Status Updates From Perdre sa culture

Loss is a given of existence.

Nostalgia is intimately tied up with their desire to imagine a diff er ent world: one able to withstand cultural homogenization and preserve ethnic diversity, one where social and po liti cal recognition can be gained for all. Truly, even for anthropologists themselves, hope is never far from nostalgia.

Like a doctor watching a patient in agony, the nostalgist feels powerless before the passage of time, as was the case for many anthropologists. Some of them felt outrage and a sense, no doubt, of personal loss.

I am particularly fond of Ramon Sarró’s likening of ethnography to “the art of being late” to describe the disappointment felt by the first anthropologists arriving in the field just as traditional systems appeared to be crumbling; they were arriving too late.

Truly, hope is never far from nostalgia.