Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-qsmjn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T19:27:56.110Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Culture inside: Scale, intimacy, and chronotopic stance in situated narratives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2020

Sonya E. Pritzker Open the ORCID record for Sonya E. Pritzker [Opens in a new window]  and
Sabina Perrino
Sonya E. Pritzker*
Affiliation:
University of Alabama, USA
Sabina Perrino
Affiliation:
Binghamton University (SUNY), USA
*
Address for correspondence: Sonya E. Pritzker University of Alabama, Department of Anthropology 350 Marr's Spring Road Tuscaloosa, Alabama35487, USAsepritzker@ua.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article focuses on what we define as scalar intimacy in the stories people tell about their embodied experience as sociohistorical beings. Our analysis, based on ethnographic studies in Northern Italy (Perrino) and Beijing, China (Pritzker), examines the ways in which speech participants draw upon various discursive strategies to ‘zoom in’ and ‘pan out’ of both time and space, placing themselves and their activities in relation to various people, ideologies, and practices. Scalar intimacy, we argue, provides a novel framework for understanding the multiple ways in which people use language to scale their embodied experience in relation to culturally situated ideas and forms. Scalar intimacy thus extends the study of scales and fractal recursivity in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. It also contributes to scholarship focusing on how culturally situated meanings are reproduced and challenged over time through specific interactions. (China, chronotope, identity, intimacy, narrative, Northern Italy, scales)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , June 2021 , pp. 365 - 387
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This article is based on research conducted in Northern Italy by Sabina Perrino and Gregory Kohler and in China by Sonya Pritzker. Sabina Perrino offers her deepest thanks to the many speakers in Northern Italy who agreed to be video- and audio-recorded for this project and who assisted her during her linguistic anthropological fieldwork. Perrino's material presented in this article was supported by research funds offered to her by the University of Michigan's Department of Anthropology (2009–2012). She wishes to thank Gregory Kohler with whom she collected most of the data in Northern Italian businesses and with whom she has been working on this project. Sonya Pritzker would like to thank the many teachers and participants in China who generously agreed to be interviewed, welcoming her into their homes and clinics in order to contribute to the research. She would also like to thank Kiki Liang, her research assistant over the course of this project in Beijing. Jointly, we owe our deep thanks to our diligent reviewers and to the editors of Language in Society for their insightful guidance during the writing and publication process. We are the only ones responsible for any remaining mistakes and infelicities.

References

Agha, Asif (2015). Chronotopic formulations and kinship behaviors in social history. Anthropological Quarterly 88(2):401–15.10.1353/anq.2015.0016CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1981). Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel. In Holquist, Michael (ed.), The dialogic imagination, 84–258. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Barsalou, Lawrence W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology 59:617–45.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Benjamin, Walter (1936). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. New York: Penguins Book.Google Scholar
Blanton, Ryan (2011). Chronotopic landscapes of environmental racism. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21(1):76–93.10.1111/j.1548-1395.2011.01098.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2015). Chronotopes, scales, and complexity in the study of language in society. Annual Review of Anthropology 44(1):105–16.10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014035CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, Jan, & De Fina, Anna (2017). Chronotopic identities: On the timespace organization of who we are. In Fina, Anna De, Wegner, Jeremy, & Ikizoglu, Didem (eds.), Diversity and super-diversity: Sociocultural linguistic perspectives, 1–16. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre; Accardo, Alain; & Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst (1999). The weight of the world: Social suffering in contemporary society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bradshaw, John (1990). Homecoming: Reclaiming and championing your inner child. New York: Bantam Books.Google Scholar
Briggs, Charles L. (1985). Learning how to ask. Language in Society 13(1):1–29.10.1017/S0047404500015876CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Briggs, Charles L. (1986). Learning how to ask: A sociolinguistic appraisal of the role of the interview in social science research. New York: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139165990CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Briggs, Charles L. (2007). Anthropology, interviewing, and communicability in contemporary society. Current Anthropology 48(4):551–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brockmeier, Jens (2009). Reaching for meaning: Human agency and the narrative imagination. Theory & Psychology 19(2):213–33.10.1177/0959354309103540CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruner, Jerome S. (2002). Making stories: Law, literature, life. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary, & Hall, Kira (2004). Language and identity. In Duranti, Alessandro (ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology, 369–94. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Carr, E. Summerson, & Lempert, Michael (2016). Scale: Discourse and dimensions of social life. Berkeley: University of California Press.10.1525/9780520965430CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Dan Booth (2006). ‘Family constellations’: An innovative systemic phenomenological group process from Germany. The Family Journal: Counseling and Therapy for Couples and Families 14(3):226–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Fina, Anna, & Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (2012). Analyzing narrative: Discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
De Fina, Anna, & Perrino, Sabina (2011). Introduction: Interviews vs. ‘natural’ contexts: A false dilemma. Language in Society 40(1):1–11.10.1017/S0047404510000849CrossRefGoogle Scholar
del Percio, Alfonso (2016). Branding the nation: Swiss multilingualism and the promotional capitalization on national hstory under late capitalism. Pragmatics and Society 7(1):82–103.10.1075/ps.7.1.04delCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dressler, William W. (2012). Cultural consonance: Linking culture, the individual and health. Preventative Medicine 55:390–93.10.1016/j.ypmed.2011.12.022CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Duncan, Whitney (2017). ‘Dináámicas ocultas’: Culture and psy-sociality in Oaxacan ‘family constellations’ therapy. Ethos 45(4):489–513.Google Scholar
Duranti, Alessandro (1994). From grammar to politics: Linguistic anthropology in a Western Samoan village. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan (2002). A semiotics of the public/private distinction. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13(1):77–95.10.1215/10407391-13-1-77CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gal, Susan (2016). Scale-making: Comparison and perspective as ideological projects. In Carr & Lempert, 91–111.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan, & Irvine, Judith T. (2019). Signs of difference: Language and ideology in social life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781108649209CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, James J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles (2018). Co-operative action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness (1990). He said, she said: Talk as social organization among Black children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness, & Cekaite, Asta (2018). Embodied family choreography: Practices of control, care, and mundane creativity. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gumperz, John J. (1982). Discourse strategies. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanks, William F. (1993). Metalanguage and pragmatics of deixis. In Lucy, John A. (ed.), Reflexive language: Reported speech and metapragmatics, 127–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511621031.008CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hansen, Miriam Bratu (2008). Benjamin's aura. Critical Inquiry 34(2):336–75.10.1086/529060CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herzfeld, Michael (2005/2016). Cultural intimacy: Social poetics and the real life of states, societies and institutions. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Huang, Hsuan-Ying (2014). The emergence of the psycho-boom in contemporary urban China. In Chiang, Howard (ed.), Psychiatry and Chinese history, 183–204. London: Pickering & Chatto.Google Scholar
Illouz, Eva (2008). Saving the modern soul: Therapy, emotions, and the culture of self-help. Berkeley: University of California Press.10.1525/9780520941311CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Irvine, Judith T., & Gal, Susan (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Kroskrity, Paul (ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities, 35–84. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Ivy, Marilyn (1993). Have you seen me? Recovering the inner child in late twentieth-century America. Social Text 37:227–52.10.2307/466270CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaffe, Alexandra M. (2009). Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keane, Webb (2016). Ethical life: Its natural and social histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.10.1515/9781400873593CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kitagawa, Chisato, & Lehrer, Adrienne (1990). Impersonal uses of personal pronouns. Journal of Pragmatics 14:739–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kohler, Gregory, & Perrino, Sabina (2017). Narrating ‘Made in Italy’: Brand and responsibility in Italian corporations. Narrative Inquiry 27(1):187–207.10.1075/ni.27.1.10kohCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuan, Teresa (2015). Love's uncertainty: The politics and ethics of child rearing in contemporary China. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lempert, Michael, & Perrino, Sabina (2007). Entextualization and the ends of temporality. Language & Communication 27(3):205–11.10.1016/j.langcom.2007.01.005CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lempert, Michael, & Silverstein, Michael (2012). Creatures of politics: Media, message, and the American presidency. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Link, Perry (2013). An anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, metaphor, politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.10.4159/harvard.9780674067684CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mattingly, Cheryl (2014). Moral laboratories: Family peril and the struggle for a good life. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nichols, Briana, & Wortham, Stanton (2018). Black flight: Heterogeneous accounts of Mexican immigration in a diverse community. Language & Communication 59:4–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ochs, Elinor (1994). Stories that step into the future. In Biber, Douglas & Finegan, Edward (eds.), Sociolinguistic perspectives on register, 106–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ochs, Elinor (2004). Narrative lessons. In Duranti, Alessandro (ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology, 269–89. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Ochs, Elinor (2012). Experiencing language. Anthropological Theory 12(2):142–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perrino, Sabina M. (2002). Intimate hierarchies and Qur'Anic saliva (Tëfli): Textuality in a Senegalese ethnomedical encounter. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12(2):225–59.10.1525/jlin.2002.12.2.225CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perrino, Sabina M. (2007). Cross-chronotope alignment in Senegalese oral narrative. Language & Communication 27(3):227–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perrino, Sabina M. (2011). Chronotopes of story and storytelling event in interviews. Language in Society 40(1):91–103.10.1017/S0047404510000916CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perrino, Sabina M. (2015). Chronotopes: Time and space in oral narrative. In Fina, Anna De & Georgakopoulou, Alexandra (eds.), The handbook of narrative analysis, 140–59. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Perrino, Sabina M. (2018). Exclusionary intimacies: Racialized language in Veneto, Northern Italy. Language & Communication 59:28–41.10.1016/j.langcom.2017.02.006CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perrino, Sabina M. (2020). Narrating migration: Intimacies of exclusion in Northern Italy. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Perrino, Sabina M., & Kohler, Gregory (2020). Chronotopic identities: Narrating Made in Italy across spatiotemporal scales. Language & Communication 70:94–106.10.1016/j.langcom.2019.01.003CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perrino, Sabina M., & Pritzker, Sonya E. (2021). Language and intimate relations. In Hall, Kira & Barrett, Edward (eds.), Oxford handbook of language and sexuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, to appear. Online (with access): https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212926.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190212926-e-58.Google Scholar
Pritzker, Sonya E. (2016). New age with Chinese characteristics? Translating inner child emotion pedagogies in contemporary China. Ethos 44(2):150–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pritzker, Sonya E., & Duncan, Whitney L. (2019). Technologies of the social: Family constellation therapy and the remodeling of relational selfhood in China and Mexico. Culture, Medicine, & Psychiatry 43(3):468–95.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pritzker, Sonya E., & Liang, Kiki Q. Y. (2018). Semiotic collisions and the metapragmatics of culture change in Dr. Song Yujin's ‘Chinese medical psychology’. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 28(1):43–66.10.1111/jola.12176CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pritzker, Sonya E.; Pederson;, Joshua & DeCaro, Jason A. (2020). Language, emotion, and the body: Combining linguistic and biological approaches to interactions between romantic partners. In Pritzker, Sonya E., Fenigsen, Janina, & Wilce, James M. (eds.), Routledge handbook of language and emotion, 307–24. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ricœœur, Paul (1984). Time and narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Rofel, Lisa (2007). Desiring China: Experiments in neoliberalism, sexuality, and public culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Sabsay, Leticia (2016). Permeable bodies: Vulnerability, affective powers, hegemony. In Butler, Judith, Gambetti, Zeyneyp, & Sabsay, Leticia (eds.), Vulnerability in resistance, 278–302. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah (1996). Narrative as self-portrait: Sociolinguistic constructions of identity. Language in Society 25(2):167–203.10.1017/S0047404500020601CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seligman, Rebecca (2018). Mind, body, brain, and the conditions of meaning. Ethos 46:397–417.10.1111/etho.12207CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (1998). Improvisational performance of culture in realtime discursive practice. In Keith Sawyer (ed.), Creativity in performance, 265–312. Greenwich, CT: Ablex.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (2005). Axes of evals. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):6–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael, & Urban, Greg (1996). Natural histories of discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Snodgrass, Jeffrey G.; Franççois Dengah;, H. J. & Lacy, Michael G. (2014 ). ‘I swear to god, I only want people here who are losers!’ Cultural dissonance and the (problematic) allure of Azeroth. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 28(4):480–501.10.1111/maq.12116CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stasch, Rupert (2011). Textual iconicity and the primitivist cosmos: Chronotopes of desire in travel writing about Korowai of West Papua. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21(1):1–21.10.1111/j.1548-1395.2011.01080.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strauss, Claudia, & Quinn, Naomi (1997). A cognitive theory of cultural meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Streeck, Jüürgen; Goodwin, Charles; & LeBaron, Curtis D. (2011). Embodied interaction: Language and body in the material world. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah (2007). Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511618987CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Charles (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Urban, Greg, & Urban, Jessica (2020). Affect in the circulation of cultural forms. In Pritzker, Sonya E., Fenigsen, Janina, & Wilce, James M. (eds.), Routledge handbook of language and emotion, 75–99. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Webster, Anthony K. (2015). Intimate grammars: An ethnography of Navajo poetry. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Google Scholar
Webster, Anthony K. (2020). Poetry and emotion: Poetic communion, ordeals of language, intimate grammars and complex remindings. In Pritzker, Sonya E., Fenigsen, Janina, & Wilce, James M. (eds.), Routledge handbook of language and emotion, 182–202. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wilce, James M. (1998). Eloquence in trouble: The poetics and politics of complaint in rural Bangladesh. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wilce, James M. (2001). Divining troubles, or divining troubles? Emergent and conflictual dimensions of Bangladeshi divination. Anthropological Quarterly 74(4):190–200.10.1353/anq.2001.0040CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilce, James M. (2003). Social and cultural lives of immune systems. London Routledge.10.4324/9780203404515CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilce, James M., & Fenigsen, Janina (2016). Emotion pedagogies: What are they, and why do they matter? Ethos 44(2):81–95.10.1111/etho.12117CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Raymond (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wirtz, Kristina (2007). Enregistered memory and Afro-Cuban historicity in Santeríía's ritual speech. Language and Communication 27(3):245–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wirtz, Kristina (2016). The living, the dead, and the immanent: Dialogue across chronotopes. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(1):343–69.10.14318/hau6.1.019CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woolard, Kathryn A. (2012). Is the personal political? Chronotopes and changing stances toward Catalan language and identity. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 16(2):210–24.10.1080/13670050.2012.720670CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woolard, Kathryn A. (2016). Singular and plural: Ideologies of linguistic authority in 21st century Catalonia. New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190258610.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wortham, Stanton (2001). Narratives in action: A strategy for research analysis. New York: Teachers College Press.Google Scholar
Wortham, Stanton, & Reyes, Angela (2015). Discourse analysis beyond the speech event. London: Routledge.10.4324/9781315735207CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, Kate (2011). The rise of the therapeutic society: Psychological knowledge and the contradictions of cultural change. Washington, DC: New Academia.Google Scholar
Yang, Jie (2018). Mental health in China: Change, tradition, and therapeutic governance. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar