Anthropology and Nostalgia

In this edited collection of essays, the authors take nostalgia, especially cultural nostalgia, as a serious concept for anthropological research and thought. They clarify the concept, discuss the forms nostalgia takes, its psychological triggers and functions. One writes about "The Bunker" in Lithuania, which is a socialist museum that allows visitors to experience conditions of life under Soviet communism. Others have a more general scope, describing the realitiies of cultural nostalgia in interactions, and through texts, objects and technologies. A certain type of nostalgia, one author finds, is an element of remaking cultural identity under the pressure of change, exemplified here in an account of displaced Turkish Cypriots. And nostalgia "reveals relationships among the past, present and future." Because anthropological study has been from the beginning largely based in colonialism, the field has been about investigating the fragility and dissolution of non-white societies. This gives a natural bias for nostalgia on the part of anthropologists, as discussed in another essay. Other authors describe aspects of cultural nostalgia in Hungary, East Germany and Spain. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

After being a researcher at the University of Oxford and at Musee du Quai Branly, Olivia Ange is now a Marie Curie European Fellow at the Sociology of Development and Change Group at Wageningen University. Her fieldwork in the Andes mainly focuses on barter, ritual and cultural transmission.