This page is referenced by:

• 1 media/First-edition-of-Daniel-c_30_f_6_fp_tp-2.jpg 2019-06-25T20:45:22-07:00 The Cross Calendar 22 plain 2019-09-26T10:37:37-07:00 Upon spending few days upon the island, Crusoe reflects:

  After I had been there about ten or twelve days, it came into my thoughts that I should lose my reckoning of time for want of books, and pen, and ink, and should even forget the Sabbath-day from the working-days; but to prevent this, I cut with my knife upon a large post, in capital letters; and making it into a great cross, I set it up on the shore where I first landed, viz., “I came on shore here on the 30th September 1659.”

  Upon the sides of this square post I cut every day a notch with my knife, and every seventh notch was as long again as the rest, and every first day of the month as long again as that long one; and thus I kept my calendar, or weekly, monthly, and yearly reckoning of time.

  Robinson Crusoe—as he recounts in the first paragraph of his narrative—is named "Robinson Kreutznaer" at birth, and his surname is later Anglicized to "Crusoe." "Kreuz" translates to "cross" in German. In addition to the religious symbolism of Crusoe's surname and its larger function in the narrative, Crusoe chooses to build a makeshift calendar upon a cross constructed of posts, onto which he tallies his time spent on the island. This autobiographical act that allows Crusoe to mark his existence upon the island, establish normalcy of routine while living on the island, and maintain a relationship with his familiar ways of measuring time in absence of his normal societal constraints. Featured below are some depictions of Crusoe and his calendar from various illustrated editions of Robinson Crusoe. 
  
  The media gallery of Robinsonades features some texts that adapt Crusoe's fashioning of the cross calendar. One of the most iconic adaptations in popular culture of Crusoe's methods of timekeeping is Cast Away (2000), where protagonist Chuck Noland maintains both a tally of the days he spends upon the island and an analemma (a diagram showing the position of the sun in the sky during different times of the year). These astronomical diagrams and calendars serve a practical purpose of tracking the position of the sun (and therefore seasons), and also provide a sense of how many years pass. Rather than serving a purely scientific purpose and equipping Robinsonade protagonists with practical information about the natural forces that surround them, however, these visualizations serve an emotional function to their creators, providing a sense of purpose and connection to the methods of timekeeping that feel familiar and are culturally important back home. These diagrams therefore serve as a connection to familiar human society, even in total isolation.
  
  But because the calendars measure the time that a protagonist spends upon the island, they are not purely objective visualizations—they necessarily revolve around their human subjects. The Robinsonade genre, therefore, reveals how no visualization is neutral, but always built from a certain standpoint and subject position. Standpoint theory argues that all knowledge stems from a social position, and its application to science and technology studies has revealed that even ostensibly objective science and scientific outputs are always operating within certain power structures and positions of authority. Robinson Crusoe as a text reveals how much of human culture is embedded in the artifacts that we create. While the novel praises modern science, astronomy, and economics, and celebrates Crusoe's triumph over unruly nature, it also points to the limitations, biases, and inaccuracies in these artifacts and systems, and how—apart of human society in complete isolation—it becomes all the more difficult to impose order upon one's surroundings and distill them into neat facts and figures.