus is a
form of social sensitivity, a way of behaving and of feeling both individual and
part of the collectivity, which has emerged historically along a certain line of
development, following a secular path whose design can be reconstructed
although there is no one creator. If it is true that living in society requires a
certain amount of denial of spontaneity and satisfaction of one’s instincts, then
the kind of restraint which the different historical forms of collective life impose
on their members varies spectacularly, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in
terms of time restraint, as the researches of numerous anthropologists, travellers
and historians have confirmed.
Simonetta Tabboni
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