Time and Space in Conflict

While we are working on editing, reviewing the themes, and refining what is missing from our research, I’m reading Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples by Linda Tuhiwai Smith. She discusses the “western” concept of time and space and notes that the Maori word for time and space are the same word. She states that other indigenous languages have no related word for time and space but a series of precise words for parts of these terms. This becomes an issue for me in this project since I imagine that we are studying “space” and ventured into this project with an idea that the concept of space was primarily a physical one. As we began the dialog (especially when Judge Sanders discussed the “architecture of the mind”, a far larger concept of space emerged: a concept that includes a psychological or theoretical space for community, intimacy, empathy, compassion. But even now I am beginning to wonder if we are still too narrow. Ms. Tuhiwai Smith:

Conceptions of space were articulated through the ways in which people arranged their homes and towns, collected and displayed objects of significance, organized warfare, set out agriculture fields and arranged gardens, conducted business, displayed art and performed drama, separated out one form of human activity from anther. Spatial arrangements are an important part of social life. Western classifications of space include such notions as architectural space, physical space, psychological space, theoretical space and so forth. Foucault’s metaphor of the cultural archive is an architectural image. The archive not only contains artifacts of culture, but it itself an artifact and a construct of culture. (Smith, 51.)

Is the courthouse an object of significance? A cultural artifact bearing testament to what our society has found important in different periods of time? If so what does the women’s witness room say? What does it mean when the courthouse moves away from the center of town? What is the psychological space and theoretical space that is created? What needs to be created? How is that associated with the physical space?
And then: what does it mean if time and space are the same? OJ Simpson was sentenced yesterday and I’ve seen a bunch of reports on his sentencing. Every reporter states the sentence as a different amount of time. I watched the judge announce the sentence on ESPN and without knowing the laws in Nevada, (whether or not each sentence is determinate or runs consecutive or concurrent to other sentences) I have no idea what his mandatory minimums or maximums may be. What is the relationship of time and space-- in the courtroom? Does it, as in Einstein’s Dreams, (Lightman, 1993) change when we move from the square into the courtroom? What does it mean to the passage of time when the space where we watch, or wait, or talk, or deliberate is crafted with diverse intentions which may be unrelated to the psychological or theoretical spaces?