12 March 2022. Weeks | Photos
The invention of the week. The World Photography Awards.
Welcome to a special (and probably one-off) Saturday edition of Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story. Recent editions are archived and searchable on Wordpress.
1: The invention of the week
Since this is an irregular Saturday edition of Just Two Things, what better to write about than the invention of the weekend. As David Heinken writes in Aeon, the week is—when compared to days, months and years—a purely human invention. It has no basis in the rhythms of the solar system. Weeks, he writes are ‘fundamentally artificial’.
As a form of human timekeeping, the week is around 2,000 years old.
there is no clear evidence of any society using such cycles to track time in the form of a common calendar before the end of the 1st century CE. As the scholars Ilaria Bultrighini and Sacha Stern have recently documented, it was in the context of the Roman Empire that a standardised weekly calendar emerged out of a combination and conflation of Jewish Sabbath counts and Roman planetary cycles. The weekly calendar, from the moment of its effective invention, reflected a union of very different ways of counting days.
The week emerged from several different types of timekeeping: it breaks days into seven different types, based on astrology; it splits working days from non-working days; it separates out one set of time from another; it schedules group activities, such as weekly food markets.
But Heinken argues that it’s the split into different types of days that has become most important in the last two hundred years.
With the rise of wage labour in the northern and western US, for example, Saturday night became more than just the end of the working week; it was also payday, generating patterns of consumption, commercial leisure and material security that shaped the distinctive feel of each of the intervening days of the cycle. Saturday itself also became a kind of half-holiday in the US over the course of the century. Teachers and students often had Saturdays entirely off, as did many office workers.
As the century wore on, labour unions won the same rights for other workers.
The doubling of the weekend probably sharpened the tick-tock rhythm of special days and mundane ones, especially since the formal expansion of Sunday to include Saturday replaced the informal bleeding of Sunday into Monday that had characterised many preindustrial work cultures.
The rise of printed diaries (and, I’m guessing, the rise of literacy) during the century also made the idea of the week more prominent.
Increasingly and pervasively, Americans were applying the technology of the seven-day count to the project of scheduling. Some of these schedules emerged in work settings, specifically schools and housekeeping... And as new norms of hygiene and respectability took hold in middle-class households, domestic manuals began prescribing weekly schedules for core housekeeping tasks: washing on Mondays, ironing on Tuesdays, baking on Wednesdays.
And Heinken doesn’t mention it, but there’s a bit more cultural evidence here. The traditional English song ‘Dashing away with the smoothing iron’ was also written in the 19th century’.
Scheduling also became more important for activities outside of the home during the century—the ability to know that your ‘fraternal lodge’ would meet on the second Tuesday of the month, for example, or theatre managers scheduling a matinee on a particular day of the week. In effect, it became a way of managing the impersonality of urban life, and of greater social complexity.
And when you track social evidence across the 19th century, you can see that the idea of ‘days of the week’ becomes more socially embedded:
(O)rdinary people shifted their mental maps during the early 19th century in a way that privileged the week over other timekeeping units. We can detect this shift in the blank-book diaries they kept, which increasingly identified the weekday at the top of each entry... We can glimpse these new mental maps in the way that trial witnesses recalled with far greater confidence and accuracy the day of the week, as opposed to the date of the month, when an event occurred – often citing a regular weekly habit or practice as the basis of their recollections – or in the inclination of correspondents to use the weekly calendar to recount developments in their lives.
—
(August Muller, Liebesgluck—der Tagebucheintrag (‘Diary entry’). 1885. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
One of the results of all of this is that the idea of the week becomes increasingly embedded. One of the striking bits of evidence that Heinken brings to this is that it exists in utopian and dystopian literature of the period—as if people couldn’t imagine a different way of managing time. Other schemes to recognise days in a more rational way—as in the Soviet Union—failed:
US businesses starting in the late 19th century promoted calendar-reform schemes designed to eliminate the bookkeeping inefficiencies caused by the recalcitrant seven-day cycle (the only timekeeping unit that does not fit neatly into a larger one). Shortly thereafter, Soviet economic planners, objecting to the way a coordinated weekend prevented continuous factory production, introduced shorter working weeks and assigned different segments of the population to different weekly schedules. All of these plans failed.
All the same, it took most of the 20th century for this to spread through the rest of the world, in particular to Asia:
Many factors contributed to the week’s relatively recent spread to places (such as East Asia) that had never seen fit to count seven-day cycles. Crucially, the week’s global reach reflects the increasing interconnectedness of the world’s rural majority with capitalist economic circuits, consolidated colonial states and expanded transportation networks, all of which exposed new populations to previously irrelevant calendar rhythms.
But at the same time as the week was exported to the world, the rhythms of the week were also breaking down, first by notions of 24/7 economic life, and amplified by the pandemic, which maybe loosened the grip of this relatively modern construct:
‘Just remember,’ as Eric Jarosinski put the point cleverly on Twitter in 2018, ‘Tuesday has always been a grand, yet failed social experiment. And always will be.’
2: The World Photography Awards
It’s that time of year when the Sony World Photography Awards are announced. They are genuinely global, and of a fabulous standard. There’s a physical exhibition in London at Somerset House next month, but all of the winners are online, and worth exploring.
As Colossal reported, there were a
whopping 340,000 entries for its 2022 competition, with subject matter spanning from the magical landscapes of Turkey to an intimate portrait of Burmese siblings. Approximately 170,000 of those original submissions fall under the contest’s National Awards category, which recently announced the top images. The winning collection offers a varied and striking look at the state of contemporary photography and a broader consideration of culture, documenting both the serendipitous and composed sights from 62 countries around the globe.
I’ve shared one image here—all rights protected, of course—which won a national award for Portraiture. It’s by Metha Meiryna.
You can explore the whole thing here.
Notes from readers
This time last week I wrote a piece about the so-called ‘pyjamafication’ of children’s literature—in particular about conflicts over the way that the Holocaust was portrayed in books used in schools. Nick Wray sent me a podcast from BBc Sounds (I hope this also works for non-UK readers) by the writer Jon Ronson on America’s “school textbook wars”, which Ronson describes as “now so pervasive, with a gravitational pull that it feels that few things can escape them.” And Ronson ends up as a bit player in the story.
j2t#278
If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.