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

Abstract

<jats:title>ABSTRACT</jats:title> <jats:p>This article focuses on what we define as <jats:italic>scalar intimacy</jats:italic> 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)*</jats:p>

Imagining the city in lockdown: Place in the COVID-19 self-recordings of the Lothian Diary Project

“…De Fina ( 2021 ) describes how “through narratives, participants bring to bear in their present interactions worlds and historical moments that belong to different geographical and temporal scales” and in so doing “create new understandings of reality and also new patterns of social interaction” (2021, p. 60). Pritzker and Perrino ( 2021 ) show how the narrator Moreno, an Italian fashion executive, shifts between chronotopes, interweaving his company's history and his family's history with an “imagined collective identity” (p. 371). Moreno uses biological metaphors such as “it's in our DNA” to connect his personal body to the public world of Mantua and of the “Made in Italy” national brand (Pritzker and Perrino, 2021 , p. 368–375).…”

“…For newcomers/temporary residents, because their primary locus is elsewhere, they may previously have been inhibited from exploring in this physical, sensory way. Catherine, too, draws a parallel between two city-chronotopes (see Pritzker and Perrino, 2021 , p. 380 on parallelistic structures). One is the city with a well-known university, and the figure of the international student, where time and space is chunked into student-related activities.…”

“Let’s Go, Baby Forklift!”: Fandom Governance and the Political Power of Cuteness in China

“…Ultimately these "parasocial" interactions can take the form of "parakin" relationships that require fans to "protect" and "support" their idols like family members (Yan & Yang, 2020). Interacting with idols also creates "scalar intimacies" (Pritzker & Perrino, 2020) as fans interact with each other in fan circles. In this way, remote supervisors came to socialize both with and through the construction vehicles, using cuteness as a resource for constituting intimacies through playful forms of involvement.…”

“…By tracing manifestations of meng in the construction vehicle memes, we provide an ethnographic account of this powerful new principle of relational intimacy in contemporary Chinese culture. In the episode we analyze, meng functioned to create "scalar intimacies" (Pritzker & Perrino, 2020) by associating different types of relationships-parents and children, fans and idols, and citizens and the nation-through verbal conventions of interpersonal affection. As remote supervisors evolved into fans, they were able to enact these connections across multiple scales thanks to a broader communicational "infrastructure of intimacy" (Wilson, 2015) encompassing social media platforms such as Weibo and the state-run social media accounts that leapt in to capitalize on the opportune emergence of cute memes with patriotic shadings.…”

“…This comment displays many features indexical of Chinese fandom registers, including specialized cultural references to “debuting and taking center stage” and the identification of Baby Forklift’s fan circle as i叉, which might be roughly translated as “Fork Lovers.” Moreover, the post contains two speech acts characteristic of fandom: apostrophic words of encouragement directed to the idol and exhortations to fellow fans to engage in additional acts of devoted support and protection. In a symbolic loop, the imaginative construction of Baby Forklift’s cute vulnerability subjectifies fans through their own vulnerability to its cuteness, summoning displays of concern and support that ramify “scalar intimacies” (Pritzker & Perrino, 2020) outward in a chain of metonymic associations extending from the hospitals, to the affected city, to the nation itself.…”