Losing Culture
162 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
1 b&w image
Paperback
Release Date:15 May 2020
ISBN:9781978815353
Hardcover
Release Date:15 May 2020
ISBN:9781978815360
Losing Culture
Nostalgia, Heritage, and Our Accelerated Times
By David Berliner; Translated by Dominic Horsfall
Rutgers University Press
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.
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.
Losing Culture is about nostalgia, combining self-reflection and rich ethnographic examples from Africa and Asia with a critical view of the disciplinary anxieties of anthropology. Nostalgia, in this wonderful book, is treated as one more thing that is, in our tormented world, no longer what it used to be.
David Berliner stands at the crossroads, observing the natives, the philosophers, the heritage bureaucrats, the tourists, and other anthropologists as well, from all nationalities, when they come to look at – or even live – the past in the present. But what does he become himself? A cultural chameleon? When you have read Losing Culture, perhaps your anthropology will never be the same again.
By linking the chameleon figure of the anthropologist with the theme of nostalgia, Berliner demonstrates anthropologists’ important role in disabusing the general public of the illusion that ‘cultures’ can be rebuilt in their original form. This subtle departure from conventional studies of heritage places a new and desirable emphasis on the ethical choices facing anthropologists when confronted with the politics of contested pasts. Of particular value is the unusual but well-grounded comparative perspective that Berliner draws from his findings in West Africa and Southeast Asia.’
What Berliner sets out to do in this concisely insightful little book is to 'refine our understanding of how cultural loss manifests today in different contexts' with a special view to 'the rhetorical forms that lead to this diagnosis.' This ambitious task of addressing such a tremendous, worldwide problematic without losing touch with ethnography is anything but simple....Impressive.
Losing Culture is about nostalgia, combining self-reflection and rich ethnographic examples from Africa and Asia with a critical view of the disciplinary anxieties of anthropology. Nostalgia, in this wonderful book, is treated as one more thing that is, in our tormented world, no longer what it used to be.
David Berliner stands at the crossroads, observing the natives, the philosophers, the heritage bureaucrats, the tourists, and other anthropologists as well, from all nationalities, when they come to look at – or even live – the past in the present. But what does he become himself? A cultural chameleon? When you have read Losing Culture, perhaps your anthropology will never be the same again.
By linking the chameleon figure of the anthropologist with the theme of nostalgia, Berliner demonstrates anthropologists’ important role in disabusing the general public of the illusion that ‘cultures’ can be rebuilt in their original form. This subtle departure from conventional studies of heritage places a new and desirable emphasis on the ethical choices facing anthropologists when confronted with the politics of contested pasts. Of particular value is the unusual but well-grounded comparative perspective that Berliner draws from his findings in West Africa and Southeast Asia.’
What Berliner sets out to do in this concisely insightful little book is to 'refine our understanding of how cultural loss manifests today in different contexts' with a special view to 'the rhetorical forms that lead to this diagnosis.' This ambitious task of addressing such a tremendous, worldwide problematic without losing touch with ethnography is anything but simple....Impressive.
Losing Culture speaks to us both through its fascinating ethnographic cases and the lucid eye it poses onto ourselves, the plastic and nostalgic anthropologists. Its insight can apply to numerous cultural contexts, as diverse as they may be, by situating participant observers in contradictory and complex globalized cultural networks… Berliner offers a lucid study of the heterogeneity and multiplicity of participants in the accelerated times of a rapidly changing world.
David Berliner is a professor of anthropology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. Between 2011 and 2015, he was co-editor of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, the journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Dominic Horsfall is a translator, editor and writer with a special focus on anthropology. He received his MA in Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge and now lives and works in London.
Dominic Horsfall is a translator, editor and writer with a special focus on anthropology. He received his MA in Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge and now lives and works in London.
Let us begin with four vignettes.
2015: Alain Finkielkraut’s latest pamphlet, L’identité malheureuse, soars to the top of the sales charts in bookshops across the French-speaking world. Loaded with cultural nostalgia for French exceptionalism and warmth, it trumpets a fear of contemporary change, towards immigration and Islam in particular, and denounces globalization for leading us inexorably down the path of uniformity and oblivion. With its contempt for sociologists and problematic revisionism of Lévi-Strauss, the text is an example of French declinism, and its commercial success is far from trivial.
December 2008: Luang Prabang, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northern Laos. Three Dutch tourists talk among themselves inside the walls of the Vat Nong temple, one of thirty-four monasteries in this holy Buddhist town. As they leave the temple, one declares forlornly, “It’s a shame. Locals don’t even wear their traditional clothes anymore.”
2001: I find myself in the maritime region of Basse-côte in Guinea-Conakry, Africa. In response to my questions about his parents’ religious past, during the pre-Islamic time of custom, a young man in his twenties tells me, “There is nothing left here. Nothing has been passed down to us. We, the young, don’t know anything about the custom.”
March 2008: Finally back in Paris, at the UNESCO headquarters. An American anthropologist turned official of the Center for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage declares, “What we’re doing here is transmitting what cannot be transmitted anymore or not well!”
But what do Finkielkraut’s treatise, the discourse of these tourists, the young Guineans, and this UNESCO official all have in common? Despite stemming from different social and cultural environments, do they not all proclaim together that cultures are being lost and that cultural transmission no longer works as it should?
2015: Alain Finkielkraut’s latest pamphlet, L’identité malheureuse, soars to the top of the sales charts in bookshops across the French-speaking world. Loaded with cultural nostalgia for French exceptionalism and warmth, it trumpets a fear of contemporary change, towards immigration and Islam in particular, and denounces globalization for leading us inexorably down the path of uniformity and oblivion. With its contempt for sociologists and problematic revisionism of Lévi-Strauss, the text is an example of French declinism, and its commercial success is far from trivial.
December 2008: Luang Prabang, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northern Laos. Three Dutch tourists talk among themselves inside the walls of the Vat Nong temple, one of thirty-four monasteries in this holy Buddhist town. As they leave the temple, one declares forlornly, “It’s a shame. Locals don’t even wear their traditional clothes anymore.”
2001: I find myself in the maritime region of Basse-côte in Guinea-Conakry, Africa. In response to my questions about his parents’ religious past, during the pre-Islamic time of custom, a young man in his twenties tells me, “There is nothing left here. Nothing has been passed down to us. We, the young, don’t know anything about the custom.”
March 2008: Finally back in Paris, at the UNESCO headquarters. An American anthropologist turned official of the Center for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage declares, “What we’re doing here is transmitting what cannot be transmitted anymore or not well!”
But what do Finkielkraut’s treatise, the discourse of these tourists, the young Guineans, and this UNESCO official all have in common? Despite stemming from different social and cultural environments, do they not all proclaim together that cultures are being lost and that cultural transmission no longer works as it should?
Introduction: The Loss of Culture and the Desire to Transmit It Onward
Chapter 1: Transmission Impossible in West Africa
Chapter 2: UNESCO, Bureaucratic Nostalgia, and Cultural Loss
Chapter 3: Toward the End of Societies?
Chapter 4: The Plastic Anthropologist
Conclusion: For a cultural and patrimonial diplomacy
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Chapter 1: Transmission Impossible in West Africa
Chapter 2: UNESCO, Bureaucratic Nostalgia, and Cultural Loss
Chapter 3: Toward the End of Societies?
Chapter 4: The Plastic Anthropologist
Conclusion: For a cultural and patrimonial diplomacy
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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