No abstract

In this article I examine ethnographic data collected during the rehearsals and performance of a play created by a group of Spanish seniors at a social center near Paris. The play recounts a Spanish immigrant's return to her pueblo from France after years of living abroad. Drawing on Bauman's (1992, 2011) notion of “cultural performance,” I approach the play as a reflexive event that stages the most significant meanings of the community by and for whom it is created—meanings that include the modernist chronotope that dominates it. This particular chronotope—in which France is associated with progress and sophistication, and Spain is associated with backwardness and provincialism—serves as an organizing framework for the community as they represent and make sense of their experience of migration. On an individual level, however, the narrative of return does not necessarily manifest this particular chronotopic structure. To illustrate this divergence, I present Fina, an actor in the play and the author of an autobiographical monologue included therein. By juxtaposing these distinct articulations of the same narrative—one communal, one individual—I show how processes of identification may be linked to chronotopic variation depending on the scale at which they occur.

In this article, I aim to shed light on the linguistic and discursive practices entailed in historical meaning‐making—that is, the various ways in which social groups perceive the past and how those perceptions inflect the interactional present. Specifically, I present ethnographic data collected at a day center for Spanish seniors outside of Paris, focusing on interactions among a group of the center's members upon their visit to a museum exhibition documenting the Parisian bidonvilles [shantytowns] in which many of them lived after they migrated from Spain in the 1960s, over 40 years earlier. As they engage with one another and their guide, participants display and enact different modes of knowing the historical content of the exhibition. Drawing on Bakhtin's (1981) concept of the chronotope, I show how these modes of knowing the past may be recruited in ideological processes of affiliation and distinction. For the transnational migrants in later life who populate this article, such chronotopic calibration is a vital means of making sense of the past and establishing forms of belonging in the present.*

No abstract

In recent years, sociolinguistic research that has taken an indexical perspective on the construction of social meaning has focused on certain dimensions of identity, such as gender and ethnicity; age, on the other hand, has not received as much attention. More often than not, it has been understood as a fixed chronological fact rather than a socially meaningful resource. The present study, which draws from data collected in an Internet course at a social center for senior citizens, illustrates how age‐related social meanings are recruited in interaction in more complex ways than generally thought. Discourse analysis of interactions between students and their younger instructor show how age informs the construction of social meaning as both a chronological fact and a dynamic social category; students and instructor alike create stances and assume interactional positions in part by indexing age‐related social categories that align with or subvert communicative expectations based on their chronological age.