Published in 1979, Fred Davis’ pioneering Yearning for Yesterday provides the
Introduction 5
fi rst in-depth discussion on the social aspects of nostalgia. Analysing 1960s’
social ruptures in American society (mostly challenges to beliefs around what
was seen as ‘natural’ in terms of race, gender, sexualities and lifestyles) and
the ‘nostalgia orgy’ in the following decade, Davis argued that nostalgic reactions
originate in perceived threats to continuity of identity in the context of
present fears, discontents and uncertainties, when identities have been ‘badly
bruised by the turmoil of the times’ (Davis 1979: 107). Against the idea of
retrospective yearnings as politically regressive and emotionally disturbed,
Davis approached nostalgia as an act anchored in present context that says a
lot more about contemporary social confi gurations than about the past itself,
as it plays a crucial role in ‘constructing, maintaining, and reconstructing
our identities’ (1979: 31). Recent anthropological literature has confi rmed
that nostalgia as affect, discourse and practice mediate collective identities,
whether they are social, ethnic or national (Bissell 2005, Bryant 2008,
Cashman 2006, Herzfeld 2004). Far from only being an evasion towards an
irretrievable past, or politically non-subversive (Rethmann 2008), nostalgic
laments can involve both moral critique of the present and an alternative
to deal with social changes (Parla 2009, Yang 2003). Sometimes, nostalgia is
‘a weapon’, as Berdahl nicely puts it (1999: 201). Similarly, Atia and Davies
emphasize that nostalgia is ‘a potent form of such subaltern memory’, underlining
‘nostalgia’s empowering agency’ and ‘critical potential’ (2010: 181). As
a matter of fact, nostalgia is mostly approached today as a narrative of loss by
way of such ‘power/resistance’ paradigm.
* * *
The texts that follow push the discussion around nostalgia in four directions.
While all the texts engage, by and large, in these ways, some add more
focus on one point rather than another. First, it is time to clarify the notional
fog surrounding the label ‘nostalgia’ and to meticulously describe the multiple
cognitive and emotional investments that lie behind it. Nostalgia has
become a catch-all notion used to refer to an array of memory discourses
and practices that sometimes share little commonalities. Katherine Stewart
already warned us that if ‘nostalgia . . . is everywhere’, ‘it is a cultural
practice, not a given content; its forms, meanings, and effects shift with the
context – it depends on where the speaker stands in the landscape of the
present’ (1988: 227). Although rooted in the idea that the past is no longer
available, nostalgic longings are indeed multiple. William Bissell invites
anthropologists to look at how ‘nostalgia takes on very different forms and
dimensions, engaging an array of social agents, interests, forces, and locations’
(Bissell 2005: 239). In the same vein, Dominic Boyer remarks that nostalgia
is not only ‘indexical’, but also ‘heteroglossic’, a ‘dialogical gossamer
6 Olivia Angé and David Berliner
of idiosyncratic references, interests, and affects that are channelled through
nostalgic discourse’ (Boyer 2012: 20). Some authors have highlighted the
need to operate distinctions between different types of nostalgia. Svetlana
Boym distinguishes between nostalgias that are ‘restorative’, aiming at
the ‘transhistorical reconstruction of lost home’ (Boym 2001: xviii), and
those that are ‘refl ective’, ironic and longing for the longing itself. Whereas
Davis separated ‘private’ and ‘collective’ nostalgias (1979: 122), Jameson
(1991) suggested a discrimination between the ‘nostalgic mood’, caused by a
feeling of loss, and the ‘nostalgic mode’, i.e., the consumable style that does
not involve memory per se (for an elaboration on Jameson’s typology, see
Grainge 2002). More generally, the latter designates these ‘fragments of the
past [that] are energetically manufactured and avidly consumed but do not
necessarily correspond to the evidence of experience’ (Fritzsche 2001: 1617).
This raises important questions for anthropologists: what forms can
nostalgia take and, when identifi ed, how to grasp them in thick description?
Is nostalgia an effect (positive or negative?), a social practice, a form of
discourse? How to distinguish it from other past-oriented states (such as
non-nostalgic reminiscences)? Does nostalgia bring into play a temporality
of its own? Nostalgia’s psychological mechanisms are habitually left
in the shadow by anthropologists, albeit Bloch (1998) and Wertsch (2009)
have recommended one take into account the complex workings of mnemonic
fi xation. A bouquet of studies examines the psychological triggers,
contents and functions of nostalgia, demonstrating its ability to generate
positive affects (Routledge et al. 2011, Wildschut et al. 2006). Although the
present volume does not constitute an exploration into the mental processes
of nostalgia, such research (that draw on methods many anthropologists
might fi nd irrelevant) opens fascinating avenues for further anthropological
enquiries. In his article for this volume, David Berliner calls for an ambitious
but nonetheless rigorous use of the notion. A consuming feeling born
of the realization that human temporality is irreversible, mostly embodied
in the Proustian madeleine experience (that of In Search of Lost Time which
triggers the author’s involuntary memories of Combray), nostalgia can be
disconnected from intense emotional feelings and sometimes from personal
experiences altogether. Berliner recommends that one disentangles
its multiple attachments, some of which are not always nostalgic. Likewise,
Gediminas Lankauskas regrets that the conceptual fuzziness surrounding
nostalgia and the dominant paradigm of nostalgifi cation in post-socialist
studies wipes out the very complexity and ambiguity of memory practices
that we should strive to describe.