Seasonality as the apprehension of time: literature and anthropology of time in Josep Pla’s Empordà

Abstract

Many peoples of the earth base their apprehension of time on the seasonal indicators that appear and transform throughout the year, whether they are animals or plants, as well as movements in climate and light on the landscape. Some writers have perceived the importance of these issues to understand the culture of the societies they wrote about. In particular, in the post-World War II period, when the effects of modernity were transforming the traditional rural societies of the Mediterranean, we can find some significant examples. This article analyses the case of Josep Pla, one of the main Catalan writers of the twentieth century, whose work contains much reflection on the passage of time in Catalan rural society, and specially the sensitive impression of seasons, on the way in which the passage of time in a vanishing agricultural society is lived. The article frames this literary work in the context of the ethnology of the Mediterranean, the anthropology of time, and specifically in the study of seasonality in culture.