Imperialist Nostalgia
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- Date Submitted: 05/04/2013 12:24 AM
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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...
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...