Anthropology and Nostalgia

After being a researcher at the University of Oxford and at Musée du Quai Branly, Olivia Angé 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.

“…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

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Anthropology of Nostalgia—Anthropology as NostalgiaOlivia Angé and David BerlinerChapter 1. Are Anthropologists Nostalgist?David BerlinerChapter 2. Missing Socialism Again? The Malaise of Nostalgia in Post-Soviet LithuaniaGediminas LankauskasChapter 3. The Politics of Nostalgia in the Aftermath of Socialism’s Collapse: A Case for Comparative AnalysisMaya Nadkarni and Olga ShevchenkoChapter 4. Why Postimperial Trumps Postsocialist: Crying back the National Past in HungaryChris HannChapter 5. Consuming Communism: Material Cultures of Nostalgia in Former East GermanyJonathan BachChapter 6. The Key from (to) Sepharad: Nostalgia for a Lost CountryJoseph Josy Lévy and Inaki OlazabalChapter 7. Nostalgia and the Discovery of Loss: Essentializing the Turkish Cypriot PastRebecca BryantChapter 8. Social and Economic Performativity of Nostalgic Narratives in Andean Barter FairsOlivia AngéChapter 9. Wither Left-Wing NostalgiaPetra RethmannAfterword: On Anthropology’s Nostalgia: Looking Back/Seeing AheadWilliam Cunningham BissellNotes on ContributorsIndex