Introduction
Translation stretches words, bridges times, mingles personal identities, and unsettles national languages. As it does so, it creates a distinctive medium in which connections between different places, times and people can be imagined, thought over, and felt through. (Reynolds Reference Reynolds2011, 11)
As the opening quote emphasizes, translating practices, as imprecise as they can be, have the potential to create, or imagine, new spatiotemporal realities that can be experienced and embodied in different ways and sociocultural contexts. Through translation, languages can be “unsettled,” while the translated message travels, gets transformed, and recontextualized. Through these spatiotemporal movements, the translated message undergoes continuous, dynamic alterations. As Gal (Reference Gal, Duranti, George and Riner2023, 179) has argued, “[i]n the social study of language, it has become a truism that any utterance, indeed any piece of ongoing real-time, discursive practice, whether written or oral, may be endlessly quoted, cited, recited, imitated, parodied and otherwise reported or repeated in whole or in part.” Furthermore, continues Gal (Reference Gal, Duranti, George and Riner2023, 180), “[w]e do not translate between languages, but rather among registers or genres of speech, writing, and other expressive practices,” thus liberating this practice from its classic, rigid Lockean conceptualization. For Locke, as for many of his followers, translation was (and has been) conceived more abstractly with translators who have been imagined as capable of perfectly rendering the structures and the meanings from the original language to the translated one. Within this rigid framework, ungraspable concepts and brand names, such as the Made-in-Italy one, would not be appreciated for their multiplicity of meanings and “intersemiotic” alterations (Jakobson Reference Jakobson and Brower1959).
In this article, I am inspired by a more heterogenous and scalar approach to translating practices through which scholars can examine multiple, emerging patterns as they are created, disseminated, and solidified. More specifically, I study how branding identities (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2012, Reference Nakassis2013, Reference Nakassis2016a: 68; Kohler and Perrino Reference Kohler and Perrino2017) are enacted, and translated, through various spatiotemporal frameworks. I especially focus on the Made-in-Italy branding identity as it discursively emerges in storytelling practices. In this vein, Michael Silverstein’s (Reference Silverstein, Paula and Rosman2003) notion of transduction, as referred to translating practices, is pertinent. In his 2003 chapter entitled “Translation, Transduction, Transformation: Skating ‘Glossando’ on Thin Semiotic Ice,” he wrote:
More than really translating material (in my narrowed sense), then, transducing material moves us between a source cultural system and a target one. In each system words and expressions are indexically anchored within entextualizations in-context, and we attempt to move across these. But this leads us to consider that in transduction, operating as we do in the realm of culture more frankly, there is always the possibility of transformation of the [en]textual[ized] source material contextualized in specific ways into configurations of cultural semiosis of a sort substantially or completely different from those one has started with. (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Paula and Rosman2003, 91, emphasis in original)
Thanks to this non-Saussurean, and more semiotic, model to approach (un)translationability in context, I have been able to examine the scalar movements, together with their various cultural translations, of branded-identifiers such as the Made-in-Italy Footnote 1 brand. Moreover, in his research on translation, linguist Roman Jakobson (Reference Jakobson and Brower1959) was intrigued by a more semiotic stance on this practice. For him, there were three types of translation: the intralingual translation, the interlingual translation, and the intersemiotic translation, with the latter being understudied across disciplines. Intersemiotic translation, which well espouses recent linguistic anthropological research on this topic (see, for example, Pritzker Reference Pritzker2014), offers more flexibility in practicing and experiencing translation as a semiotic resource. As Campbell and Vidal (Reference Campbell and Vidal2024) write on “experiential translation,” for example, which they consider as an extension of intersemiotic translation:
Experiential translation embraces the visibility of the translator and eschews semiotic erasures imposed by the norms and expectations of source and target cultures. As such, it aims to undo acquired knowledge and give voice not only to the sensory and affective, but to endow the natural world with the status of ‘text’ […]. Experiential translation views translation as a holistic, co-creative process of discovery and renewal in a dynamic ecological context where Western anthropocentric discourse is displaced by a pluriverse of local and global, analogue and digital, (dis)embodied voices. (Campbell and Vidal Reference Campbell and Vidal2024, 3)
Thus, intersemiotic, or experiential, translation enables researchers to study the various movements of translated messages as they travel across different modalities. In this light, an inter-scalar translation, inspired by the Jakobsonian notion (Jakobson Reference Jakobson and Brower1959), allows more flexibility in the study of identities and their frequent adjustments across scales. To trace the spatiotemporal movements and transformations of the Made-in-Italy brand, for example, I have used the Bakhtinian notion of chronotope (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1981) to study participants’ interactional moves and their multimodal reverberations in their storytelling practices. Given the heterogenous nature of chronotopic frameworks, which are scalar in nature (Koven Reference Koven2024; Perrino Reference Perrino2024; Woolard Reference Woolard2012), translating practices can emerge more clearly if considered through spatiotemporal lenses. In these cases, these transformations, or translations, are inter-scalar. Reflecting on translation as related to Chinese medicine, moreover, Pritzker emphasizes the interactional and changing nature of these practices. As she writes, “[t]he view of living translation as interactive is grounded in a sociolinguistic and anthropological understanding of interaction and co-construction as the social process by which meaning is jointly formulated” (Pritzker Reference Pritzker2014, 118). For Pritzker, translation is, indeed, living, always in the process of changing and adapting to new sociocultural and linguistic environments. In this way, translation often goes beyond language and can thus be applied to broader semiotic phenomena, as in the cases examined in this article.
In my research, I examine how executives in Northern Italian family-owned companies use their past and present narratives to (co)construct, (re)configure, or transduce, and solidify their individual and collective branding identities through their association with discourses of cultural values, shared responsibility, and various senses of authenticity. I do so by analyzing their spatiotemporal, or chronotopic, alignments in which their past and present family histories become flattened at times, by merging, and thus being transduced, into one another, while they remain separate in other instances. In the process, these executives re-contextualize (Bauman and Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990) and re-scale their branding identities to the various contexts in which they land. In this way, their identities are transformed, or translated, into more or less localized ones. After describing my theoretical framework on translating the Made-in-Italy branding identity across time and space, and after offering a brief historical background on Italian history and art, and on how ideologies of authenticity rely upon it, I turn to the analysis of three narrative examples extracted from the interviews that I conducted with two Northern Italian executives of two well-known companies in the sector of fashion, in the small town of Mantua (Mantova), and of glassmaking, in the small Venetian island of Murano (which is part of the small town of Venice [Venezia]).
Inter-scalar translation(s) in narrative practices
In my work, I conceive of translating practices as fluid and scalar phenomena and as being part of our everyday life. Within this perspective, translation involves much more than the rendition of syntactic and morphological structures from one language to another language. Translating practices frequently navigate through various levels, or scales, which are not always obvious. Following Gal’s insights (Reference Gal, Duranti, George and Riner2023, 180), which posit that translation transcends language-to-language boundaries and instead includes shifts between registers and other practices, I study how these intersemiotic alterations (Jakobson Reference Jakobson and Brower1959), or, as I name them, inter-scalar translations, happen across spatiotemporal frameworks, such as chronotopes, and scales more generally. While translating practices are scalar in nature, given the recurrent upscaling and downscaling shifts (Flowers Reference Flowers2021) that naturally happen when moving across different meanings and semiotic tokens, a scalar approach has rarely been applied in translation studies. In this article, I show how chronotopic configurations and scales are intrinsically part of these practices as they are enacted by Northern Italian executives in the three narrative examples that I analyze.
Scales, or perspectival processes (Carr and Lempert Reference Carr, Lempert, Carr and Lempert2016a; Gal Reference Gal, Carr and Lempert2016), are always present in storytelling practices across narrating and narrated events (Jakobson Reference Jakobson, Linda and Monville-Burston1957). When they tell their stories, narrators (and intervening audience members) take perspectives, or stances, not only as related to the plot of the story, or the narrated event (Jakobson Reference Jakobson, Linda and Monville-Burston1957), but also on the various interactional moves of the here-and-now of the storytelling event, or the narrating event (Jakobson Reference Jakobson, Linda and Monville-Burston1957). Though speakers are usually not aware of their scaling shifts, these discursive alterations play powerful roles in indexing individuals’ identities, ideologies, and stances. As Gal (Reference Gal, Carr and Lempert2016, 91) argues, “scaling implies positioning and, hence, point of view: a perspective from which scales (modes of comparison) are constructed and from which aspects of the world are evaluated with respect to them.” In this light, when speech participants engage in scaling practices—for example, by narrowing the imaginary boundaries of a community through the use of inclusive pronouns (we) instead of non-inclusive ones (they)—they also take certain positions, or stances, vis-a-vis the unfolding discourse such as the narrated content (the narrated event) and/or the narrating interview interaction (the narrating event). As I show in my three narrative examples, Northern Italian executives engage in significant scalar moves across spatiotemporal frameworks. Through so doing, they translate, or transform, not only the content of their stories but also their interactional stances. In their narrated event, for example, they navigate through stories about the past, present, and future, as they are related to their business and the Made-in-Italy brand more generally. In the process, however, these executives might also take stances on who can fully appreciate their products and who cannot, or is not entitled to (such as migrants or Italian citizens from migrant descent). In the narrating event, these executives often enact various degrees of intimacy while performing scalar senses of belonging to a collective identity in which the exclusiveness of the Made-in-Italy brand keeps Italians intimately connected to each other (Perrino Reference Perrino2020; Perrino and Kohler Reference Perrino and Kohler2020). Individuals can thus feel more intimate with their co-present or imaginary speech participants through their scalar moves, and this often emerges in their storytelling practices (Perrino Reference Perrino2024). An inclusive attitude can thus be translated, inter-scalarly, into an exclusionary one. As Carr and Fisher (Reference Carr, Fisher, Carr and Lempert2016) write:
scaling is a practice that can—among other things—spawn a sense of intimacy and an ethic of interrelatedness at the same time it serves projects that discriminate, individuate, and alienate […]. This is so because there is more than one pragmatics of scale: different sorts of sign activities amount to distinctive modes of scaling, each enjoying its own productive potentials. (Carr and Fisher Reference Carr, Fisher, Carr and Lempert2016, 136)
To be able to study these inter-scalar and spatiotemporal movements in narrative practices, I have been inspired by a narratives-as-practices approach (De Fina Reference De Fina and Barkhuizen2013; Ochs and Capps Reference Ochs and Capps1996) which considers narratives as performances. Through this pragmatic approach to narratives, it is possible to examine how participants scale their perspectives, and thus change, or transform, their stances or positionings, during their storytelling events, in relation to their narrated content. As it has been widely demonstrated, moreover, narrated and narrating events (Jakobson Reference Jakobson, Linda and Monville-Burston1957), or denotational and interactional texts (Silverstein Reference Silverstein and Sawyer1998), are in a continuous, dialogic relationship (Koven Reference Koven, Fina and Georgakopoulou2015; Wortham Reference Wortham2000, Reference Wortham2001). Furthermore, narrators often enact various stances while they tell their stories. This is conceivable thanks to the intrinsic, scalar nature of narratives: narrators and audience members (co)construct their stories by shifting their positionalities across time and space. Through so doing, participants engage in scalar moves by offering or imposing similar or contrasting perspectives related not only to the content of the story (the narrated event), but also to the ongoing interaction (the narrating event) (Perrino Reference Perrino2024).
As my three narrative excerpts show, through these inter-scalar transformative acts, Northern Italian executives (co)constructed an overall sense of intimacy and connectedness with their co-nationals with whom they assumed to share a historical and artistic background. In their narratives, as I show, Northern Italian executives frequently shift back and forth between past and present, often anchoring those temporal distinctions within spatial dimensions. They resort to multiple temporalities in the past by re-invoking historical facts that are key to the construction of what they sense is authentic, and thus unchangeable and irreplicable, about their company. In this way, these executives invoke chronotopes of authenticity. While the Bakhtinian notion of chronotope, literally “time-space” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1981), has been developed creatively and extensively across many disciplines, still today it remains a resourceful analytic tool to study the spatiotemporal dimensions of human interactional dynamics, including their storytelling practices. Since the early 2000s, linguistic anthropologists have applied the malleable concept of the chronotope widely and creatively, studying how space and time interweave in interactions (Agha Reference Agha2007, Reference Agha2015; Dick Reference Dick2010; Divita Reference Divita2014; Harkness Reference Harkness2015; Koven Reference Koven2013, Reference Koven2023; Perrino Reference Perrino2007, Reference Perrino2011, Reference Perrino, Fina and Georgakopoulou2015, Reference Perrino2022; Perrino and Kohler Reference Perrino and Kohler2020; Wirtz Reference Wirtz2016; Woolard Reference Woolard2012, Reference Woolard2016, to mention just a few). For example, Agha (Reference Agha2015) has applied this concept to the construction of intimacy in kinship relations. As he writes:
“[P]articipants in social practices around the world routinely invoke the idiom of kinship to perform or construe interpersonal behaviors, whether their own or of those they meet or try to imagine. In doing so, they inhabit kin-like relationships with persons or groups that are sometimes nearby in time and place (such as their interlocutors), and sometimes quite far (such as the dead or the unborn). The social-semiotic practices through which people inhabit these relations are kinship behaviors whose participants rely on chronotopic formulations of place, time, and personhood (Agha Reference Agha2007) in order to become recognizable to each other as social beings of specific kinds, whether as persons already belonging to, or as persons hoping to avoid, group-specific historical trajectories in relation to others.” (Agha Reference Agha2015, 402)
Place, time, and personhood are key elements in my data, as family ties and relationships strongly emerged in my interviews with Northern Italian executives. Chronotopes, moreover, have been recently analyzed as perspectival, or scalar, spatiotemporal frameworks (Koven Reference Koven2024; Perrino Reference Perrino2024; Woolard Reference Woolard2012, Reference Woolard2016). Woolard (Reference Woolard2012, 2) for example, writes that the “[c]hronotope is thus a particular version of the general notion of ‘scale’” in the sense that chronotopic configurations always have a scalar dimension which can be more or less nuanced. Indeed, chronotopes can have more or less resonance; they can be more or less evident; they can entail more or less interactional moves. A cross-chronotope alignment (Perrino Reference Perrino2007), as I have demonstrated, usually incorporates two main chronotopes which are aligned, interactionally and/or denotationally in the interactional framework. These particular alignments are also possible thanks to various shifts in perspectives, or scalar moves. This is why, as Woolard (Reference Woolard2012) contended, chronotopes and scales overlap most of the times. Put it simply, chronotopes are scalar (Perrino Reference Perrino2024).
Translating branding identities
Often referred to as the crib of the Renaissance, Italy promotes art and history as centerpieces of Italian culture and identity. The numerous medieval churches, Renaissance palaces, and ancient Roman ruins in the Italian landscape often create an “aura” that infuses a high regard for Italy’s rich artistic history. This aura is believed to emerge from other aspects of Italian sociocultural life, thus becoming—as many of my interviewees emphasized—part of Italy’s “cultural DNA” (Perrino Reference Perrino2020). These artistic and historical values have been also transduced (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Paula and Rosman2003) into Italy’s business sector, often through ideological associations with the “Made in Italy” brand. In my narrative analysis, I demonstrate how some northern Italian executivesFootnote 2 inter-scalarly translated the Made-in-Italy brand, which they often attached to their businesses, through several spatiotemporal shifts. Furthermore, my analysis shows how these individuals significantly enacted senses of authenticity with respect to their companies. In so doing, they moved across time and space and thus inhabited chronotopic stances while building a collective sense of connection with their co-citizens. This is how collective, intimate identities are (co)constructed, solidified, and transformed in Northern Italy.
I study how executives in northern Italian family-owned companies use their past and present narratives to (co)construct, (re)configure, and solidify their individual and collective branding identities through their association with discourses of cultural values, shared responsibility, and their invocation of chronotopes of authenticity. I do so by analyzing their spatiotemporal, or chronotopic, alignments in which their past and present family histories become flattened at times, by merging into one another, while they remain separate in other instances. In the process, these executives re-contextualize, and thus translate and transform, their branding identities by adapting them to the various contexts in which they land. As many of these northern Italian executives have emphasized, Italy’s history and art permeate many aspects of Italian sociocultural life, including the business world, and are even presented as becoming part of Italy’s “cultural DNA” (Kohler and Perrino Reference Kohler and Perrino2017).
Furthermore, as Nakassis (Reference Nakassis2012, Reference De Fina and Barkhuizen2013, Reference Nakassis2016a: 68) argues: “[t]here is a tension and gap between any brand token (or instance) and the type (or identity) to which it belongs and hence between both token and type and the very ontology that such types stand under.” It is precisely this tension that I study in the (co)construction, circulation, and transduction of northern Italian executives’ branding identities into more localized brand-tokens. In this vein, a well-known brand such as Made-in-Italy, which is recognized across the globe, can be scaled, and translated, into a more localized, and thus solidified, “Made-in-Town” or even “Made-in-a-small-island” branding identity, such as “Made-in-Venice” or even “Made-in-Murano” for specialized glassmaking companies. In the process, however, these executives emphasize the uniqueness of their company whose products can be fully appreciated only by their co-citizens (of Italian descent) who share the same history, artistic patrimony, language(s), and aspirations.
These fluid branding identities, moreover, are part of a scalar process that Donzelli (Reference Donzelli2023, 436 my emphasis) has recently named “place-branding; namely, the application to nations, regions, cities, or even neighborhoods of marketing strategies of product differentiation aimed at enhancing the value, reputation, desirability, and competitiveness of a specific locale.” Besides telling stories about their companies, the Northern Italian executives that I interviewed translated their stories about their own historical and traditional backgrounds, their extended families, their friends, and their locations through the many scalar shifts that they enacted. These executives thus align their corporate narratives, family histories, and branding identities with circulating ideologies on the significance of Made-in-Italy across scalar chronotopic configurations. They not only blended time and space by making family histories and traditions part of their here-and-now interactions through various discourse strategies (Gumperz Reference Gumperz1982), but they also navigated through different temporal and spatial scales as they transduced and enacted both their individual and collective identities while their stories unfolded.
Besides the performance of their individual and collective branding identities, my analysis also unveiled how northern Italian executives’ ideologies are reinforced, re-entextualized (Bauman Reference Bauman1977, Reference Bauman2004), shared, and (re)circulated not only across the Italian business world but in Italian society, and across the globe, more generally. The scalarity of these processes thus becomes very significant also thanks to the malleability, or transformability, of the Made-in-Italy branding identity, which navigates across more or less globalized and localizes scales. Speech participants’ emerging branding identities are thus intimately connected with an imagined Made-in-Italy trademark as a form of national branding that serves to boost the nation’s position in the global marketplace. As my three examples show, through their efforts to link a historical, artistic and cultural patrimony to the present identities and families of their companies, Italian executives index, and thus reinforce, the “schema of cultural knowledge,” in Silverstein’s (Reference Silverstein2013) terms, that surrounds the Made-in-Italy brand. In this way, Italian companies enroll Italy’s art history going back to the Renaissance as a basis for the perceived creativity and authenticity of the Made in Italy brand today, especially as related to small businesses and their relationship to Italian capitalism (Kohler and Perrino Reference Kohler and Perrino2017). Clusters of small-scale family firms in Central and Northern Italy have always elevated and maintained this vision of Made in Italy (Blim Reference Blim1990; Yanagisako Reference Yanagisako2002). Italian executives have shown their commitment in (co)constructing, defending, and maintaining Made-in-Italy as their national brand (Del Percio Reference Del Percio2016) as if it were a treasure to be passed through generations. In this respect, the Made in Italy brand functions as a type of national branding, which Del Percio (Reference Del Percio2016, 86) defines as “a governmental strategy transforming the nation into a commodity that can be branded to successfully position the nation internationally.”
Translating Made-in-Italy
In the following section, I analyze three narrative excerpts from two interviews drawn from a pool of 150 interviews that I have conducted with Northern Italian executives since 2011. I interviewed two executives of two well-known Northern Italian companies specializing in fashion and glassmaking respectively. These participants’ enactment of a collective “Italian culture” of art, design, and imagination rooted in a supposedly Italian DNA has been a recurrent pattern in most of my interviews and conversations with them. As I show in my analysis, speech participants’ collective branding identities emerge through the performance of some discursive strategies, such as the use of specific past tenses (the historical past [passato remoto] and the imperfect tense [imperfetto]), deictics (personal subject and object pronouns); discourse markers (Schiffrin Reference Schiffrin1987), and parallelism (Wilce Reference Wilce2001, 191). These executives often shifted in and out of certain identities and aligned or disaligned with their conceptualization of Made in Italy, including authenticity, responsibility, and family values. In the process, they (co)constructed and translated their individual and collective branding identities in significant ways and across spatiotemporal scales.
The first excerpt is extracted from an interview that I conducted with Moreno, who was the grandchild of the founder of a well-known fashion company in Northern Italy. As it is the case in many Italian companies, Moreno was involved in this family business and was in charge of the marketing department. Moreover, his company prides itself in producing all its products in Italy, and their brochures and website prominently display local landmarks from their town Mantua. This town itself is an important cultural center in Italy, as its historical downtown is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. On the day of the interview, I arrived in Mantua by train early in the morning and then took a bus to Mantua’s zona industriale (“industrial park”) located in the countryside. This fashion company is located right outside the town. As is common amongst many executives in Italy, Moreno wore his dress shirt with the cuff buttons undone and his watch over his dress shirt. This style was first popularized by one of Italy’s most prominent industrialists, Gianni Agnelli, while he was the CEO of the FIAT car company. The interview with Moreno lasted one and a half hours. The first question centered on the history of the company, to which Moreno narrated that he had been involved in his company for a long time:
Example 1 (M: Moreno)
Original Italian version
1 M: [..] il papa Carl-Carlalberto e lo zio maggiore Claudio ripartirono
2 praticamente ricominciarono da zero con trenta sei dipendenti
3 e fondarono quella che è la […] S.p.A.
4 quindi in realtà se guardiamo le- le- la storia senza nessun tipo d’interruzione
5 diciamo la storia data dal’ 58 ad oggi quindi 54 anni- anni
6 però se prendiamo invece anche la parte precedente
7 quindi diciamo il DNA le origini del nonno
8 allora ne fa molti di più con circa intorno a cento anni
9 perché è iniziata all’inizio degli anni degli anni venti- ven- col nonno [..]
English translation
1 M: [..] our dad Carl-Carlalberto and our older uncle Claudio started again
2 basically [they] started again from scratch with thirty-six workers
3 and [they] founded what is […] S.p.A. [i.e., public company]
4 so in reality if [we] look at the- the- the history without any kind of interruption
5 let’s say the history starting from 1958 until today so 54 years-years
6 but if [we] also take the previous part instead
7 so let’s say the DNA, our grandfather’s origins
8 then there are many more [years of history] about one hundred years
9 because [it] started at the beginning of the 1920s twent- with [our] grandfather [..]
Moreno started his narrative with a classic Labovian orientation (Labov and Waletzky Reference Labov and Waletzky1967), in which he situated his company temporally and spatially to provide some historical context to his interlocutors. At the very outset of the interview, Moreno recounted the history of his company by merging it with the history of his family. In line 1, he explained that his father and his older uncle were the founders of the company. The two histories then became one, as if the two chronotopes that he invoked were aligned and transformed into only one. The boundaries between the family and the company are indeed often blurred in small Italian businesses (Yanagisako Reference Yanagisako2002). This is even more evident in line 9 when he claimed that his company established its roots well before the official foundation year. He grounded the company’s origins in the 1920s when his grandfather was already active in the fashion sector. In this way, Moreno extended the historical background of his firm even further back in history: From the ‘50s, when his company was legally founded, to the ‘20s, when the family began working in the fashion industry. By going back and forth through these historical facts, spatiotemporally, Moreno enacted his family’s identity together with his company’s identity. He did so by chronotopically combining the two histories and by traveling fluidly across spatiotemporal scales. Kinship chronotopes (Agha Reference Agha2015) thus consistently emerged in Moreno’s storytelling event. This is even more obvious in line 7 when he formally linked the two histories, by adding that the DNA of his grandfather was connected to their company. By unequivocally invoking his family’s biological DNA in his narrative, Moreno infused an intimate element in the identity of his family business. In this way, he translates his identity through his many discursive scalar movements. This is possible if considered through an inter-semiotic, inter-scalar, framework, which considers translation in a continuous, fluid dynamics (Pritzker Reference Pritzker2014). Besides the kinship chronotopes, moreover, through these spatiotemporal movements, a chronotope of authenticity surfaces in Moreno’s first lines as well.
Moreno’s chronotopic stances become more evident intertextually when he used the Italian remote past tense, the passato remoto. This remote tense was used in the past across Italy, and it has been replaced by the more common past tense, passato prossimo. However, passato remoto is still found in literary works, but is less frequent, and thus is marked, in everyday conversation (Renzi and Cardinaletti Reference Renzi and Cardinaletti1988; Rohlfs Reference Rohlfs1968). Even though in some areas, especially in Tuscany and in some southern regions, the passato remoto is still used on a daily basis, in Northern Italy, where this interview was conducted, this remote tense is rarely used. Some speakers use this remote tense, however, as status marker: showing that one knows how and when to use it shows a good competence in standard Italian in certain social environments. Formal interviews are sites where individuals, such as executives of well-known companies, need to display their linguistic proficiency as well. Right at the outset of the his narrative, Moreno used three instances of this remote past tense, “ripartirono,” “ricominciarono” (“started again”) and “fondarono” (“founded”) in lines 1–3 (bolded in the above transcript excerpt). By using these three tokens of passato remoto in the very beginning of the interview (and several other times later), Moreno emphasized how the histories of his company and family were rooted in the area around Mantua, in its arts and cultural traditions. In the process, he also transforms his identity from the one of the business man interested in selling products to the one of a very knowledgeable person whose grammar use is impeccable and very exclusive. History and art had been, indeed, part of the family’s identity and part of their DNA, as Moreno claimed in line 7, since his grandfather’s time. He continued the translation process of his identity by emphasizing the key role of Italian history and DNA further in my second example when he also used some parallelistic structures.
Example 2 (M: Moreno; I: interviewer)
Original Italian version
10 M: [..] e::hh sicuramente un altro punto di forza diciamo di successo
11 viene un po’ dal nostro DNA il fatto che Mantova
12 cioè sia di essere nati in Italia prima di tutto
13 che ovviamente ha un DNA di cultura rinascimentale il gusto del bello
14 ehh quindi l’arte un po’ il gusto di vivere bene
15 di saper realizzare dei prodotti che abbiano un grande appeal
16 quindi il fatto del DNA italiano e in particolare Mantova
17 che ha rappresentato per la cultura dell’abbigliamento
18 I: mmhmm
19 M: Isabella d’Este cultura rinascimentale [clears throat] è sicuramente un punto di forza
20 quindi direi la tradizione no?
21 la tradizione italiana e la tradizione la mantovanità [..]
English translation
10 M: [..] e::hh [it is] certainly another advantage let’s say of success
11 [it] comes a bit from our DNA the fact that Mantua
12 that is to say being born in Italy first of all
13 which obviously has a DNA from the Renaissance culture the taste for beauty
14 ehh so art a little bit [like] the taste for living well
15 for being able to create products which have a great appeal Footnote 3
16 so the fact of the Italian DNA and in particular Mantua
17 which represented for the clothing culture
18 I: mmhmm
19 M: Isabella D’Este Renaissance culture [clears throat] [it] is certainly an advantage
20 so [I] would say tradition [is an advantage], right?
21 Italian tradition and the tradition of being from Mantua [..]
In this narrative excerpt, Moreno recounted that his company’s success was rooted not only in its prestigious historical background, but also in the local DNA of his town, Mantova (Mantua—lines 11, 13). Moreno indeed scalarly extended, and thus translated, his local DNA background to the national, Italian DNA in lines 16-21, and thus reinforced the circulating ideology of a national Made in Italy brand, and of its historical, artistic and cultural authenticity. Mantua’s DNA was “rinascimentale” (“from the Renaissance,” line 13), thus contributing to an authentic historical and artistic aura (Benjamin Reference Benjamin1936; Hansen Reference Hansen2008) that pervades his birth town Mantua, its museums, antique churches, buildings, and companies, including his. In Moreno’s perspective, Mantua’s history, art, and tradition are thus part of a shared DNA, of something that is connected to the idea of being produced in Mantua. In his words, its “mantovanità” (“being from Mantua,” line 21). Moreno then, again, rescaled the local DNA background to the national, Italian DNA in lines 16-21, and thus reinforced the circulating ideology of a national Made in Italy, and of its historical, artistic and cultural authenticity even more. At the same time, Moreno also enacted both his individual and collective identities, which are fluidly shifting from a more local, Mantua-based identity, to a more national, Italian one. In terms of scales, he thus shifts from a small, local scale, represented by his birth town, to a larger, national scale. Since scales are never neutral (Carr and Lempert Reference Carr and Lempert2016b), these scalar shifts carry significant meanings and instantiate Moreno’s subsequent narrative moves. The very fact of being born in Italy constitutes an important part of these chronotopic stances and collective identities in which history, art, and culture are shared and need to be cherished, as many of my interviewees emphasized. Biologized metaphors and embodied senses of authenticity are thus encapsulated in the rescaled Made-in-Italy branding identity. These senses of identity are indeed translated from a more global pattern, which includes all relevant products that are made in Italy, to a more local one, which highly values the localized, town-made quality of these products.
My third example is extracted from an interview that I conducted with Bernardo, the president of a well-known glassmaking company in the small island of Murano, which is part of the town of Venice (Venezia). The interview, which lasted one hour and fifteen minutes, took place in a Venetian palace in Murano where the company is headquartered. The room where the interview took place was quite large and displayed several glass objects such as large vases, lamps, chandeliers, and glass sculptures. There was one window on the far side of the room overlooking one of Murano’s many canals. In the middle of the room, there was a large circular wooden table with a large round translucent glass over it. The president and his assistant asked me to sit around that table. Bernardo wore a navy-blue suit, a dark red tie, and small circular bright red glasses. To a question on the history of the company, he responded as follows:
Example 3 (B: Bernardo)
Original Italian version
1 B: Quindi uhm fino a 150 anni fa le aziende erano delle- delle botteghe artigiane
2 dei- dei luoghi dove un gruppo di persone guidate dal- da un proprietario illuminato ehh più bravo degli altri
3 e riuscivano a produrre delle cose
4 quindi ehh NON è la nostra azienda che esiste dal 1295
5 è la nostra FAMIGLIA che si occupa di vetro dal 1295
6 quindi c’è un- una notevole differenza
7 non è che nel 1295 ci fossero le S.p.A.Footnote 4 o le S.r.l.Footnote 5
8 ehh col consiglio di amministrazione
9 e i revisori della KPMG che venivano a lavorare
10 erano:: botteghe artigiane come- come in-in tutta l’Italia dell’epoca::::
11 era così per qualsiasi tipo di manufatto
12 e comunque è vero nel 1295 la mia famiglia si occupa di vetro
English translation
1 B: So uhm until 150 years ago companies were just artisanal shops
2 locations where a group of people managed by the- by an enlightened owner uhm more skilled than the others
3 and were able to produce things
4 so uhm it is NOT our company that has been in existence since 1295
5 it is our FAMILY that has worked in glassmaking since 1295
6 so there is a remarkable difference
7 [it] is not that there were joint-stock or limited liability companies in 1295
8 uhm with a Board of Directors
9 and KPMG auditors who come to do their work
10 [there] were artisanal shops as- as everywhere in Italy at that ti::::me
11 [it] was this way for any kind of product
12 and [it] is therefore true that in 1295 my family started to work in glassmaking
As Bernardo described in line 1, how people think about Venetian glassmaking companies today is a rather new concept: only 150 years ago, they were just family-run artisanal shops. In line 4, however, he jumped back seven centuries, up to 1295 when his family started to work in glassmaking. Traveling through spatiotemporal scales, Bernardo, similarly to Moreno in the previous two narrative excerpts, merged his company’s identity with his family’s in lines 4 and 5 when he asserted that it is not his company that had existed since 1295, but it is their family that had been consistently working in this sector across long spans of time and space. Thus, Bernardo translates his company’s identity into one that makes sense because of the strong family ties that keeps it together. Kinship chronotopes (Agha Reference Agha2015) thus consistently emerged in Bernardo’s narratives as well. By increasing his voice volume (Gumperz Reference Gumperz1982), in line 5, for example, Bernardo seems to emphasize the fact that his family had been very influential on his business. His family had been his business for more than seven centuries, he highlighted. The connection between his company and the DNA of his family becomes clear in this case as well. He reiterated this in line 12 and in many other moments of this initial part of the interview.
Right at the outset of the interview, this executive clarified that art and history had been part of his family and company since early times. The prestige of glassmaking as a quintessential form of art thus surfaced at various points during the interview. As his narrative unfolded, Bernardo indeed clarified his position vis-à-vis the concept of art as it had been understood by his family and company’s members. In the process, while Bernardo flattened time and space in the storytelling event, he also created an opposition between a chronotope of modernity (Divita Reference Divita2014; Koven Reference Koven2013) and a chronotope of tradition. Through these two layered, although hypothetically opposing, chronotopes, Bernardo’s family and brand identities had been translated across time and space. Thus, Bernardo, like Moreno, constructed, through significant scalar shifts, his localized branding identity while keeping it connected to the Made-in-Italy one. These collective identities were thus translated through several, fluid chronotopic configurations such as kinship chronotopes, but also scalar, and at times conflicting, chronotopes of authenticity, chronotopes of modernity, and chronotopes of tradition. As a result, these individuals’ identities are not stable, nor are they fixed; rather, they are often fluid and heterogeneous (Nichols and Wortham Reference Nichols and Wortham2018; Perrino and Wortham Reference Perrino, Wortham, Fisher and Ayres-Bennett2022), given speech participants’ scaling shifts in their storytelling practices.
Conclusion
Translating branding identities across spatiotemporal scales has been recurrent in the Northern Italian executives’ narratives that I have collected. As I have demonstrated in the analysis of my three examples, these executives transduce (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Paula and Rosman2003) their Made in Italy brand, by inhabiting various spatiotemporal configurations at different scales. While they narrate their companies’ past and present vicissitudes, which are intimately connected with their families’ histories, these executives shift scales and thus position themselves from different perspectives. In the process, as I have argued, these executives transform, and translate, the supposed prestige of a national Made in Italy brand into a more localized, regional, or even town- or small island-based branding identity. To do so, they resort to an imaginary shared biological DNA together with a historical and artistic patrimony which index the uniqueness of everything that is Italian. In this respect, these executives’ moves are scalar (by continuously upscaling, middle-scaling, and downscaling): history and art are transposed into their storytelling events to possibly emphasize the assumed authenticity of Italian culture, language, and people. Time and space interweave in fluid alignments, and thus reinforce the overall sense of a national identity: a collective identity (Van De Mieroop Reference Van De Mieroop, Fina and Georgakopoulou2015) of people of Italian descent who share the same prestigious historical past and who can appreciate the artistic heritage and patrimony with which they have lived for generations (Perrino Reference Perrino2020, Reference Perrino2024; Perrino and Kohler Reference Perrino and Kohler2020).
As the three examples that I analyzed in this article show, Moreno and Bernardo started recounting the history of their companies immediately by linking them to their families’ past. Their companies histories thus solidly merged with their families’ past by invoking exclusive kinship chronotopes (Agha Reference Agha2015) throughout their narratives. Both companies rest on respected pasts as they are related to the founders of their companies and to the towns where their businesses started. Moreno and Bernardo praised their ancestors for their ability to successfully start their companies that have lasted throughout time and space. Their commitment to their historical, regional, and artistic patrimony therefore helps solidify a collective, Made-in-Italy branding identity which is held together by an imaginary, although embodied, shared DNA. While appealing to a biologized metaphor such as the DNA might be common in some brand marketing discourse, such as the American fashion industry, as Nakassis (Reference Nakassis, Carr and Lempert2016b) convincingly shows, the emphasis that Northern Italian executives have put on the connection between their family and their businesses pushes this metaphor further. Some executives have reinforced racialized ideologies and anti-immigrant politics, for example, by resorting to similar biologized tropes and by enacting intimacies of exclusion vis-à-vis migrants or Italian citizens of migrant decent who have been active in similar industries or sectors such as historical cafés (Perrino Reference Perrino2020, Reference Perrino2024), or by simply venting their frustrations about the new demographics in Italy (Allievi Reference Allievi2014). In closing, throughout their scalar moves, these executives inhabit chronotopes of authenticity by emphasizing that their businesses are unique and exclusive. The way their Made-in-Italy branding identity shifts, and gets translated, across these scales, thus enables them to reinforce exclusionary and xenophobic ideologies while they reinstate their illusion to keep their history, culture, art, and businesses untouched.
Acknowledgements
I presented an earlier version of this article at a panel entitled “The Translation Machine: Exploring the Linguistic Infrastructures of Valorization under Semiocapitalism,” organized by Aurora Donzelli for the 2023 American Anthropological Association Conference in Toronto, CA. I wish to thank the panel organizer, who is also the guest editor of this edited collection of articles, and the panel presenters with whom I engaged in fruitful conversations. Special thanks go to the panel discussant, Constantine Nakassis, who offered acute comments and suggestions. Many thanks to two anonymous reviewers whose astute critical comments were very helpful. I wish to thank the Editors of Signs and Society, Asif Agha and Kyung-Nan Koh, for their guidance and feedback throughout the publication process. Last, but not least, this article would have never been written without the participation of many Northern Italian executives and ordinary speakers who agreed to be interviewed and with whom I have had long formal and informal conversations for almost two decades. My deepest thanks go to them all. I am fully responsible of any remaining infelicities.
Appendix: Transcription and Abbreviations ConventionsFootnote 6
- Syllable cut-off.
. Stopping fall in tone.
, Continuing intonation.
? Rising intonation.
! Animated tone.
Words with underline indicate stress.
CAP Words in capitals indicate increased volume.
(…) Talk between parenthesis indicates the transcriber’s best guess at a stretch of discourse that is unclear on the original recording.
[…] Three dots between square brackets indicate that some material of the original transcript has been omitted.
[] The material inside square brackets indicate the transcriber’s comments/suggestions.
Bold: highlighted portions of the transcript discussed in the analysis
Italics: English translation.
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