By LUIZ MENNA-BARRETO*

Power games in the family, at school, at work and on the streets, in the construction of temporal niches

First of all, this text is a second attempt to share with the site's readers the earth is round, my proposal of thinking about the construction of a critical biology, supported by dialectics. In this effort, I hope that it will be both possible and desirable to articulate issues of our society. Secondly, adolescence is synonymous with crisis, both with sad outcomes (weakening of family ties, for example), and with success in the ongoing maturation process.

Before anyone asks about my place in an essay about adolescence, in addition to my academic qualifications, I will say that I live with my family in the rural area of ​​Mogi das Cruzes, a family composed of my partner Cláudia, myself, and two teenagers (now 13 and 16 years old) adopted by us more than 12 years ago. With both of them, we have experienced temporal conflicts that have made me think a lot about how to manage the times in question.

Two devices come into play, the TV and the cell phone, with our attempts to create a less excessive use of both, especially in the consumption of the garbage imposed by these media. I will not discuss here the countless articles published in recent times warning about the harms of excessive screen time; we advocate moderate use and, when possible, monitored by us. Conflicts arise in conversations and arguments about screen time. The biggest difficulty we face is the compulsive addiction of girls who do not accept restrictions. In addition to screens, conflicts emerge in the frequent procrastination of going to bed and doing household chores that they are responsible for.

I take flight from the everyday and venture into philosophical heights. I will initially address a topic of reflections present in the academic field on evolution. My readings on the temporalities involved in evolution can be summarized in two distinct but completely integrated planes. One plane, broader, is of a time that invites a long-range view, which deals with the origins and changes of both physical and behavioral characteristics. This plane is that of phylogenesis. The second plane, shorter, is the one in which we witness changes throughout the lives of individuals; it is the plane of ontogenesis. I propose that adolescence and its crises be understood in these two temporal dimensions, thus enabling interventions better based on updated knowledge.

It seems appropriate and necessary to introduce here a concept that is very dear to evolution scholars: the concept of niche, almost always reduced to its geographic, spatial dimension, present for example in explanations about the search for food, which accompanies and helps to analyze both the residence and the movement of species in search of new environments. These movements and consequent adaptation to new scenarios certainly constitute milestones in the evolution of species.

Here the temporal dimension of the niche clearly appears, fundamental to explaining permanence and change. In the evaluation of the temporality present in these processes, it seems to me that a theme that deserves creative incursions resides, hence the proposal of a temporal niche. One question that illustrates a change in temporality is the “option” for diurnality in some mammals and that today characterizes our species among other primates.

By exploring the preference for daytime activities and nocturnal rest, we have relied on vision as an important source of interactions with the environment, and have developed tools and written language, for example. Thus, the concept of spatial niche must be supplemented by the notion of temporal niche, which would help us better understand cases of temporal “migrations” such as diurnality in some mammals, but certainly not all of them; rats continue to be nocturnal, and our dogs and cats pay a high price to live with us – a good example of a temporal conflict, don’t you think, dear reader?

I suggest that curious readers keep a record of the activity and rest times of their animals and the humans present in the domestic environment, where the interplay between the rhythms of humans and animals in the domestic environment will clearly appear.

From now on, I will continue to focus on human temporalities, and will consider the temporalities constructed in the ontogenesis of humans since birth (and probably since gestation). Simultaneously with the long-term phylogenetic adaptations that make us diurnal beings, we also witness the construction of a fascinating phenomenon: differences in preferences for activity times among individuals.

Thus, diurnality is expressed with some diversity; some people are more morning people and others are more evening people, a diversity that can be easily measured through preference questionnaires, originally proposed by Horne and Östberg (1976) and studied by us in Brazil (Benedito-Silva et al. 1990). Based on the responses to these questionnaires with scores for each option, we can divide the population into the so-called chronotypes, with half being characterized as intermediate chronotypes, and 20% as moderate morning or evening people, with 5% being extreme morning or evening people.

Differences in preferences for daytime and nighttime activities as an object of research date back to the end of the 19th century. And in Brazil, at that time, the theme appeared in literature: Machado de Assis (1869) gives a humorous account of these differences in the short story “Luís Soares” (CF) about a convinced evening person and his temporal conflicts. Machado wrote: “To exchange day for night, said Luís Soares, is to restore the empire of nature by correcting the work of society”.

This attribution of nighttime as a natural phase of activity has not received support in the scientific environment, where it appears as a dominant idea among researchers who discuss chronotypes. According to most of these authors, who suffer from a serious lack of understanding of diversity, evening types are more prone to health problems (sleep, learning, mood, etc.), which is statistically true, but is nothing more than a superficial analysis that does not consider the process by which eveningness is constructed.

This construction is what attracts me, because it contains a bit of the ontogenetic history of individuals, and it is on this that I will invite the reader to reflect. In the popular imagination, evening people tend to be called vagrants or lazy, which coincides with the dominant prejudice in the scientific environment. The necessary task here is to call for a deeper reading that includes both the history of the species and the history of individuals, within what I am calling the temporal niche.

I invite/summon an author that I have been reading lately, the Frenchman Henri Lefebvre, especially in his posthumous work Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2019), now from the perspective of the dialectical perspective proposed there. Lefebvre writes that the identification of human temporal patterns in the most diverse environments (domestic, school, work) always reveals power games between those involved.

Thus, dear readers, timed analyses of domestic conflicts such as domestic quarrels about bedtime (and this appears in the voices of adults in more or less imposing tones) and the resistance offered by adolescents (from simple refusal to various procrastinations). In these conflicts, it is reasonable to assume the exercise of power games in this scenario. Still inspired by the writings of Henri Lefebvre, now in the pedagogical aspect, this process called by him “training” (adjustment of temporalities) can generate both accommodation and rebellion in young people, which brings me back to the theme of adolescence and the necessary dialectic.

Necessary because it serves as an invitation to better understand the temporal dimension of our existences, the evident diversity in conflicts and the resulting challenges. In addition to the new theoretical path that this theme of domestic temporalities allows us to suggest, other environments deserve this method of analysis, the school and its schedules, the factory and the office end up harboring conceptions about the temporalities involved that are possibly relevant.

*Luiz Menna-Barreto is a retired “senior” full professor of biomedical sciences at EACH-USP. He is the author of, among other books, History and Perspectives of Chronobiology in Brazil and Latin America (edusp).[https://amzn.to/4i0S6Ti]

References

Horne, JA & Östberg, I. A self-assessment questionnaire to determine morningness-eveningness in human circadian rhythms, Int J Chronobiology, 4(2):97-110, 1976.

Benedito-Silva, AA, Menna-Barreto, L., Marques, N. and Tenreiro, S. A self-assessment questionnaire for the determination of morningness-eveningness in Brazil. Chronobiology: Its role in Clinical Medicine, General Biology, and Agriculture, Part B, p. 89-98, 1990.

Lefebvre, H. “Elements de Rhythmanalyse et autres essa sur les temporalités” ed. Eterotopia, 2019. Originally published by ed. Syllepse in 1992. There is a translation into Portuguese, ed. Consequência, 2021.

Machado de Assis, in the short story “Luis Soares”, part of the work Fluminense Tales originally published in 1869.

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