DATE: Sunday, June 22, 1997                 TAG: 9706120619

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY TEMPLE WEST 

                                            LENGTH:   77 lines

CULTURAL METRONOMES LEVINE DRAWS A MAP OF THE WORLD'S MANY TIMES.

A GEOGRAPHY OF TIME

The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently

ROBERT LEVINE

Basic Books. 258 pp. $24.

There is something slightly arrogant, yet compellingly reassuring about the wide-ranging studies of social psychologists. They are concerned with the relationships between individuals and the groups that guide our behavior, and the behavior of individuals as we exist in our environments - what founding father Kurt Lewin called the ``life space, the whole nine yards.'' Their work serves to save us from dangerous isolation and ethnocentrism, yet few meet the challenge of bringing their work to the general population. That takes an ability to translate studies, statistics and tables into lively observations and anecdotal narratives filled with wit and humor, engaging us in new dimensions of experience.

Robert Levine is a social psychologist who meets the challenge. As a professor at California State University in Fresno, he has spent nearly his whole career studying time, ``the very cornerstone of social life.'' In A Geography of Time, he gives us the history, the studies and the statistics as he seeks to understand the richness and complexity of views about time.

His history is fascinating. We are all so used to the concept of precise, mechanized, standardized time that we have probably lost track of how recently it appeared. As late as the 1860s, there were about 70 different time zones in the United States alone, and efforts to standardize were met with vocal opposition focused generally on the tyranny and rigidity of the clock. Even through his studies and statistics, Levine delivers fun and humor.

Describing his studies spent isolating certain indicators of a culture's internal clock (e.g., pedestrian walking speed, the quickness of postal transactions and clock accuracy), he shares the sometimes crazy anecdotes and observations surrounding the research: In Zambia, the tempo of life is generally slow, but in Lusaka, the capital and largest city, walking speed is uncharacteristically fast - an individual deterrent against rampant pickpocketing.

But in downtown Los Angeles, it is difficult to find anyone walking. A UCLA professor suggests an alternative indicator: Measure the honkosecond, ``the smallest measure of time known to science - the time between when the traffic light changes and the person behind you in L.A. honks his horn.''

In Switzerland, ``in one hell of a splendid finding,'' clock accuracy did rank first.

Adhering to his title, Levine conflates the dimensions of time and place. Places, he has discovered, are marked by their own temporal fingerprints. It's no surprise that U.S. cities rank among the fastest paced in the world. But that's not all bad.

``Cultural values,'' Levine explains, ``especially ones as profound as those about time, rarely separate into such orderly categories of good and bad. Any given pace carries mixed blessings.''

Our fast pace is an indicator of economic vitality and general life satisfaction, he says. But does it come at the expense of coronary health? Not necessarily. Japan outranks the United States in the overall pace of life, but the rate of heart disease in Japan is astonishingly low. Without physically leaving our culture, Levine asserts, we can learn alternative approaches to time - approaches to a more satisfying and healthy life - and he outlines eight lessons for a curriculum of what he calls ``Time Literacy.''

Part of Levine's intent in writing A Geography of Time is to offer a window into the psyche of our own culture through the study of other temporal constructions. A dentist doing unpleasant things to Levine's mouth put it succinctly: ``I went to another country once. You learn a lot about yourself.''

The other part of his didactic intent hovers around the theme of seizing control of time in order to achieve a temporal prosperity, or, making our time our own. He has done his job well, and we have much to learn from engaging his experience. MEMO: Temple West is a graduate student in the M.F.A. writing program at

Old Dominion University. She lives in Norfolk.

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