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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, USA[email protected]
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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
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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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.

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