The fifteenth volume in the Lessons & Legacies series, featuring multidisciplinary research in the Holocaust and Jewish cultural history on the theme of Global Perspectives and National Narratives. The fourteen chapters included in this volume manifest three broad categories: history, literature, and memory. These chapters continue the recent trend in Holocaust Studies of a focus on local history, integrating specific regional and national narratives into a more global approach to the event. Newer studies have continued to incorporate what was once termed the periphery into a more global examination of the experiences of Jewish refugees in flight to Latin America, Africa, and the Soviet Union. At the same time, very specific local studies deepen our knowledge of the mechanics of genocide, along with the experiences of refugees in flight, and the subsequent dimensions of Holocaust memory and representation. 

New research on Holocaust literature continues to unearth unexamined texts from the period of the war itself, which can shed light on Jewish responses to persecution and strategies for survival. The study of Holocaust testimonies continues to grapple with the challenge of language: how to convey through the limits of human language the depths of barbarity to an audience that could never fully understand what they had not personally experienced. Likewise, literary studies continue to incorporate texts that were once considered outside the standard canon of Holocaust literature, such as science fiction and children’s literature.

The tension between local and global perspectives can also be seen quite clearly in what the volume's editors understand by the term “memory studies,” or new approaches to research on museums and memorials. The very specific nature of collective memory on the national level continues to be the site of the contested “politics of memory.” A number of the chapters in this volume engage with the conflict of monuments and memorials, museums’ attempts to resolve provenance issues, questions around the ethics of Holocaust tourism, and the inclusion of new technologies and digital survivors into the memorial landscape.
 

We’re losing our culture… our heritage… our traditions… everything is being swept away.

Such sentiments get echoed around the world, from aging Trump supporters in West Virginia to young villagers in West Africa. But what is triggering this sense of cultural loss, and to what ends does this rhetoric get deployed?

To answer these questions, anthropologist David Berliner travels around the world, from Guinea-Conakry, where globalization affects the traditional patriarchal structure of cultural transmission, to Laos, where foreign UNESCO experts have become self-appointed saviors of the nation’s cultural heritage. He also embarks on a voyage of critical self-exploration, reflecting on how anthropologists handle their own sense of cultural alienation while becoming deeply embedded in other cultures. This leads into a larger examination of how and why we experience exonostalgia, a longing for vanished cultural heydays we never directly experienced.

Losing Culture provides a nuanced analysis of these phenomena, addressing why intergenerational cultural transmission is vital to humans, yet also considering how efforts to preserve disappearing cultures are sometimes misguided or even reactionary. Blending anthropological theory with vivid case studies, this book teaches us how to appreciate the multitudes of different ways we might understand loss, memory, transmission, and heritage.