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 calendars, and of childhood accompanying collective nostalgia in many parts of the world, as a reaction against urban and industrial anomie. It notes nostalgia's frequent 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 nationalistic invention of states as imagined communities. It discusses ways where nostalgia for a lost past, rather than stagnating people in the past, can be a collective means to move forward into the future. It explores how anthropology itself has been viewed as the nostalgic conscious of the modern world for remote, small-scale, or preindustrial cultures and lifeways seemingly lost or sacrificed to modernity. It addresses earlier attempts at salvage anthropology, discussing these in relationship to both a positively espoused ‘critical nostalgia,’ and a negatively viewed ‘imperialist nostalgia.’ Finally, it addresses more recent trends in the anthropology of nostalgia that consider how nostalgic projections are used differentially by different elements within a culture in the on-going negotiation of culture, and how processes of world systems, and accelerating trends of globalization and transnationalism influence or induce cycles of collective nostalgia.