Anthropology and Nostalgia

248 Pages·2014·1.96 MB·English

by  Olivia Angé

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Anthropology and Nostalgia
Macintosh HD_Ange & Berliner_final / 19 - 08 - 2014 / 04:04 : PM
Macintosh HD_Ange & Berliner_final / 20 - 08 - 2014 / 07:45 : AM
A
nthropology
n
And ostAlgiA

Edited by
Olivia Angé and David Berliner
berghahn
N E W Y O R K (cid:127) O X F O R D
www.berghahnbooks.com
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Published in 2015 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2015, 2016 Olivia Angé and David Berliner
First paperback edition published in 2016
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anthropology and nostalgia / edited by Olivia Angé and David Berliner. -- First
edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-78238-453-3 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-78533-338-5 (paperback) --
ISBN 978-1-78238-454-0 (ebook)
1. Nostalgia--Cross-cultural studies. 2. Nostalgia--Social aspects. I. Angé, Olivia.
II. Berliner, David.
BF575.N6A67 2014
302’.1--dc23
2014016266
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-78238-453-3 hardback
ISBN: 978-1-78533-338-5 paperback
ISBN: 978-1-78238-454-0 ebook
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Contents

List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Anthropology of Nostalgia – Anthropology
as Nostalgia 1
Olivia Angé and David Berliner
1. Are Anthropologists Nostalgist? 17
David Berliner
2. Missing Socialism Again? The Malaise of Nostalgia
in Post-Soviet Lithuania 35
Gediminas Lankauskas
3. The Politics of Nostalgia in the Aftermath of Socialism’s
Collapse: A Case for Comparative Analysis 61
Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko
4. Why Post-imperial Trumps Post-socialist: Crying Back
the National Past in Hungary 96
Chris Hann
5. Consuming Communism: Material Cultures of Nostalgia
in Former East Germany 123
Jonathan Bach
6. The Key from (to) Sefarad: Nostalgia for a Lost Country 139
Joseph Josy Lévy and Inaki Olazabal
7. Nostalgia and the Discovery of Loss: Essentializing
the Turkish Cypriot Past 155
Rebecca Bryant
v
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vi Contents
8. Social and Economic Performativity of Nostalgic
Narratives in Andean Barter Fairs 178
Olivia Angé
9. The Withering of Left-Wing Nostalgia? 198
Petra Rethmann
Afterword: On Anthropology’s Nostalgia – Looking
Back/Seeing Ahead 213
William Cunningham Bissell
Notes on Contributors 225
Index 229
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Illustrations

3.1 A stand advertising a communism-themed hostel
and tours in Krakow train station 72
3.2 A leaflet for communism-themed tours in Krakow 73
3.3 Supermarket shelves lined with Soviet-era brands:
Baikal and Limonad on the bottom, and 1980s-stylized
Pepsi-Kola on the top 75
3.4 Karaoke cruise flyer 87
4.1 Fragment of the Feszti panorama at Ópusztaszer 105
4.2 Péter Mátl’s turul, Ópusztaszer 106
8.1 Panorama of a fair 181
8.2 Highland landscape 182
8.3 Lowland landscape 182
8.4 Highland shepherds’ meat and wool 184
8.5 Lowland cultivators’ multiple varieties of maize 184
8.6 The elders’ measures 186
vii
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Acknowledgements

Special thanks are due to all the authors of this volume for their participa-
tion in this editorial project and their contribution to the discussion on
nostalgia-related questions: Jonathan Bach, Rebecca Bryant, Chris Hann,
Gediminas Lankauskas, Joseph Levy, Maya Nadkarni, Petra Rethman and
Olga Shevchenko; as well as William Bissel for his generous afterword.
Our anonymous readers for Berghahn Books helped us to improve the
manuscript and we are indebted to them for reading it so cautiously. We also
appreciate the editorial support of Mikaëla Le Meur and Maria Sigutina.
We finally wish to express our gratitude to Marion Berghahn for her interest
in our collection of essays and for rendering its publication possible.
viii
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Introduction
Anthropology of Nostalgia – Anthropology as Nostalgia
Olivia Angé and David Berliner

La pensée d’un homme est avant tout sa nostalgie.
Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe.
This book explores how nostalgic discourses and practices work concretely
in different social and cultural environments. Since the rediscovery of
memory by social scientists (Berliner 2005), and in particular its emotional-
ity (White 2006), nostalgia has increasingly attracted anthropologists’ atten-
tion. Terms including ‘structural’ (Herzfeld 2004), ‘synthetic’ (Strathern
1995), ‘armchair’ (Appadurai 1996), ‘colonial’ (Bissel 2005), ‘imperialist’
(Rosaldo 1989), ‘practical’ (Battaglia 1995), ‘resistant’ (Stewart 1988) and
‘for the future’ (Piot 2010) have been applied to it in order to deal with its
complexity, at the intersection of the individual, the social and the political.
Scholars have realized that nostalgia constitutes a fascinating site for study-
ing contemporary issues of identity, politics and history.
However, fine-grained ethnographies of nostalgia and loss are still
scarce (Berliner 2012, Bissel 2005, Graburn 1995, Ivy 1995, Metcalf 2012,
Schneider 2000). Most of the topical literature focuses on post-socialist con-
texts (Berdahl 1999, Boyer 2006, Todorova and Gille 2012). As much as the
Holocaust has become a paradigm for research in memory studies (Lapierre
2007), works on nostalgia are paradigmatically ‘Eastern European’. This
1
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2 Olivia Angé and David Berliner
book intends to expand on this research, ethnographically and theoretically.
Drawing on disparate fieldwork around the globe (Argentina, Germany,
Cyprus, Spain, Lithuania, Russia and Hungary), the contributors explore
the fabric of nostalgia, by addressing its places, interactions, agents, insti-
tutions, objects, rituals, politics, codes, critical moments, gestures, banal
temporalities and media. They investigate nostalgic feelings, discourses
and practices in the fields of heritage and tourism, exile and diasporas,
economic exchange and consumerism, politics and nationalism. Although
the bulk of the texts are ethnographic in essence, the book gathers a gamut
of works based on classical as well as unconventional empirical cases and
brings together insights from history, literature, museology and political
sciences. Analytically, they all contribute to a better understanding of how
individuals and groups remember, commemorate and revitalize their pasts,
and the crucial role played by nostalgia in the process of remembering.
Nostalgia, in the sense of a ‘longing for what is lacking in a changed
present . . . a yearning for what is now unattainable, simply because of the
irreversibility of time’ (Pickering and Keightley 2006: 920), is a central notion
that permeates present-day discourses and practices. Theorists see in it a dis-
tinctive attitude towards the past inherent to contemporary culture, ‘a reac-
tion against the irreversible’ (Jankélévitch 1983: 299) to be found everywhere
and now often commodified, the result of ‘a new phase of accelerated, nos-
talgia-producing globalization’ (Robertson 1992: 158). Whilst, in L’ignorance,
Milan Kundera describes his hero, Josef, a Czech man who feels only disin-
terest towards his past, as suffering from ‘a lack of nostalgia’ (2005: 87), in
many parts of the world there seems to be a current overdose of nostalgia, a
reaction to the modern ‘accelerism’ (the acceleration of modern temporality
coined by Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities) and deployed in uni-
verses as diverse as nationalism, heritage policies, vintage consumerism, the
tourism industry and religious and ecological movements.
Nostalgia, however, has a long history. Reviewing past literature on the
subject would be an impossible task, far beyond the reach of this introduc-
tion. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, historians, literary critics, scholars of
cultural studies and philosophers have abundantly discussed such history,
from Odysseus’s homesickness, yearning for his return to Ithaca, to the
medicalization of nostalgia (as a physical trouble) by Johannes Hofer in
the seventeenth century (Bolzinger 2007, Jankélévitch 1983, Starobinsky
1966). The nineteenth century saw nostalgia lose its clinical connotations
and started to take the metaphorical meaning of longing for a lost place
and, especially, a vanished time. In Europe, at that period, nostalgia for past
times indeed blossomed. Massive changes, such as those induced by indus-
trialization and urbanization but also by the French Revolution, fostered