Abstract
Human society exists in two temporal measures: While astronomical time is uniform, homogenous, quantitative and continuous, social time cannot be described in the same way, for there are days with special functions, periods of time with specific features due to the activities, meanings and associations with them, and critical dates which break up continuity. Social time has a qualitative character, a nonuniform flow - it can slow down, speed up and even stop, and it cannot be arbitrarily divided into parts.
The concept of social time suggests that time is a human creation, and social life produces different temporal structures of social phenomena together with tools and units to measure time. Despite their duration and thematic richness, the debates on social time unfairly ignore C.
Levi-Strauss's theory of synchronic time. The article considers its prerequisites, criticism and main ideas, and in particular the famous typology of "hot" and "cold" societies distinguished by the criterion of time as manifested differently in different types of social systems, with different meanings.
Societies with the same perception of historical time as our society today, i.e. considering time as a huge folder where historical events are systematized so as not to be forgotten, are called hot (and emphasize historicity). Cold societies' basic cognitive systems attempt to remain static and indifferent to change, i.e. strive to ignore historicity and externalize it as alien to them.
The author emphasizes that, when speaking of cold societies as not taking time and historicity into account, Levi-Strauss does not want to rewrite the laws of logic or physics and is merely attempting to see the world through the eyes of another culture.