Description
Book Synopsis Nostalgia is intimately connected to the history of the social sciences in general and anthropology in particular, though finely grained ethnographies of nostalgia and loss are still scarce. Today, anthropologists have realized that nostalgia constitutes a fascinating object of study for exploring contemporary issues of the formation of identity in politics and history. Contributors to this volume consider the fabric of nostalgia in the fields of heritage and tourism, exile and diasporas, postcolonialism and postsocialism, business and economic exchange, social, ecological and religious movements, and nation building. They contribute to a better understanding of how individuals and groups commemorate their pasts, and how nostalgia plays a role in the process of remembering.
Trade Review “…this edited volume remains an important contribution to the increasing number of anthropologists who encounter affective remembrances of distant pasts. Particularly valuable are its methodological focus on the concrete discourses, materialities, social interactions, texts, and technologies through which nostalgia manifests. Scholars who work on memory, politics, affect, identity, and material culture will all find many valuable and challenging insights throughout the book.” · Anthropos
“[This volume] illustrates that nostalgia is an undeniable part of modern (if not general human) experience and that anthropology has a great deal to offer in understanding and critiquing its diverse forms, practices, and social and political implications.” · Anthropology Review Database
“Nostalgia is a central characteristic of our age. Gathering together ethnographic cases from around the world, this timely and innovative volume investigates the diversity of nostalgic forms today, as well as the historic role nostalgia plays in the development of anthropology. A must read for all scholars interested in the contemporary politics of memory and heritage.” · Lynn Meskell, Stanford University
“A brilliant foray into the field of nostalgia studies, which pluralizes and de-familiarizes the term’s standard meaning. Nostalgia emerges from these essays not just as a backward glance but also as a future-oriented, contemporary critique, strategic, materialist, performative – and as a defining feature not only of modernity but also of anthropology and social theory more broadly. Sémart theorizing rooted in deep ethnography makes this a masterful contribution.” · Charles Piot, Duke University
“Nostalgia permeates the anthropological profession, both as the often evanescent object of its investigation of pasts recalled and recalibrated, and as a characteristic of anthropologists’ sometimes rueful musings about their own work. Ranging across a variety of ethnographic settings, these well-crafted and mutually illuminating essays illustrate both the ambiguity and the utility of what has become an important concept for linking the recurrent preoccupations of anthropological research with the concerns of several other disciplines.” · Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University
“This volume… risks being a future trend-setter in the anthropological study of memory and temporality, as it captures a historical moment of growing interest (in and outside the academy) regarding nostalgia as a social and political phenomenon, while simultaneously disentangling the multiple understandings and instrumentalisations that the concept entails…” · Ruy Llera Blanes, University of Bergen
“The ideas are original, noteworthy, and of value not just to anthropologists, but also psychologists, sociologists and others who are concerned with memory and the social world. Drawing on the experiences of people in a number of countries inevitably provides a breadth of outlooks, and this is to be applauded.” · Nigel Hunt, University of Nottingham
Table of Contents List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Anthropology of Nostalgia—Anthropology as Nostalgia
Olivia Angé and David Berliner
Chapter 1. Are Anthropologists Nostalgist?
David Berliner
Chapter 2. Missing Socialism Again? The Malaise of Nostalgia in Post-Soviet Lithuania
Gediminas Lankauskas
Chapter 3. The Politics of Nostalgia in the Aftermath of Socialism’s Collapse: A Case for Comparative Analysis
Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko
Chapter 4. Why Postimperial Trumps Postsocialist: Crying back the National Past in Hungary
Chris Hann
Chapter 5. Consuming Communism: Material Cultures of Nostalgia in Former East Germany
Jonathan Bach
Chapter 6. The Key from (to) Sepharad: Nostalgia for a Lost Country
Joseph Josy Lévy and Inaki Olazabal
Chapter 7. Nostalgia and the Discovery of Loss: Essentializing the Turkish Cypriot Past
Rebecca Bryant
Chapter 8. Social and Economic Performativity of Nostalgic Narratives in Andean Barter Fairs
Olivia Angé
Chapter 9. Wither Left-Wing Nostalgia
Petra Rethmann
Afterword: On Anthropology’s Nostalgia: Looking Back/Seeing Ahead
William Cunningham Bissell
Notes on Contributors
Index
