Berliner, David C. Losing Culture. Nostalgia, Heritage, and Our Accelerated Times. New Brunswick, Camden, Newark, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2020, 150 pages

“I love the things I never had / with the others I no longer have,” wrote the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral (1958, 96) to express a longing for that which we have never owned. Arjun Appadurai (1996, 77) calls it a feeling for “losses that never took place.” Nostalgia is a theme long explored in literature, popular culture, and the arts. In recent years, nostalgia has seen a boom in anthropology, contemporary archaeology, social history, and heritage studies through studies on migration, exile, and deindustrialization. David Berliner has studied cultural transmission, nostalgia, and its anthropological derivations since the 2000s. Originally published in French under the title Perdre sa culture by Editions Zones Sensibles in 2018, Losing Culture is welcomed by an English reading audience. The book is a sober, almost frugal—with a single photo and no figures or tables—edition of revised articles previously published. The theme is a growing sense of cultural loss. The book is an analysis of the place of the past in the present and the multiple discourses that are built around such nostalgia. Nostalgia is a complex notion, and many have attempted to define its contours, its derivations, and its conceptual trajectory. Losing Culture offers a conceptual distinction between endonostalgia and exonostalgia to decipher the multiple forms taken by the diagnoses of loss and the experiences of longing. Endonostalgia refers to the “nostalgia for a past that has been experienced personally” (62). Exonostalgia is the longing for “a past that one has not personally lived, entailing feelings of loss that are detached from the direct experience of loss” (62). These ideas invite us to reflect on the dynamism of nostalgic discourses and practices through time. Exploring exonostalgia as “the sadness for other people’s cultural loss” (9), Berliner identifies it with Western tourists, Paris-based UNESCO experts, and anthropologists. Nostalgic discourse is understood in spatial and temporal terms, built around both a longing for the past and other places; for example, anthropologists in terms of their longing for disappearing cultures. Divided into four chapters, the book depicts the sense of cultural loss and the associated nostalgic discourses. The first chapter focuses on the author’s ethnography among the Bulongic, a Baga group of Western Africa. It explores the ambivalences of culture transmission, memory, and nostalgia that are associated with pre-Islamic traditional ritual practices. The male Bulongic initiation ritual is discussed in terms of religious practices that vanished in 1954 when Islam was established in the region. Ritual knowledge is gradually fading, and its transmission is impeded by the current silence of elderly men, whose secrecy is resignified into prestige and power. While elders emphasize the religious values of the present, they “nostalgically described the era of initiation and pre-Islamic rituals as some sort of golden age and idyllic past; and lamented the real loss of ritual power that accompanied the end of this period” (27). This ambivalent gaze on past and present customs—and its associated objects such as the bansonyi masks—allows us to reflect on meanings and their dependency on the paradigm that locates historical value in the imagined original state of objects or practices. Is memory being decoupled from its dependence on continuity and stability? Cultural secrecy and the absence of objects do not necessarily lead to forgetting and cultural loss. Absence and secrecy paradoxically dignify and open the door to the persistence of memory and meaning. The persistence of cultural and knowledge transmission can be found elsewhere, for example, in rituals performed by women. The Bulongic ethnographic case shows how nostalgic fossilization and “museumification” of the past obscures how traditional cultural meanings are produced and subtly transmitted …