Did You Know? Amondawa Tribe Lives Without Concept of Time

Amondawa Tribe: Life without Clocks and Calendars. The Amondawa people in deep Brazilian Amazon rainforest base their lives on natural cycles, and in their language, there are no words to describe time, week, month or year. 

This distinctive worldview comes to the fore in a revived University of Portsmouth study in Language and Cognition against the increasing external pressures.

What is the Reason Behind Life without Clocks?

Among the dialects of the Amondawa language, the first language to be contacted in the year 1986, events are treated sequentially as opposed to being abstract, linear time as well as English metaphors such as working through the night. 

There are no spatial maps of time travel; the day to day living is in line with sunrises, sunsets and seasons but not in units of measure. The numbers that exceed four are not present, which helps to support non chronological thinking.

What are the Age and Identity Markers?

Also in the absence of numerical ages or birthdays, maturity is indicated by changes of name, children get new names at various stages of life, possibly many times. 

Status is determined by social roles rather than the number of years lived, and this is a challenge to new documentation such as passports.

Here and now existence is Amazon cycles: hunting, gathering, and rituals are in accordance with the lunar phases and rainy seasons. 

Professor Chris Sinha observes that this is because of the absence of time technology such as clocks or calendars. It provides some information on the topic of linguistic relativity: the influence of language on cognition.

What are the Encroaching Problems?

The exposure of Portuguese increases; children are skipping Amondawa at a higher rate and the dialect is threatened. Traditions are undermined by administrative requirements that compel approximations of birth dates. Logging is dangerous to the habitats as it indirectly strains cultural continuity.

The recent recirculation of the 2011 study opposes assumptions of universal time, similar to the characteristics of Hopi language. Amondawa learns external time mappings cognitively and not culturally. There are also less than 100 speakers and so there is a pressing need to preserve.

Amondawa is taught in Brazilian schools selectively, though globalization threatens to wipe out the language. Scholars champion the record of oral histories and maintenance of territories, to preserve this eternal view. Their sustainable living as the climate change changes Amazon cycles has a lesson on sustainability.