Losing Culture
Rutgers University Press (Verlag)
978-1-9788-1535-3 (ISBN)
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.
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.
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
| Erscheinungsdatum | 29.05.2020 |
|---|---|
| Übersetzer | Dominic Horsfall |
| Zusatzinfo | 1 b&w image |
| Verlagsort | New Brunswick NJ |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 140 x 216 mm |
| Gewicht | 200 g |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie ► Volkskunde | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Allgemeines / Lexika | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-9788-1535-2 / 1978815352 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-9788-1535-3 / 9781978815353 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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