I'm not an anthropologist, but I have a hard time believing that different peoples have significantly different conceptions of time. Americans are a lot heavier than other peoples, but nobody suggests they have a different concept of mass.
They're really talking about culture - mutual rules for deciding when a thing will occur, and when it has ended. Or dominant metaphors for time. A lot of these are dependent on material conditions; what is locally scarce?
In a place where gasoline and vehicles are scarce and people operate on thin margins, people expect long voyages to be infrequent, and the bus is not going to leave unless there are enough passengers. Otherwise the bus driver can't buy dinner that evening.
In a place where human labor is cheap, materials are expensive, and enforcement of contracts is sketchy, keeping people waiting while you assess their character may be preferable to making a hasty commitment.
Maybe not every difference is explainable this way but I think a lot of them are.
If alien anthropologists arrived, they might look at our space programs and conclude that we had a different conception of time. There's a strange obsession with the exact moment of launch, and time is measured as starting from a negative number up to that point. Time can be, and often is, started and stopped relative to that moment. Launches may have a published, scheduled time, but everyone expects it to be deferred until consensus is achieved that conditions are right. We are also careful that each launch be carefully timed to use an auspicious window, dependent on the planets around us and other cyclical conditions.
The alien anthropologist, ignorant of how his powerful ship even works, notes that he takes off whenever he wants to and just goes in a straight line to wherever he likes. He attributes the humans' odd practices to their different conception of time.
They're really talking about culture - mutual rules for deciding when a thing will occur, and when it has ended. Or dominant metaphors for time. A lot of these are dependent on material conditions; what is locally scarce?
In a place where gasoline and vehicles are scarce and people operate on thin margins, people expect long voyages to be infrequent, and the bus is not going to leave unless there are enough passengers. Otherwise the bus driver can't buy dinner that evening.
In a place where human labor is cheap, materials are expensive, and enforcement of contracts is sketchy, keeping people waiting while you assess their character may be preferable to making a hasty commitment.
Maybe not every difference is explainable this way but I think a lot of them are.
If alien anthropologists arrived, they might look at our space programs and conclude that we had a different conception of time. There's a strange obsession with the exact moment of launch, and time is measured as starting from a negative number up to that point. Time can be, and often is, started and stopped relative to that moment. Launches may have a published, scheduled time, but everyone expects it to be deferred until consensus is achieved that conditions are right. We are also careful that each launch be carefully timed to use an auspicious window, dependent on the planets around us and other cyclical conditions.
The alien anthropologist, ignorant of how his powerful ship even works, notes that he takes off whenever he wants to and just goes in a straight line to wherever he likes. He attributes the humans' odd practices to their different conception of time.