Our seasonal cultures must adapt to fast-changing seasonal realities

CALENDARS was built on an idea that climatic and other changes are undermining the cultural frameworks or calendars that people use for living by seasonal rhythms.

The primstav is a traditional Norwegian stick calendar of symbols, used to mark important local days as cues for activities over the year.

Photo:

Reinsfelt, Anne-Lise, Norsk folkemuseum

Main content

Communities worldwide are critically re-examining their seasonal calendars to better adapt to fast-changing seasonal realities in the places they live. Seasonal calendars as cultural frameworks have long structured patterns of community life and provided a repertoire for living according to seasonal rhythms. Calendars evolve with environments and communities’ worldviews, values, technologies and practices affecting how people perceive seasonal patterns over the year and behave seasonally.

The problem is that communities today find themselves in a unique moment of accelerated and intersecting climatic, environmental, social, technological and cultural changes that are destabilizing their calendars as templates for timely action. There are increasing accounts of populations whose calendars no longer correspond to the seasonal rhythms they track. We see for instance farming practices disconnected from a changing climate; fishing rhythms upset by altered ocean habitats; festivals detached from an increasingly diverse society or obsolete seasonal objects under technological advancement.

Now is an important moment for communities to reflect on what seasonality means for them. The way communities reorient calendars to shifting conditions may affect whether they continue to serve as resources for living by seasonal rhythms, or lock people into maladaptive pathways. Our seasonal cultures have always been synched with those rhythms that matter to us, but where calendars are slow to change, where they are disconnected from what matters, or where they inscribe unsustainable habits, it might be time to consciously recalibrate them.

This research touched on a kaleidoscope of research fields, but perhaps most clearly started from work on the cultural side of adaptation to climate and environmental change, in communities, institutions and organisations. More particularly the project linked up to work examining the role played by cultural frameworks of time and temporality in adaptation.

A drawing of a circula calendar with the 12 months named and illustrated

Photo:

CALENDARS

What are seasons?

There are no universally agreed upon definitions of seasons.

We can read them in Earth’s tilted voyage around the sun, in annual cycles of precipitation and temperature, in the phenology of plants and activity of animals, or in societies' calendars and activities.

As CALENDARS focused on how seasons affect what people 'do' and how they adapt, the team variously began from cultural framings of seasons as practical and often-tacit knowledge.

One working definition of seasons can be:

Seasons are individuals’ and groups’ perceived patterns in yearly rhythms that they bracket into periods meaningful for them, and effect practices that maintain and change these patterns.

In human systems, seasons can be more or less formalized into calendars as frameworks for organizing and synchronizing activity over the year.

Note that this definition recognizes that seasons are not only shared systems of meaning for coordinating social activity, but that we all walk around with an individualized calendar of seasons in the back of our minds.

Note also that this definition extends to more-than-human seasons, as plants and animals track patterns of seasonal rhythms in (consciously or unconsciously) behaving seasonally.

The CALENDARS team have been asking groups to rethink the seasons and recreate traditional calendars fitted to the functions of contemporary life.

To the left, you’ll see a circular primstav drawn by a school student in Bergen in 2019.

02.07.2024