Nostalgia for imagined pasts provides community glue for detached suburbanites

Evidence

Here, Buffaloes picked up on the theme of nostalgia in country music, and leaned heavily on it to provide a sense of community. Ray (who, as we have heard, was opinionated in one-on-one conversation) talked in the group at length only about his grandparents’ long-gone farm in what was now a wealthy suburb; how much it would be worth now if his grandparents had not sold it; how different the area was now, full of malls and highways. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 906

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Old moral panics about community loss breed reactionary nostalgia rather than constructive reform — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1445; Nostalgia operates as a civic practice enabling non-committal interaction — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 912; Nostalgia retroactively reconstructs past communities as more unified than they were. (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Nostalgia supplies warm shared feeling without requiring present-day mutual obligation #corroborates (0.90) — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 910
• Nostalgia operates as a civic practice enabling non-committal interaction #expands (0.85) — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 912
• Nostalgia retroactively reconstructs past communities as more unified than they were. #expands (0.80)