Night: Cultural Patterns and Behavioral Particularities

With our entrance into history, the imagination has nourished and diversified the fear of the night, the fear of darkness, of everything hidden that could be suddenly revealed. The ancient, secret creatures of our imagination, which have nourished and shaped civilizations and beliefs, eventually gave way to new options for colonizing nighttime, as technology became useful in fully taming the dark. The city became the tool for the nocturnal reshaping of our behavior, preoccupations, imagination, and beliefs.

The taming of night through the city, the dialogue with its intimate mechanisms that have shaped our humanity and every form of civilization, is a recent presence. The story of the nocturnal city also represents an ongoing confrontation between the desires of hidden, darkness-loving behavior (the world of criminals, thieves, social misfits – everything the day seeks to heal) and the extension of certain daily concerns for which daytime no longer offers enough time. Here we also refer to certain professions, including those linked to the leisure industry.

Beyond the extension of daytime into the night, with lit-up cities and colorful, attractively noisy crowds (a collective fear of the sublimated silence of darkness?), consumers of the different, there remains a hidden desire to explore impulses that the day does not fully allow or prefers to forget. Night offers a mysterious feeling of insecurity, hidden in our distant ethology, and this relationship between mystery and fear has never been entirely removed.

In another historical sense, Night has provided the opportunity to create useful avatars for those who hoped to know themselves, to (re)become, to change, to fulfill, or to destroy themselves, taking night as their ally. From another historical angle, it’s well known that revolutions take place during the day, while coups – favoring tyrannies – prefer the night.

The city may have pulled us out of mythology and folklore, yet the souls of the night remain very active presences, with echoes in contemporary literature and cinema. Darkness-loving demons, vampirism, lycanthropy, and all kinds of evildoers are favorite themes in today’s cultural consumption.

Returning to our topic: humanity has attempted to defeat darkness and shorten the period it occupies in our lives. The city has diversified technology so much that, over the last hundred years, night has surrendered much of its early hours. Humans have pushed the daytime deep into the night, which at first glance has extended work or entertainment hours. Certain nighttime professions have even developed, and some people are convinced that they work best during the night.

In recent generations, humans have given night a new meaning. Entertainment and nighttime activities have a different emotional impact compared to daytime ones. The nervous system doubles its activity during the night – an inheritance from ancient times when heightened reflexes were vital for survival. Now, we use those reflexes to explore sensory refinement. All these changes are owed to urban life.

Sleep time remains an important factor in human evolution. For tens of thousands of years, humans have divided life into balanced time zones, distinguishing between day and night, between active life and rest. Our body is thus calibrated to develop within this balance. Prolonged reduction of nighttime leads to increased risks of both physical illness and psychological imbalance. Recovery is often very difficult.

In the future, humans will tend to control this time balance and adapt to day and night depending on their profession or the society in which they live. Technology will be created to help facilitate this adaptation.

The Diurnal-Nocturnal Alternation

We currently live in an increasingly artificial world. Electricity and modern lighting systems allow us to continue our activities both day and night, without being “slaves” to sunlight. We can now travel to the other side of the globe in a matter of hours – something unimaginable at the beginning of the last century.

Yet, the human being (like most animals) has an internal “biological clock” synchronized with the rhythm of day and night. The human brain has the capacity for alternating states of consciousness.

Still, this biological clock may not remain absolute forever. In the near future, people may be able to stop this biological mechanism using technology.

Nocturnal behavior in organisms is characterized by activity during the night (Latin nocturnus, French nocturne). But a nocturnal lifestyle may also result from certain jobs or careers, an active social life, or even be a symptom of illness. The urban environment, however, creates the conditions for a universe in which everything is in a continuous daytime state.

Shift work is potentially “harmful,” “strenuous,” or “exceptional”. Identifying the types of risks associated with alternating shifts – especially night shifts – is essential, as they may contribute to maladjustment or difficulty adapting to work demands. Physiologically, alternating shifts disrupt the alignment between biological rhythms and imposed schedules – i.e., between the natural times the body is used to being active and those demanded by work schedules.

This leads to an inevitable dependence on the purest biological clock: the circadian rhythm – cyclical changes over 24 hours in various biochemical, physiological, psychophysiological, and behavioral parameters: the wake-sleep cycle; activation-deactivation states; body temperature; hormone secretion; mood; performance, etc.

Anthropologically, a challenge affecting human adaptation to alternating (especially nighttime) work schedules lies in the multiplicity of temporalities in which the individual lives – the complex interplay among them.

The human individual must face multiple and differing temporal constraints: professional, familial, social, biological, and more. Conflicts arise between biological time, psychological time, social time, and technical-economic work schedules – between working time and non-working time.

Thus, we are currently one step ahead of the adaptive options that the body can naturally support within our historical time. Possible genetic modifications resulting from the pressure to change aspects of the diurnal-nocturnal cycle may emerge over several generations, especially as technological progress accelerates.

To conclude, the avatars of the nocturnal city offer a brief introduction to the social and cultural phenomena tied to night-time life, or inspired by it – some with primordial roots, many nourished by the historic time of urban living. These topics are difficult to fully grasp or pin down in relation to the concept of night-time.

What we will explore together, through this topic, is and will remain an open field for anyone interested in studying and researching night-time history and the everyday life shaped by each night, across generations.

Adrian Majuru

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The Editorial Team of the Journal of Urban Anthropology