Around the world, you will hear complaints that people are losing their culture and their heritage. This study explores what is triggering this sense of cultural loss, to what ends this rhetoric gets deployed, and how anthropologists deal with their own feelings of nostalgia.

Introduction: The Loss of Culture and the Desire to Transmit It Onward Chapter 1: Transmission Impossible in West Africa Chapter 2: UNESCO, Bureaucratic Nostalgia, and Cultural Loss Chapter 3: Toward the End of Societies? Chapter 4: The Plastic Anthropologist Conclusion: For a cultural and patrimonial diplomacy Acknowledgements Notes Bibliography Index

“Losing Culture is about nostalgia, combining self-reflection and rich ethnographic examples from Africa and Asia with a critical view of the disciplinary anxieties of anthropology. Nostalgia, in this wonderful book, is treated as one more thing that is, in our tormented world, no longer what it used to be.”

Let us begin with four vignettes. 2015: Alain Finkielkraut’s latest pamphlet, L’identité malheureuse, soars to the top of the sales charts in bookshops across the French-speaking world. Loaded with cultural nostalgia for French exceptionalism and warmth, it trumpets a fear of contemporary change, towards immigration and Islam in particular, and denounces globalization for leading us inexorably down the path of uniformity and oblivion. With its contempt for sociologists and problematic revisionism of Lévi-Strauss, the text is an example of French declinism, and its commercial success is far from trivial. December 2008: Luang Prabang, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northern Laos. Three Dutch tourists talk among themselves inside the walls of the Vat Nong temple, one of thirty-four monasteries in this holy Buddhist town. As they leave the temple, one declares forlornly, “It’s a shame. Locals don’t even wear their traditional clothes anymore.” 2001: I find myself in the maritime region of Basse-côte in Guinea-Conakry, Africa. In response to my questions about his parents’ religious past, during the pre-Islamic time of custom, a young man in his twenties tells me, “There is nothing left here. Nothing has been passed down to us. We, the young, don’t know anything about the custom.” March 2008: Finally back in Paris, at the UNESCO headquarters. An American anthropologist turned official of the Center for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage declares, “What we’re doing here is transmitting what cannot be transmitted anymore or not well!” But what do Finkielkraut’s treatise, the discourse of these tourists, the young Guineans, and this UNESCO official all have in common? Despite stemming from different social and cultural environments, do they not all proclaim together that cultures are being lost and that cultural transmission no longer works as it should?