Emotions and Society • vol XX • no XX • 1–3 • © Bristol University Press 2022

Print ISSN 2631-6897 • Online ISSN 2631-6900 • https://doi.org/10.1332/263169022X16546736384853

Accepted for publication 06 June 2022 • First published online 01 July 2022

BOOK REVIEW

Krystine I. Batcho, batcho@lemoyne.edu
Le Moyne College, USA

Michael Hviid Jacobsen (ed.) (2022)

Intimations of Nostalgia: Multidisciplinary Explorations of an Enduring Emotion
Bristol University Press
262 pp
Hardback: ISBN 978-1-5292-1476-5, £79.00

The impressive body of scholarship devoted to nostalgia makes it advisable for

readers to discern how they might best navigate the literature for the greatest gains
in knowledge and understanding. Intimations of Nostalgia: Multidisciplinary Explorations
of an Enduring Emotion, edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen, is well situated to
guide readers through the labyrinth of different approaches to the complexities of
nostalgia and its ramifications. Numerous nostalgia studies provide critical analyses
and in-depth insights, and offer a comprehensive picture of the pervasiveness of
nostalgia across contexts, cultures and disciplinary boundaries. While there is much
to be learned within single disciplines, a more complete understanding emerges
from tackling the construct from diverse, yet complementary, social sciences and
humanities perspectives.
Intimations of Nostalgia reveals how concepts of nostalgia vary as a function of
philosophy of time, historical context, political theory and culture. In Chapter 1, Giulia
Bovassi elucidates the role of the ambivalent nostalgic condition in affirming cohesion
in temporalisation. Placing nostalgia on a par with philosophy, Bovassi argues that
during a state of being uprooted, nostalgia can be a sanctuary of meaning, providing
comfort, an escape from stagnation and a preservation of identity. In Chapter 2, Tobias
Becker contrasts nostalgia with history, arguing that history attempts to understand the
past, whereas nostalgia falsifies it to feel better in the present. In Chapter 3, Andrew
R. Murphy distinguishes between nostalgic and Golden Age politics and explicates
how nostalgia, incorporating critiques of the present and celebrations of the past,
extends beyond individual psychology. Murphy points out that as an eminently political
affective state, nostalgia has served as a rallying call for social movements.
Chapters 4 and 5 contribute an important shift to the social science focus on the
experience and behaviour of individuals within their social-cultural context. Michael
Hviid Jacobsen and Janelle L. Wilson propose that sociology provides a unique
perspective by emphasising how conceptualisations, experiences and uses of nostalgia
vary historically, socially and culturally. They view nostalgia as a response to alienation,

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anomie, dissatisfaction with the present, and the sense of loss of important aspects of
personal wholeness and autonomy. Examining how individual nostalgia is affected by
the social-cultural context, the sociological perspective identifies triggers and functions
of nostalgia and dovetails with the psychological approach presented by Tim Wildschut
and Constantine Sedikides in Chapter 5. One would expect consistent insights to evolve
from the sociological and psychological approaches, given their common object of
scrutiny, albeit at different levels of emphasis. Citing a body of empirical psychological
research, Wildschut and Sedikides frame nostalgia within a regulatory model in which
nostalgia functions as a balancing feedback mechanism to counter distress and restore
psychological homeostasis. The regulatory approach characterises nostalgia as primarily
beneficial, as it strengthens positive affect, self-esteem, social connectedness, meaning and
optimism in contexts of loneliness and other threats to wellbeing. Despite the volume
of empirical research support for this model, agreement with the conceptualisation of
nostalgia as predominantly adaptive is not universal. Discrepant views are often attributable
to approaches that investigate nostalgia in life beyond the laboratory setting.
Exploring nostalgia within and beyond the laboratory, Intimations of Nostalgia is
well positioned to uncover conflicting images of nostalgia. The second half of the
book presents applied and theoretical perspectives from anthropology, media studies,
marketing, literature and architecture. While important themes emerge, a number
of ambiguities are also evident across the diverse disciplines. The chapters on media
studies and marketing view nostalgia as predominantly favourable, despite the risks
for abuse, whereas the chapters on anthropology and architecture struggle with
distinguishing nostalgia from related phenomena and highlight the potentially dark
side of nostalgia. For example, in Chapter 6, Michael Herzfeld distinguishes nostalgia
from heritage, positing that nostalgia laments irreversible loss while heritage seeks to
reverse loss with creative invention. Describing nostalgia as a moving target, Herzfeld
contrasts nostalgia as a social experience with the monumentalisation of an invariant
past or the trivialisation of a simplistic history. In Chapter 10, Fernando Quesada
and Andrés Carretero discuss architecture within the tension inherent in the conflict
between historical progress and the loss of confidence in progress during times of
dissatisfaction or fear of the future. They conclude that architecture is an exceptional
symbolic mode as technique can create physical forms of memories of the past.
Possible abuses or dangers of nostalgia are flagged by the authors of chapters
on media and marketing. Describing nostalgia as a bittersweet feeling that arises
during times of physical or social change, Katharina Niemeyer points out that while
nostalgia comes and goes, media is its point de passage. Confronting the irreversibility
of time and inevitability of mortality, nostalgia allows people to reconnect with one
another. Niemeyer argues that nostalgia’s power to restore joy in the midst of loss
makes it a vulnerable and exploitable feeling. By using nostalgia as a comforting
tactic, media can foster reiterations of past inequities and inhibit more progressive,
future-directed messaging. Similarly, Ela Veresiu, Thomas Derek Robinson, and Ana
Babić Rosario discuss how marketing can manipulate nostalgia to promote visions
of the past that capitalise on present-day anxieties and fears about the future and
increase the dissatisfaction that elicits further nostalgia in a vicious cycle or nostalgia
trap. Images of past societies based on selective editing of inequality and suffering
can allow past inadequacies to persist rather than to be overcome. Selective versions
of the past can engender tensions among groups as one consumer’s nostalgia might
be another’s abomination.