make-up post

While reading “Friction” I found Tsing’s explanation of “nostalgia” a really interesting example of that which relates the local to global. She writes that Uma Adanag’s worries about the difficulty of finding food on her local river with the construction of new roads and electric currents in the water amounted to a “prospective, incipient nostalgia” that “helped motivate the list” (157). Tsing writes that it is the “same incipient nostalgia” as that which motivates the “science of environmental conservation” (157). She goes on to write that it was the nostalgia that enlivened their encounter and the globalism of the exercise charged the list with “emotions, quests, and voices originating from many sites” (158). This passage reminded me of the many times we have seen nostalgia used in this course. For example, in terms of Snow Crash and Jameson we saw that history itself can be nostalgic or replaced by nostalgia. Appadurai talks about history in terms of “nostalgia without memory” and its implications for a global audience. Tsing, as mentioned above, talks about nostalgia in terms of global and local environmental conservation. For me, the idea of nostalgia has been one of the most interesting course concepts though it has been defined and used in different ways. Why is nostalgia is effective tool for examining the local and the global? What exactly is nostalgia?