When I turned 40 for the third time, I began to have some doubts about what was going on.
At first I was a bit confused. In the cycle of major milestones, birthdays, and the aftermath I was totally unprepared for. Especially when I considered myself 38 years old.
A few months later, I turned 40 again. Well, I wasn't very good at math. But then it happened that I turned 41 a few times and finally turned 40 again. No, it can't be, something is wrong with the timing.
It became clear that some civilizations are fine with many years or many ages of experience at the same time.
It is now the beginning of 2023 everywhere around the world. But step into Myanmar and there is also 1348, while Thailand will push you to 2566, Moroccans are worshiping at 1444 but farming at 2972 while Ethiopians are going through 2015 for which the year is thirteen months. is of
In South Korea, where I live, New Year's is everyone's birthday. This explains the dilemma of why I turned 40 three times.
South Korean age:
I was 38 years old when I found out in South Korea that I was actually 40 years old there. Korean age is related to two dates: your date of birth and the Gregorian (solar) New Year.
From your date of birth to December 31st, you are one year older in Korea than in the UK or the US. From January 1 to your next birthday, you add two years to your age.
South Koreans are one year old at birth and at any point thereafter have two to three official ages: a domestic age, an international age (which starts at zero), and an extra year when The entire country turns a year older on January 1. (Symbolically this can also happen at the beginning of a lunar year)
Interestingly, Koreans can also choose to celebrate their birthdays according to the Gregorian or traditional lunar calendar. Technically I could have celebrated six birthdays taking advantage of the system here, but who is that happy to be forty?
It was all new to me, an expat American. I thought time was one of the few things the human race agreed on.
It's true that people have measured time in different ways in the past (the Stone Age had one big calendar), but I don't think other calendars are in use today. And at the same time, not at all. So it was clear that I never questioned my experience
The Slow Road: From Past to Present:
Dates are the backdrop to our lives, just something that seems to grow. But of course any date (e.g. January 1, 2023) is the basis of a specific timekeeping system, in this case the Gregorian calendar.
The ISO-approved global standard Gregorian calendar, which is used internationally in everything from aviation to politics, seems likely to be very accurate and efficient. But in reality it is not. Its importance in the world was due to being in the right place at the right time and the imperial culture.
A product of religious ideas and Renaissance science, the Gregorian calendar, the Catholic liturgical year (which was then based on the Julian calendar) and the true solar year were created to correct the differences. The Julian calendar was only 11 minutes and 14 seconds wrong.
This was the supreme example of mathematics in the era of 45 BC. But this time difference would accumulate over centuries and distort the calendar. When Pope Gregory VIII issued orders to correct the calendar in the late 16th century, the calendar was off by about ten days.
The Gregorian calendar difference was only 26 seconds. But in 1582 there was resistance to its implementation. It was difficult for Protestants and Orthodox Christians to accept that they would conceive of time as dictated by the Pope.
So only the Catholic parts of Europe adopted the new calendar before the beginning of the 16th century. Other regions gradually adopted this calendar in the following centuries. Protestant Germany and the Netherlands adopted this calendar in the 1700s, while England and its colonies adopted it in the 1800s.
In 1900, distant non-Christian countries such as Japan and Egypt introduced this calendar, while Orthodox countries such as Romania, Russia and Greece adopted it in 2000. In the year 2000, Europe unanimously welcomed January 1 as the New Year.
However, most major imperial powers had adopted the Gregorian calendar by the mid-nineteenth century. At that time, Europe dominated more than eighty percent of the world and there were European colonies.
It was at this time that a movement was emerging among scientific and commercial people in Europe and America to create a common world calendar that would help world trade. And hence the role of the Gregorian calendar became important.
In regions not conquered by Europe, the calendar spread through other means. In her book The Global Transformation of Time, historian Vanessa Ole argues that capitalism, Christian preaching, and scientific desire for uniformity played a greater role in standardizing time than imperial policy. Colonial thought was not even an integral part of this change.
Beirut was under the control of the Ottoman Empire when the Gregorian chronicles appeared in the schools of Beirut in the late eighteenth century. Japan has never been a colony, but it adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1872. Adoption was thus perhaps easier because everyone knew that the benefits would not be unilateral.
Before the Gregorian calendar, several calendars were in use side by side for a thousand years.
King Sejong of Korea created two special calendars as part of a calendar reform in the 1430s. One according to the Chinese calendar and the other according to the Arabic calendar. By the 1880s, three other calendars were in use in Beirut in addition to the Gregorian calendar. Even Japan, where the Gregorian calendar was apparently adopted, maintained its own separate imperial chronological system or 'Rokuyo' calendar for important days, and a 24-seki calendar of climatic changes.
Social anthropologist or anthropologist, Claire Oxby, has studied the use of the calendar on the coast and in the desert.
He introduced the term 'calendar pluralism' or calendar collectivism to explain the co-existence of multiple systems for keeping track of time. In the same way, the coexistence of several legal systems in societies is called legal collectivism or legal pluralism.
It may seem difficult, but different calendars work differently. In North Africa, the Amazigh, Tuareg, and other Berber-speaking nations may use three or four systems simultaneously.
The sidereal calendar marks the agricultural seasons, the Islamic lunar calendar guides religious worship, the Gregorian calendar is used to conduct business with the government. Keeping different calendars side-by-side can be a practical solution to unifying processes to meet different needs.
But while pluralism has existed historically, the calendars themselves have been changing. What is used today may look different in a few decades. You may have more and different ones. Human civilization is constantly evolving.
An ongoing cultural shift is our journey into the digital world. The old trade routes have been replaced by fiber optic cables. These wires are bringing the Gregorian calendar to regions where the colonial system did not reach. And at least for now, communication links have created a new kind of calendar community.
Nepal is one of the few countries in the world where the Gregorian calendar is not a national calendar. There is officially either the year 2079 (Bikram Sambat), or 1143 (Newari Nepal Sambat) or both. A total of at least four calendars are being used in different linguistic units. There are many new years. Even Nepal is 15 minutes away from the World Standard Time zone compatibility. Something different is going on there.
Despite all this, Nepali people like Sanjiv Dahal have absolutely no need to use multiple calendars. "I only use Bikram Sambat calendar, I have never used Nepal Sambat in my life," says Dahal.
This is also not a one-sided calendar. There are twelve lunar months and six seasons in the solar year of Bikram Sambat and they contain many layers of cultural and religious histories. For a Hindu living in Kathmandu, this system caters to all needs from religious days to pay days.
While Dahal only wants a calendar inside Nepal, he is also doing a PhD on Nepalese diaspora as an international student at Boston University in the US. Which meant that they were unwittingly using another civilization's calendar. Digital culture, like 19th-century colonial Europe, uses the Gregorian calendar exclusively.
Dahal says 'I live in two times and houses.' He also solves this technological problem with technology. His laptop is set to 2023 while his smartphone is set to 2079. And an application guides them between the two.
Dahal believes that there is a gap in calendar usage between the two generations: their parents had no need to use Gregorian time. But even among your friends there is a division on the use of the calendar. They use Gregorian for work while Bikram Sambat for social and family rituals.
Similarly, social media usage is dominated by the Western calendar, for example when people send birthday messages to them, while it is completely useless for important Nepali cultural and religious days as they follow lunar dates. For this reason, Dahal does not expect the Gregorian calendar to be officially adopted in the near future.
History may go in circles. But the movement to establish a uniform world calendar, which began in the late 19th century, is gaining momentum again in the 21st century due to the homogenization of the economy. In 2016, Saudi Arabia shifted its employee salary schedule from the Islamic calendar to the Gregorian calendar. The move was said to save money.
In December, South Korea passed a bill abolishing the traditional calendar because it believed multi-age systems were economically unviable. This law will go into effect this year, which will mean that my next birthday will probably only come twice, or even just once.
But what would we lose by combining a calendar, especially one that would fit a different era and house?
Oaksey, author of The Power Dynamics and Calendar Uses, answers this question by saying, “Governments can gain control by imposing a centralized calendar. A country can lose its cultural history and diversity. People can get hurt. If they are part of a regional minority culture, they may feel inferior at the national level.'
But it is also a fact that 150 years of globalization has not wiped out collectivism or pluralism.
Calendars may come and go: Mostly they change. And if there's one thing mankind is good at, it's change.
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