Analysis of The Term Nostalgia and Its Manifestation in Real Life

The term “nostalgia” was initially coined by Johannes Holfer a Swiss student in the 17th century. It was used to describe a disease, a kind of “homesickness”. He came up with the term to explain the anxieties presented by Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home. Nostalgia today is generally linked with reminisicence regarding the so-called simpler times in the past. Svetlana Boym interprets Holfer’s interpretation of the diseased by stating that: “[they have] lost touch with the present” and captivated the “ability to hear voices or see ghosts”.

The first American philosopher in postmodernity to resort to nostalgia as a channel of forming and conserving identity is Ralph Harper. He is called the “Father of American Existentialism”. Harper’s fundamental work, released in 1966 and titled ‘Nostalgia’, is frequently shared with poetics to depict nostalgia: “Nostalgia combines bitterness and sweetness, the lost and the found, the far and the near, the new and the familiar, absence and presence. The past which is over and gone, from which we have been or are being removed, but some magic becomes present again for a short while. But its realness seems even more familiar, because renewed, than it ever was, more enchanting and more lovely. Magic-like it comes unasked, unanticipated, in the middle of sterility and defeat, in the middle of a waste which is impregnated with longing. And what is longed for is what we do not usually have, a sense of the intimate, immediate presentation of the whole to our consciousness”.

Janelle Wilson demonstrates four basic functions of nostalgia. These are:

• Nostalgia is an intra-personal expression of self which subjectively provides one with a sense of continuity.
• Nostalgia is an interpersonal form of conversational play, serving the purpose of bonding.
• Nostalgia is a form of ideologizing or mystifying the past.
• Nostalgia can be used as a cultural commodity derived from the experience of a particular age-cohort and transformed into a market segment.

As Edgerton, describes what she experienced during her childhood: “The displacement becomes significant in that one cannot simply choose one another place that is truly home. The place called ‘home’ is in many ways closer to being a part of the anatomy than mere geographic location.”

As stated by Janelle Wilson, the concept of nostalgia encases a remembering of the past, in the present and conceivably predicting the future. Wilson suggests that nostalgia is not simply about the past, as it was described conventionally. However, it is indeed declared to be much more complicated. Nostalgia is not just situated in time but it is also established in space. While nostalgia is taken for granted to be most broadly about time, it is also situated in space. She emphasises that nostalgia allows sociologists plenty to examine and question.

Sedikides, Wildschut, and Badendetermined that nostalgia can attend to an existential function, by administering some promise that one has a significant life. In brief, nostalgia can sustain a sense of substance. Sedikides and others, including Davis and Wilson highlighted the fact that nostalgia can assist the progress of the persistence of identity.

How one experiences nostalgia might additionally be advantageous for the whole community. There is a  link among amusing aroma associated to nostalgia and to consequent assisting behaviour: one is more likely to help a passerby if outside a bakery where pleasant scents emanate than if we are outside a dry goods store.