At least in the 1980s when Basso was writing about the stories, geographic features reminded the Western Apache of "the moral teachings of their history" by recalling to mind events that occurred there in important moral narratives. Linguistic anthropologist Keith Basso invoked "chronotopes" in discussing Western stories linked with places. The distinctiveness of chronotopic analysis, in comparison to most other uses of time and space in language analysis, stems from the fact neither time nor space is privileged by Bakhtin, they are utterly interdependent and they should be studied in this manner. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic" Analysis The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time.
The chronotope in literature has an intrinsic generic signifi cance. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. We understand the chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature we will not deal with the chronotope in other areas of culture.' In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. What counts for us is the fact that it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space). The special meaning it has in relativity theory is not important for our purposes we are borrowing it for literary criticism almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely). This term is employed in mathematics, and was introduced as part of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. In the Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin defines the Chronotope: "We will give the name chronotope (literally, "time space") to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.
To this extent, a chronotope is both a cognitive concept and a narrative feature of language. Specific chronotopes are said to correspond to particular genres, or relatively stable ways of speaking, which themselves represent particular worldviews or ideologies.
Bakhtin scholars Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist state that the chronotope is "a unit of analysis for studying language according to the ratio and characteristics of the temporal and spatial categories represented in that language".