The Sweet Land: Manufacturing “Tradition” in Small‐Town Bolivia

Abstract

Chronotopes have been described as "envelopes" of time and space that provide the setting for the circulation of particular types of characters or personae (Silverstein 2005, Agha 2007, Bakhtin 1981, 1986. In this article, I investigate how these narratives of time and space are used to produce meaning in conjunction with structured relationships between groups of social categories, particularly discourses of tradition and modernity. Specifically, I examine the ways in which local actors shape and imagine how Saipina, a small town in central Bolivia, is represented to outside audiences. Influential actors produce a set of artifacts that represent the town, as well as a series of narratives that overlay values such as hard work and agricultural roots with goods such as sugarcane and chancaca, a raw sugar product, in representing the town to outside audiences. [Andean studies, branding, chronotopes, history, modernity, semiotic fields, sugarcane, tradition] History, it could be argued, is local knowledge par excellence.

Isma‘ili Continuity and Social Change: Chronotopes and Practicing Taqiyya within the Sulaymani Community of Saudi Arabia

“…In this paper, we employ Mikhail Bakhtin's (1981) heuristic of the chronotope for understanding the unique conditions of validity established through the discursive invocation of these time-space contexts. While the notion of chronotope was developed within literary theory, the concept has enjoyed broad appeal in the social sciences (Babel 2022;Barrett 2017;Blommaert 2015;Britt 2018;De Fina et al 2017;Dick 2010). This appeal is due to the fact that chronotopes serve as both frames for discourse as well as discursive objects that enable and constrain agency over the speakers' construction of personae via stancetaking (Woolard 2013).…”