"Solomon Time": negotiating its meaning in Chinese businesses in Honiara, Solomon Islands

Abstract (English)

Time is a recurrent topic of discussion between Chinese businesspeople and their indigenous employees in Honiara, the capital city of the Solomon Islands. Their different understandings of the concept of time often result in frictions that potentially escalate into conflicts with a strong impact on their lives. That is perhaps unsurprising, given the profoundly different cultural contexts in which these actors were born, grew up, and lived until recently, and the relatively sudden processes that brought them to work together in the ever-growing number of Chinese companies, enterprises, and small shops in this Melanesian capital. Another reason these frictions should not come as a surprise is the age-old recognition that "time is among the most primary categories of human thought and is social in origin just like space, cause, and number" (Mughal 2023: 4).

In Melanesian anthropology, time has been investigated from ethnographic (Smith 2016), comparative (Eräsaari, 2023; Fortis & Küchler, 2021), and critical perspectives (Munn 1992), and the same could be said of the anthropological study of time in China (Feuchtwang & Bruckermann 2016; Naydenov, 2023) and in the Chinese diaspora (Trémon, 2022). The challenge that this study faces, thus, consists of marshalling a large and ever-growing body of literature in search of analytical tools to distinguish the unique features of time confrontations, negotiations, and frictions between Chinese and Solomon Islanders in Honiara, such as, for example, the widely used concept of "Solomon Time". Simultaneously, this paper searches for conceptualisations of time that might be relatively easier to compare, such as the said concept of Solomon Time and that of another Pacific Island state, namely “Fiji Time” (Eräsaari, 2023).