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.
Table of Content
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
About the author
David Berliner is a Professor of Anthropology at Université Libre de Bruxelles. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Guinea-Conakry and Laos. His topics of research are social memory, cultural transmission and the politics of heritage.
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