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Losing Culture: Nostalgia, Heritage, and Our Accelerated Times
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.
162 pages, Hardcover
Published May 15, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 15, 2025
An incredibly interesting book about perceived cultural loss, nostalgia, the politics surrounding the discourse and self-reflection of anthropologists in this system.
My only complaint would be that the translation from french to english is quite wordy at times and makes some sentences hard to understand, especially as a non-english native.
Still, absolutely recommendable book.
My only complaint would be that the translation from french to english is quite wordy at times and makes some sentences hard to understand, especially as a non-english native.
Still, absolutely recommendable book.
January 23, 2025
A vrai dire, j'ai juste apprécié et vraiment lu le chapitre L'Unesco ou la nostalgie bureaucratique
June 6, 2025
Bon livre pour ceux qui sont déjà un peu ancrée dans l'anthropologie. Super critique des notions de perte de la culture avec des exemples variées et même de nouveaux concepts !
June 19, 2025
"Loss is a given of existence"
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews