Editorial: Contesting seasonal orders – polyrhythmic seasons in a time of change

What the paper says

In changeable times, seasons can feel like dependable coordinates for dividing up the year and setting order to annual cycles, providing reference points to tell the time and organise society's activities. Seasons have come to be institutionalised temporal patterns and symbol systems, as ubiquitous and taken-for-granted as language, and held in place by history, culture, routines and norms as well as science – to the point they become seen as natural categories. This editorial introduces a special issue that seeks to problematise this understanding of seasons as laws of nature, arguing that it overlooks the cultural origins of seasonal categories, glosses over their contestedness and precludes a meaningful discussion of how seasons are varying and changing for societies. Societies today live by different seasons than they have in history. Facing accelerating global changes – in climate or globalisation for instance – some societies feel they no longer recognise familiar framings of seasons, and some seek to create seasonal categories anew. The seven papers in this issue encourage readers to consider seasons as ‘polyrhythmic cultural frameworks’ – as the patterns people perceive in tangles of multiple rhythms – and as undergoing constant renewal and evolution across different levels of society and at different timescales. The articles give accounts of encounters between different seasonal patterns – how they clash or sync or run in parallel – and how seasonality is renegotiated through these encounters. This editorial draws on the contributions to the special issue to first describe seasons as polycentric cultural frameworks, and using that concept, to lay out 10 ways in which seasons are under-going rapid change.