ABSTRACT
Much anthropological discussion is couched in terms of a pervasive opposition between ‘Westerners’ and other, ‘non-Western’ people. Amongst other things, it is argued that Westerners have a specific attitude to time and work that is not shared by people in nonWestern societies. I want to propose here that while the concepts of time and work have indeed acquired specific meanings through their implication in such key historical transitions as the rise of capitalism and the growth of industrial manufacture, there is nevertheless a sense in which none of us are Westerners, and that the challenge that non-Western perspectives present to Western modes of apprehension exists at the very heart of our own society, in the mismatch between our shared experience of dwelling in the lived-in world and the demands placed on us by external structures of production and control that seem to leave only a residual space, divorced from culture and social life, where we can truly be ourselves.
