The Yupno people live in a village called Gua. There are no roads leading in or out and the only other people the villagers see are the occasional missionaries, researchers or governmental health workers. Thus, their way of life hasn’t changed much, as most of the rest of the world marched into what we now perceive as a very modern society. And because of that, the Yupno people have retained their own interpretation of time, and for them, it’s all about the river. And because of that, time for them can be construed as running straight, as it does for us westerners, but only where the river runs straight. Where it kinks, so too does time.

 

In interviewing many of the people that live in Gua, the researchers found that when asked questions about the past or the future, their responses were almost always relative to their position along the river. The past was downriver, the future was upriver, regardless of which direction the river happened to be flowing.

Interestingly, the perspective of time changed for the villagers when inside their homes. There the past was represented by the doorway, and the future away from the door, which might seem counterintuitive until noting that for those that live in Gua, the doorway is always seen as downhill which is likely to promote drainage after rains; both water and time, flowing away when viewed from the vantage point of those sitting safely inside their homes.