What can different cultures teach about boredom?

By William Park

10 December 2020

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20201209-what-can-different-cultures-teach-about-boredom

In Niger, young men counter the “weight of boredom” by drinking tea together. For them, it’s better to
live in the here and now, and enjoy what is coming in the immediate future.

A dozen or so young men wait, some playing cards or chatting

around a fire. It’s a scene from any street in Niger over the
past three decades. One, the “tea man”, attends a small metal
kettle on hot coals. He is responsible for the long and
laborious process of brewing his group’s, or fada’s,
gunpowder green tea. It’s the reason they have gathered.

The men give their fada a name, which they often paint on the
wall by which they gather along with murals of tea pots. The
names they choose to call themselves can speak of the hopes
and aspirations the men have for their futures. Names like
“Money Kash”, “Lune de Miel” [Honeymoon] or “Brooklyn
Boys”. Others hype up their members (“Top Star Boys”) or
reiterate their religiousness (“Imani” [faith]). Some – like “Boss
Karate” – are named after shared interests. A few speak to the
challenges facing the men: one fada is called “MDR”, which
stands for manger-dormir-recommencer [to eat-to sleep-to
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restart]; another is “L’internationale des Chrômeurs” [The
International Unemployed].

Waiting for tea helps unemployed groups of men cope with boredom (Credit: arabianEye FZ
LLC/Alamy)

In the 1990s, groups of college students began to gather in

the street to strike in protest at the government, asking for
political reform. Soon the groups became useful for sharing
news, exchanging views and making connections. Brewing
tea was a natural addition. The political motivation for fadas
slowly faded over the next three decades, being replaced by a
kind of silent protest – the protest of people who are bored in a
country with a badly struggling economy. By choosing to
gather in the streets around a kettle rather than indoors, the
men are a visual sign of the health of the nation. They wait for
the kettle to boil and for their futures to improve.

“[Young Nigerien men say] ‘zaman kashin wando’, which

literally means ‘the sitting that kills the pants’. It’s a phrase that
describes the immobility one feels when your future is on hold.
Hausa is a highly metaphorical language; ‘to kill actually
means here ‘to wear out’,” said Adeline Masquelier, a
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professor of cultural anthropology at Tulane University,
Louisiana. “It refers to the fact that all the sitting they do during
their waking hours wears out the parts of the pants they sit on.
Young men refer to themselves as ‘masu kasin wando’ (‘those
who have worn out pants’) – it is a self-derogatory
expression.”

Their aspirations are fairly ordinary: to secure a job; to marry;

to start a household. One leads to the other; marriage is
unlikely if the young man has no means of income. When jobs
are scarce, the only alternative is to wait. Scholars refer to the
wasted time before adulthood, in Niger and in others places
like India, as “waithood”. These unemployed youths are not
fully adults. Instead they are bored and stuck in limbo, and so
fill their time with tea.

In Niger, the names of fadas speak to the hopes and aspirations of young men (Credit: arabianEye
FZ LLC/Alamy)

Why we have boredom

In her book How Emotions Are Made, professor of psychology

at Northeastern University Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that
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emotions are not universal – there is no one experience of
fear or happiness or anger that everyone shares. Instead,
emotions are shaped by our cultural and social background,
and sometimes the words we use to describe them.

Because of the subtle differences that our language makes in

how we perceive emotions, it’s not trivial that the French word
for boredom – ennui – evokes creative listlessness, while the
German – langeweile, a compound of “long” and “time” – is
more literal. In Russian-speaking countries, boredom is skuka,
an onomatopoeic word for the sound a chicken makes.
There’s also kukovat, the Russian for “cuckoo”, which means
“to waste one’s time”. People take inspiration for words from
the things around them.

Langeweile seems to predate the English “boredom” by a few

decades, coming into use some time in the early 19th
Century. This is timely because some historians suggest that
boredom did not exist before then – at least not in the sense
that we know it. In order to be bored you had to have a reason
to be bored and have an awareness of time. For labouring
classes this was not a problem. There was always work to be
done and no great stress about observing strict times. Some
jobs were better done in the morning but being more specific
than that was not necessary.

Yasmine Musharbash, head of anthropology at the Australian

National University, says boredom started as a specifically
Western feeling. Scholars refer to “modern boredom” as the
type that came into being around the Industrial Revolution. At
this time, observing “clock time” became much more
important. In the steam age, trains ran to a schedule.
Suddenly, as public transport boomed in popularity, the need
to know where to be and at what time was important.
Likewise, for labourers in factories, clocking on and off was
necessary. This was the beginning of shift working.

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Clock time was being imprinted on the lives of Westerners,
bringing with it “spare time”, and, for a lucky few, the money
and social connections to accompany it. Soon, Westerners
were boring themselves, and it wasn’t long before they were
taking their boredom and spreading it elsewhere.

Curing boredom

Musharbash has visited and studied the Aboriginal Warlpiri

people who live in Yuendumu, near Alice Springs in Australia’s
Northern Territory, since 1994. Each year she returns to
spend a bit more time, and over the last few decades has
noticed a change in how the generations of Warlpiri
experience boredom.

“Traditionally, and by that, I mean pre-colonisation, there

would not have been such a thing as boredom,” she said.
“Boredom is when you rub up against time. That just would
not have happened before. Because of colonisation and how
the day is structured – school bells, work times – time
becomes a straitjacket.” Imposing time on the Warlpiri way of
life has confused things, and increasingly younger generations
are adopting the routines of European Australians.

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The way Warlpiri people experience boredom is changing as younger generations adopt the routines
of European Australians (Credit: Julien Di Vincenzo/Alamy)

Anthropologist Victoria Burbank, a professor at the University

of Western Australia, describes that for many Aboriginal
Australians, the lifestyle of European Australians is completely
incompatible. European Australians spend enormous
energy training their kids to go to bed whereas Aboriginal
parents do not.

“Bedtime trains us for work and makes us good workers,” said

Mushrabash. “We learn that certain things need to be done at
certain times. It is a pretty brutal lesson, but it is a way of
accepting that time is the boss of you.”

Musharbash says that Aboriginal Australians have become

“oppressed” by time. However, to alleviate boredom, they can
try to escape this oppression. “If you live in the present there
is no oppression, [time] unfolds and just happens,” said
Musharbash. “You have a snooze, or you go hunting, or
prepare food, or sit around a fire and tell stories. And you talk
about stuff and come up with deep and fascinating
philosophies, you have endless time to do that.” The need to
use spare time well disappears if you are not worried about a
clock ticking down until you next need to work.

As with pre-19th-Century Europe, we cannot know whether

the feeling of boredom in the Warlpiri community predates the
word. Although clearly, from Musharbash’s experience, older
generations have less to do with boredom – whether they feel
it or dislike it – the further they are removed from European
lifestyles. “Not everyone sleeps at the same time, you sleep
when you need it, then you start chatting and getting hungry –
there is literally nothing that tells you that you have to do
anything,” she said. “It is very hard for Westerners to imagine.”

The key to the future 

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The freedom from time that Musharbash and Masquelier
observed in the Warlpiri community and people of Niger has
also been seen in other non-Western cultures. What unites
everyone, though, is some of the unhealthy ways with which
we deal with too much time. When time gets too heavy then
people, no matter where they’re from, tend to engage in killing
time – which as a rule can be quite destructive, said
Musharbash. People binge on TV, food or alcohol, gambling
and drugs.

Tea shows Niger men that it's better to live in the now (Credit: Tuul and Bruno Morandi/Alamy)

In Niger, young people are often described as holding the key

to the nation’s future. “Educated samari [young Nigerien men]
feel particularly victimised by joblessness given the
prevalence of male breadwinner norms,” said Masquelier,
because their schooling was prioritised over their sisters’.
While unemployed, “they are forced to live in a diminished
existence in which there can be no time off since time is never
on in the first place,” she said.

The young Nigeriens interviewed by Masquelier describe time

as an “emptiness that they try to ‘fill’ or ‘kill’”. The Hausa word
that we would translate into English as boredom is “rashi”,
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which means “a lack of” – as in “rashin da’di”, or “a lack of
pleasure/satisfaction”. Boredom in Niger is about absence. If,
as Musharbash says, killing time is destructive, to be
productive they have to fill it. And that’s the purpose of their
teatime.

“Tea drinking caught us like a virus,” one young Nigerien

explained. “Tea is our drug,” said another.

The tea man who compared the drink to a drug was

highlighting easily time can be wasted on something negative
like the addictions Musharbash mentions. For these men, tea
drinking has become a way to take back control of their time.
Their time is no longer purposeless; it is social, collaborative
and positive.

Niger men choose to gather in the streets around a tea kettle rather than indoors (Credit:
Reuters/Alamy)

Masquelier says that teatime absorbs young Nigerien men in

the “now”. The slow process fights two anxieties for the young
men. On the one hand, they have something to look forward
to; they want the tea to be ready. On the other, they can busy
themselves with the fastidious process. The alternative would

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be to drop one tea bag into a cup and to make the tea on their
own – but where is the fun in that?

Waiting for tea, alongside playing cards or backgammon, “is a

purposeful form of engagement that counters the oppressive
weight of boredom by grounding those who wait in the here
and now,” she said. It gives them something small to fix their
attention on, rather than the bigger long-term goal of
employment.

The tea men show that it is fine to have grand ambitions, but
to cope with boredom, it is better to live in the now and enjoy
what is coming in your immediate future.