Nostalgia and its disciplines: A response

Abstract

One of the very first definitions of nostalgia in western culture comes, not surprisingly, from Homer's Odyssey. Having returned to Ithaka, disguised as a Cretan prince and Trojan War refugee, Odysseus idly asks the aged swineherd Eumaeus for his own story of exile and enslavement. Eumaeus proposes not simply a narrative, but a sharing of memories, one refugee to another:    ᾽          ,        ,           .[But we two will drink and feast in the hut, and will take delight in each other's wretched sorrows as we remember them. For in after time a man can even delight in grief, whoever has suffered greatly and wandered far.] (Homer, 1995: 15.398-401; translation mine) The signature of what would come to be called nostalgia is starkly legible here: a form of memory that can convert previous suffering (algos) into delight, although that style of memory is limited to exiles and refugees, those whose homecoming (nostos) has been indefinitely delayed or permanently prevented. It is also a collective endeavor, here a late-night conversation between two older men, each with their stories, whether true or feigned, of multiple dislocations to tell. Over two millennia prior to the word's coinage by a Swiss physician, the swineherd's invocation of a shareable, potent mnemonic alchemy by which painful wanderings can become shared pleasure already defines the 'nostalgia' that increasingly vexes and preoccupies modern scholarship.The vexation produced by nostalgia is, in fact, intimately related to its capacity for offering solace and pleasure. Even in this rather tender Homeric scene opportunities for skepticism suggest themselves. Eumaeus is, in fact, in rather serious error as to the identity of his interlocutor, who has presumably heard Eumaeus's story already and is more interested in testing the continued loyalty of his family's retainer than in transforming pains into delightful recollection over a rustic meal. Whereas for Eumaeus an evening of nostalgic recollection is a pleasure, for Odysseus it is part of a strategy. It is tempting, then, to read this moment as less touching than tense, rife with future Memory Studies 3(3) 269-275

The commodification of time and memory: Online communities and the dynamics of commercially produced nostalgia

“…In the mid-2000s, Keightley and Pickering (2006) launched a call for rethinking the place of nostalgia in sociological research to recognise (but not guarantee) its creative and progressive potential, and in the same year, the more constructive nature of nostalgia as a way for overcoming personal crises of the present was empirically demonstrated (Arndt et al, 2006). The publication of a special issue of Memory Studies on the historical misconceptions about nostalgia finally opened the way towards a more performative approach to nostalgia (Dames, 2010) and a transition to the verb ‘to nostalgize’ (Sedikides et al, 2015; Niemeyer, 2014) became possible. A more empirically informed exploration of the multiple and diverse relationships between the media, communications and nostalgia began to emerge in the mid-2010s (see, for example, Lizardi, 2015; Menke, 2017; Niemeyer, 2014; Schrey, 2017; Sielke, 2017).…”

Historic enchantments – materializing nostalgia

“…the word sought of its own accord that murky and inchoate amalgam of sentiments to which so homely a word as homesickness could no longer render symbolic justice'. 55 Nostalgia's chirality occasions its recursive and conjunctive status as both sickness (originally a disease) and cure (later a therapeutic practice). Even those who bemoan persistent medical tropes in nostalgia discourse turn to the expression's earlier literary 'origins' where magical beings, such as Homer's Sirens, cast the first nostalgic spells.…”

Multiple nostalgias: the fabric of heritage inLuangPrabang (LaoPDR)

“…Secondly, I emphasize that, far from being a feeling hidden in the confines of the self, nostalgia is ‘a force that does something’ (Dames : 272) in contemporary Luang Prabang. I argue that, by attempting to preserve spaces, practices, and objects, UNESCO experts and national heritage professionals effectively transform them.…”