Losing Culture: Nostalgia, Heritage, and Our Accelerated Times

About the Book

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:
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

About the Author :
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.
 

Review :
“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.” - Arjun Appadurai (author of The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition) “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.” - Arjun Appadurai (author of The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition) "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." - Ulf Hannerz (author of Writing Future Worlds: An Anthropologist Explores Global Scenarios) "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." - Ulf Hannerz (author of Writing Future Worlds: An Anthropologist Explores Global Scenarios) “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.”
  - Michael Herzfeld (author of Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok) “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.”
  - Michael Herzfeld (author of Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok) "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." (Anthropos) "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." (Anthropos) "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." - Francisco Rivera (Anthropologica) "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." - Francisco Rivera (Anthropologica)