Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Society for Cultural Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists

Primary Theme: Human rights

Secondary Theme: Identity and Equity

(3-1235) Nostalgia (Pain of Past), Ecalgia (Pain of Home), Topalgia (Pain of Place): Three Aspects of Loss, Pain, and Displacement

A great deal has been written about the privations and dispossession of people exiled by various causes from their homes and prior lives. Generally the bereavement suffered has been treated as if singular in constitution, but in actuality, a number of distinct facets make up its disposition. Incorporated are at least three vectors of pain: past, home, and place. This panel aims to problematize the concepts of “loss” and “displacement” as experienced through disaster, conflict, and other disrupting and dislodging crises. We understand “loss” both in its psychological reading as a form of mourning, melancholia, nostalgia, sadness, trauma, and depression, and, as a contested set of relations and structures of feeling set within a social-scientific frame and consequent to historical, economic, and socio-political processes. In order to examine the impact of losses suffered, the panel crosses over a number of what are usually treated as diverse concerns: disaster survivors, conflict refugees, the increasing number of climate exiles, and groups forcibly extracted from their milieus. Explored will be the nuanced intricacy of heartbreak in order to illuminate and potentially allow for mediation of it. Covered will be loss of cultural and physical surroundings, quotidian habit and sphere, legacy and expectation, and perceptual ambience. The past is implicated within the despair, but so are the present and the future, all at times articulated as both utopia and distopia.

Organizer(s)

• Susanna Hoffman

  Director
  Hoffman Consulting

Chair(s)

• Susanna Hoffman

  Director
  Hoffman Consulting

Presenter(s)

• Susanna Hoffman

  Director
  Hoffman Consulting

• A.J. Faas

  Assistant Professor of Anthropology
  San Jose State University

• Elizabeth Marino

  Oregon State University, Cascade

• Adriana Garriga-Lopez

  Chair and Associate Professor
  Kalamazoo College

Discussant(s)

• Roberto Barrios

  Associate Professor
  Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Presenter(s)

• Paul Kadetz

  Robert Fisher Oxnam Chair of Science & Society
  Drew University, Department of Anthropology

Presentations:

• 4:15 PM - 4:30 PM

  Nostalgia (Pain of Past), Ecalgia (Pain of Home),Topalgia (Pain of Place): Deciphering the Loss and Pain of Displacement and Resettlement: An Overview
  Susanna M. Hoffman – Hoffman Consulting
• 4:30 PM - 4:45 PM

  Estando, estando, estando: Pain of Place and Making a Life in the Shadow of Mt. Tungurahua
  A.J. Faas – San Jose State University
• 4:45 PM - 5:00 PM

  Forecasting Nostalgia: anticipating the loss of homeland under conditions of climate change
  Elizabeth K. Marino – Oregon State University, Cascade
• 5:00 PM - 5:15 PM

  Speculations on Puerto Rico: The Future in Question
  Adriana M. Garriga-Lopez – Kalamazoo College
• 5:15 PM - 5:30 PM

  Twice Removed: Unpacking Post-disaster “Resilience” and Social Infrastructure in the Returning Vietnamese Refugees of New Orleans East
  Paul I. Kadetz – Drew University, Department of Anthropology
• 5:30 PM - 5:45 PM

  Discussion
  Roberto E. Barrios – Southern Illinois University Carbondale