Seasonality

Perceived patterns in yearly rhythms. An approach to time as non-homogenous, qualified. Changes or fluctuations that occur in a recurring, predictable cycle over time. Seasonal planning, after FoAM.

Flexible, fuzzy (?) cultural categories like seasons as ‘tacit repertoires for reckoning time’ (Bremer and Wardekker 2024). A movement between phases.

A certain base level of predictability. Annual cycles create a kind of “deep time” that transcends individual human lifespans. The repetition of the seasons year after year provides a sense of continuity. Perceptions and meanings of seasons are also culturally constructed, with different societies dividing and defining the seasons in diverse ways.

Phenology, weather, divisions of light and darkness.

While the rhythms of the hazel tree are of great importance to the beekeeper, they are likely invisible to the hotelier who is tuned to tourist season, or the engineer who is monitoring the seasons in the wear on key infrastructure. — Scott Bremer and Arjan Wardekker, “When seasons no longer hold” (2024)

The patterns that people discern depends on the rhythms that matter for them, and how they perceive a coherence between these rhythms, or a ‘wholeness’. What the Norwegian beekeeper names ‘spring’ is not only the budding hazel but the whole complex weave of rhythms coming together over a period; when temperatures and light increases, bee’s leave the hive, beekeepers open the hive and feed the bees sugar, the fruit growers organise how many hives they need for pollination, biosecurity laws on when hives can be moved take effect, and so on. — Scott Bremer and Arjan Wardekker, “When seasons no longer hold” (2024)

Seasonal time has a certain “thickness” to it, particularly when compared with the fungible units of clock time. The changing qualities of light, weather, growth, and decay influence our perceptions and experience of the passage of time.

Less fixed than it might once have been, in a context of anthropogenic climate change.

How then do we choose to respond when, in turbulent times, our seasonal cultures no longer hold? How do we adapt as the patterns we are accustomed to smudge together, and we lose our sense of seasonality? — Scott Bremer and Arjan Wardekker, “When seasons no longer hold” (2024)

Shifts in the timing, intensity, and variability of seasonal events could disrupt ecological and cultural systems that have evolved in relation to more stable cycles.

• [?] How do seasonal changes shape the evolution of social practices and traditions?
• [&] See also: the wheel of the year

Tags: time

Backlinks

: Chronos and kairos : The Wheel of the Year