Nostalgia, Anthropology of

Abstract

This article reviews anthropological and sociological perspectives on nostalgia. It discusses collective nostalgia during times of rapid change as a response to insecurity and uncertainty. It addresses nostalgia for a past way of life due to a widespread sense that strong emotional bonds to other human beings and to community have diminished. It explores the romanticization of rural areas, small towns and villages, of cultural calenders, and of childhood accompanying collective nostalgia in many parts of the world, as a reaction against urban and industrial anomie, and the anonymity of modern life. It notes nostalgia's frequenct collapse of time and place, with rural areas of the present nostalgically equated with the past, or desires to return to a geographical place of childhood really reflecting a desire for a past time. It situates collective nostalgia in theoretical discussions of community as a multivocal symbol in human life. It discusses “nationalistic nostalgia,” showing how emotionally-laden nostalgic sentiments are used in the nationalisitic invention of states as imagined communities. Finally, it discusses ways nostalgia for a lost past, rather than stagnating peopole in the past, can be a collective means to move forward into the future by quelling fears about an uncertain present.