This essay introduces a collection of five research articles that address how time becomes materialized, regimented, politicized, and phenomenologically experienced in diverse ethnographic settings. Against notions of time’s uniformity, we explore considerations of its relational nature in physics, linguistics, and anthropology. Temporal frameworks are not given but created, not unitary but multiple, and operate in degrees of lamination, synchrony, or dissonance. In colonial Papua New Guinea, the Ecuadorian and Brazilian Amazon, highland Bolivia, and South Korea, temporal frameworks serve as anchors to diverse social and political projects. These ethnographic accounts illuminate the dynamic and consequential nature of temporal semiosis.

This article considers the multimodal enregisterment of an ancestral time-space in indigenous-language media production. Beginning from the insight that chronotopes engage semiotically mediated, subjective experiences of time, space, and social personhood (Wirtz 2016; Hartikainen 2017), I use ethnographic evidence from lowland Ecuadorian Quichua (Kichwa) radio production and reception to explore the semiotic recalibration of the wayusa upina, the guayusa-drinking hours as a register of media performance aimed at cultural revival. Identified as one of the most significant and endangered spaces for transmitting cultural and linguistic knowledge, the nondiscursive signs and material practices used in multimodal lowland Quichua radio productions reconstitute the ancestral guayusa-drinking hours, indexically linking it to the voices and knowledge of still living elders. In doing so, these programs attempt to establish a counterchronotope of remembering, which contrasts with a widely circulating chronotope of endangerment.

Inhabitants of Gurupá, a rural municipality in the Brazilian Amazon, routinely move between economic, social, and territorial systems that order community spheres, the Brazilian state apparatus, and global networks. Each of these comes encumbered with temporalities and spatialities that differentially parse space and time. Drawing upon my ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how chronotopes are made, and remade, in a place where community commitments are paramount. Through planning and calculation of urgency and priority, Gurupaenses make strategic choices to achieve calibration between Clockwork and community time. By waiting or leaving, hurrying or lingering, and by choosing the object, mode, and speed of motion, actors independently and communally “flex” time, constructing a Ragtime temporality in which some intervals are stretched and others compressed. In so doing, actors strategically navigate these theoretically incommensurable chronotopes, thus meeting immediate and long-term needs and attending to the social, economic, and political demands of both worlds.

Lutheran missionaries in pre–World War II colonial New Guinea transformed their mission when they became the first group to use “aviation for souls.” Transformations in modes of circulation (from muddy, dark paths through dense rainforests into fast, sun-filled flights above a mountainous landscape) depended upon the discursive organization of a set of different space-times—to use Nancy Munn’s term—so as to properly sacralize a mode of transportation that had until then been used almost exclusively in service of colonial resource extraction at the New Guinea gold fields. The mission prized movement and circulation as a Christian evangelistic practice in and of itself, in which the “message” and the process of its spread could be conflated. Yet this emphasis on circulation has been obscured by the almost exclusive attention within the anthropology of religion to evangelism as a form of agonistic comparison between Christianity and local culture and within linguistic anthropology to circulation as about type-token relations among texts.

Debates about cultural practices in Bolivia have increasingly unfolded around questions of which practices are deemed essentially indigenous or essentially Western and demands for decolonization, or the reestablishment of indigenous cultural hegemony. This article examines cases in which the construal of time (through calendars, clocks, and notions of the past and future) is depicted as being either essentially Andean or a colonial import and, thus, a target for reform. Advancing competing construals of time has become a feature of such contemporary state-led political interventions as reorienting clock faces on public buildings; reconciling the Gregorian calendar with an agricultural, Aymara one; replacing Spanish loanwords for the days of the week with neologisms; and framing the launching of a telecommunications satellite as the reconstitution of pre-Hispanic astronomical science. These debates draw on a salient difference in the space-time semantics of Andean languages. Aymara and Quechua are typologically unusual for linking front space with past time and anterior space with the futurity and for sharing a unified concept of “space-time,” or pacha, a term that has become popularized through the widespread use of pachakuti ‘the turning over of space-time’, to refer to what, in other contexts, might be called revolution.

This article examines a South Korean cultural chronotope from the perspective of Korea’s world-renowned digital gaming culture, including its professional electronic sports (e-sports) scene and the experiences of amateur gamers in online gaming cafés (PC bang). My analysis centers on two of Korean digital gaming culture’s recognizable social types and the spatiotemporal qualities of their play: professional gamers and the quickness embodied in their e-sports performances; and a specific kind of amateur PC bang gamer who is more socially isolated and whose engagement with games is slow and repetitive. I argue that through their performances in digital games’ virtual and actual-world participation frameworks, gamers orient to these social types in ways that differentially construe their relationships to semiotic depictions of places, times, and personhoods. Thinking through these orientations and their spatial, temporal, and social qualities is critical to understanding chronotopic representations of contemporary Korea.