Imitation, interdiscursive hubs, and chronotopic configuration

•Synthesizes contemporary work in semiotics to proposes a model for the study of chronotopic formation.•Identifies a new process, interdiscursive hub, that seems important in the formation of chronotopes.•Proposes a new concept, interdiscursive hub, to capture this process.

Taking inspiration from work on imitation, chronotope, and scale, this paper examines the formation of chronotopes of bureaucratic personhood in Indonesia during a period of rapid change. My data is drawn from a database of over a thousand stories from an online Indonesian newspaper that were published between 2003 and 2004. In looking at a small subset of this database, I show how imitation of particular characteristics and the use of features that act like selective deictics help to produce and circulate the chronotope of the deviant bureaucrat. I propose that the co-occurrence of imitation and the erasure of deictic anchoring produces interdiscursive hubs that are crucial for chronotopic configuration.