Losing Culture : : Nostalgia, Heritage, and Our Accelerated Times / / David Berliner.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2020 English
• VerfasserIn: Berliner, David,
• MitwirkendeR: Horsfall, Dominic,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (168 p.) :; 1 b&w image

We’re losing our culture… our heritage… our traditions… everything is being swept away. Such sentiments get echoed around the world, from aging Trump supporters in West Virginia to young villagers in West Africa. But what is triggering this sense of cultural loss, and to what ends does this rhetoric get deployed? To answer these questions, anthropologist David Berliner travels around the world, from Guinea-Conakry, where globalization affects the traditional patriarchal structure of cultural transmission, to Laos, where foreign UNESCO experts have become self-appointed saviors of the nation’s cultural heritage. He also embarks on a voyage of critical self-exploration, reflecting on how anthropologists handle their own sense of cultural alienation while becoming deeply embedded in other cultures. This leads into a larger examination of how and why we experience exonostalgia, a longing for vanished cultural heydays we never directly experienced. Losing Culture provides a nuanced analysis of these phenomena, addressing why intergenerational cultural transmission is vital to humans, yet also considering how efforts to preserve disappearing cultures are sometimes misguided or even reactionary. Blending anthropological theory with vivid case studies, this book teaches us how to appreciate the multitudes of different ways we might understand loss, memory, transmission, and heritage.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. The Loss of Culture and the Desire to Transmit It Onward -- 1. Transmission Impossible in West Africa -- 2. UNESCO, Bureaucratic Nostalgia, and Cultural Loss -- 3. Toward the End of Societies? -- 4. The Plastic Anthropologist -- Conclusion. For a Cultural and Patrimonial Diplomacy -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author