The concept of chronotope was first used by Bakhtin (1981) to describe how time and place are referred to in literary narratives. The chronotope, or the time and place in which a story takes place, determines all the possible actions of the characters. For example, a novel set in the American west during the 1800s will have a different range of characters and possibilities for action compared to a novel set in ancient Greece. Recently, chronotope has been applied to the field of linguistic anthropology and Agha (2007) develops the concept showing that certain constellations of time and space are linked to personhood. Agha views chronotopes from a participation framework which allows people to resist or accept the the construct of place and time as “an official picture of the world (linked to canonical texts and institutions) ... or an object of derision (and sometimes rage)” (p. 321). In line with Agha’s discussion, many studies have shown that chronotopes are often connected to ideology and stance (Britt 2018, Ennis 2019; Riskedahl 2007; Woolard 2013). Chronotopes are constructed as a way of making sense of changes that have happened over time (Sonnleitner 2018, Woolard 2013).
Furthermore, counter-chronotopes can be constructed as ways of resisting ideology and presenting alternative time-space constructions (Britt 2018; Ennis 2019).
Woolard (2013) uses the concept of chronotope to analyze interviews of students from a previous study of hers in 1987. In her original study, she focused on Castilian speaking teenagers who were immigrants into Catalonia and were resistant to the Catalan language and identity. However, 20 years later she discovered that most of these students had developed positive attitudes to Catalan except for one who had developed more hostility towards it. She found chronotope was a useful concept in analyzing her informants accounts of their changed attitudes to Catalan. She identified three contrasting chronotopes in the interview data:
biographical, socio-historical and adventure time in everyday life. Her analysis revealed that
chronotope did two things for her participants. First, it restrained their character development, and second, it framed their stance towards learning Catalan. Further, she found that “different ideologies of the authority of language accompany these different chronotopic frames and stances toward Catalan” (p. 222). The participants who developed positive attitude towards learning Catalan constructed chronotopes connected to ideology of personal growth while the participant who continued to have a negative attitude towards Catalan constructed a
chronotope connected to a politicized language and an ideology of authenticity linked to origin.
Ennis (2019) also found ideology connected to chronotope and demonstrates how a radio program in lowland Quichua constructs a counter-chronotope of remembering to the chronotope of language endangerment. Standardized Quichua which is taught in schools is different than Quichua spoken in lowland Ecuador. Through interviews it was revealed that learning standard Quichua was another force causing Quichua language lose in the Napo Province. In a move to resist the ideology of language endangerment that is fueling language revitalization of a disappearing language, the ancestral guayusa drinking hours are
reconstructed over the radio using sounds invoking the tradition which symbolizes
remembering and learning from elders. In this way the focus is on cultural revival rather than language revitalization.
Britt (2018) found that residents of Flint constructed counter-chronotopes to resist externally produced negative discourses about Flint circulated through media. The negative discourses were chronotropic in that they portrayed a place, Flint, in a certain time period, post industrial, where certain kinds of people live, dangerous and impoverished. For individuals in Flint, these negative discourses delimited the types of identity they could undertake. She points out that through oral history interviews, residents of Flint constructed counter chronotopic representations of Flint portraying Flint positively. Through these
counter-chronotopic representations, “residents may gain agency through the ability to re-anchor their identities and possibly establish new subjectivities for themselves and their communities” (Britt 218: 253).
For Sonnleitner (2018) the concept of chronotope is useful for analyzing how individuals make sense of the past and views it “as a model of agency and as a participation framework” (p. 32). She uses chronotope to analyze interview data from “born frees”, those born after the apartheid in South Africa, and found as a model of agency, the chronotope limited the possible actions of the characters and enabled particular types of personhood. As a participation framework, she found that “alignment with certain chronotopes is an act of positioning” (p. 34) and therefore a form of stancetaking.
The construction of a chronotope about the past can be used by political parties to gain power in the present (Agha 2007; Riskedahl 2007). In Riskedahl’s (2007) analysis of Lebanese political discourse, she found that “flashpoints” were used in political and individual discourse to mobilize people into certain stances. These flashpoints were
chronotopic in that they evoked the harshness and vividness of violence of the Lebanese civil war, a specific time and place. Since chronotopes are experienced in a participant framework (Agha 2007), individuals were able to choose how to respond to these flashpoints. Riskedahl found three main discursive stances in response to the flashpoints: rejection, resignation, and retaliation. Rejection was the response of those who did not accept and align with the chronotope of the political party. They believed the past is not the present. The resignation and retaliation responses were based on the acceptance that the past is the present but for the later this invoked a need to retaliate and for the former, it invoked a sense of hopelessness.
In sum, for the current study, chronotope is used to analyze accounts of the past and present told by two generations of women in Harūb (chapter 7). Since one way to control the present is to control the past (Agha 2007, Riskedahl 2007), the state has constructed a
chronotope for the purpose of nation building. The past is portrayed negatively as a time of ignorance and immorality in order to persuade people of their need for a new and better present. Chronotopes are experienced in a participant framework (Agha 2007) which means people can choose to accept a chronotopic representation or they can construct a counter-chronotope as a way of resisting the ideologies underpinning it. Consequently, in Harūb two responses are seen regarding the state’s chronotope. One is the response of many from the younger generation of women who accept the state’s chronotopic representation of the past and continue to recirculate it. Second is the response of many from the older generation of women who construct a counter-chronotope of the past. Each chronotope that is told is connected with ideology and stance and are constructed to frame the actions of those subject to the chronotope. In other words the chronotope is seen to restrain and make possible the actions of the subjects.