Imperialist_Nostalgia

Imperialist Nostalgia Nostalgia is usually connected to one’s childhood and characterized with a feeling of having lost something of innocence. When one feels nostalgia for cultures, they revive the relationship between colonialism and the people who were thought to be “inferior”. Rosaldo has the audience examine the definition of nostalgia, since in the past it was a medical condition that affected Swiss mercenaries from being homesick but changed to the definition we have today. It no longer has that negative definition, and instead of it being something that harms the body, it has transformed into something of innocence, it is just a person longing and remembering the bittersweet moments of the past. Rosaldo’s argument is that the Imperialist nostalgia is a paradox in itself. The “civilized” have to carry the white men’s burden and thus it is their “duty” to help out the “savage” people, but once there is progress and change, they long for what was. The Western culture has this longing and admiration for the untouched nature, although they themselves were part of what changed and destroyed the culture. Nostalgia is fixated what is unrecoverable and in itself disguises a fear of reality, that things can be destroyed and come to an end. “Imperialist nostalgia revolves around a paradox: A person kills somebody and then mourns the victim. In more attenuated form, someone deliberately alters a form of life, and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to the intervention. At one more remove, people destroy their environment, and then they worship nature" (108). Rosaldo doesn’t try and exclude anthropologists from the fault. They can’t be innocent when observing the culture because in doing so they are altering the culture. When people are having a feeling of nostalgia they are remembered something that ended, in many case, it is ones childhood. As an adult one cannot go and relive their childhood again, it is gone and unrecoverable; they can just try and remember how those days used to be. Western culture is one that celebrates life and the day that a baby is born the family is bursting with happiness, the baby enters the world untouched by societies rules and social norms. Children are shaped by how they are raised and it is their parents who “corrupt” their minds. Although the western culture praises life, they don’t share the same views about death. The feeling of nostalgia disguises that fear of reality and life, and what ultimately comes with life. Just how everything has a beginning, everything has an end. With that fear, people cling to the past and try to remember those days when things were uncorrupted, while nature takes its course. If something is unnatural, it usually does not exist in nature. Rosaldo says, “In any case, the changing meanings of nostalgia in Western Europe (not to mention the fact that many cultures have no such concept at all) indicate that “our” feelings of tender yearning are neither natural nor as pan-human, and therefore not necessarily as innocent as one might imagine”. Rosaldo makes sure to point out the fact that although we are accustomed to the concept of nostalgia and see it as normal, it isn’t to others and thus unnatural. People are using this concept that doesn’t exist in nature to mask our feelings of guilt about destroying something that was in harmony with nature. Although those cultures were part of nature, they were destroyed because they were seen as unnatural and by making nostalgia into something of innocence and turning people into innocent bystanders, it makes the domination of these cultures more acceptable since it is converted into being just that, an innocent error. It makes it okay for people to remember these cultures how they were before and not feel guilty for being part of that change. That is where the anthropologist is implicit in imperialism, the things that made it possible for them to be present is what caused the change. In recording the everyday lives and rituals of these people and trying to represent them, the peoples’ were acquiescing with the culture that the anthropologists came from. Nostalgia was used as a mask to appeal to the people that were conquered and destroyed. Although people no longer wear that mask in the same way that they used to, it has become a shield for the reality that is life. People must continue to live knowing that some cultures no longer exist in their purest forms because of intervention. Because of this, people can be more aware of what it truly means to feel nostalgic and where it originated.