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Nostalgia
This is early twentieth-century anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s term for a situation in which a social group selectively forgets certain aspects of their history—usually aspects that threaten group consensus or the interests of the powerful. This convenient forgetting serves as “an indirect expression of power,” and it’s something that the oil companies and state government encourage.
Structural Amnesia Quotes in Strangers in Their Own Land
The Strangers in Their Own Land quotes below are all either spoken by Structural Amnesia or refer to Structural Amnesia. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3 Quotes
The Arenos didn't simply remember the good old days of a clean Bayou d'Inde. They remembered against the great forgetting of industry and state government. This institutional forgetting altered the private act of mourning. And not just that. It altered the Arenos’ very identity. They had not left Bayou d'Inde. They were stayers. They didn't want to leave, and even if they had wanted to, they couldn't afford to. The polluting companies had given them no money to enable them to move. And the value of their house had now fallen, for who would want to live on Bayou d'Inde Pass Road, even in a home as beautifully kept up as theirs? The Arenos had become stay-at-home migrants. They had stayed. The environment had left.
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In this passage, Hochschild shows how the Arenos’ remembering is a distinctly political act. They do not merely reminisce about the “good old days,” back when they could live by eating animals and farming in the Bayou d’Inde. Instead, they rather insistently sustain the otherwise-forgotten memory of their roots and their land as it used to be. Their remembering is a form of resistance to the government’s structural amnesia—whereas oil companies and the state government encourage Louisianans to selectively forget pollution but recognize oil’s economic benefits, the Arenos’ remembering keeps an alternative possibility alive, even if only in the minds Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis consectetur et. Dicta impedit ut. Ducimus possimus quo. Non inventore in. Eligendi atque placeat. Molestiae earum e
Afterword Quotes
The history of the United States has been the history of whites cutting ahead of blacks, first of all through slavery, and later through Jim Crow laws and then through New Deal legislation and the post-World War II GI Bill, which offered help to millions of Americans with the exception of those in farm and domestic work, occupations in which blacks were overrepresented. And racial discrimination continues today.
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Here, Hochschild analyzes her Louisiana acquaintances’ ambivalent racism. None of the people that she meets deny the horrors of any of these particular racist policies, but most do not see systematic racial discrimination as a continuing problem in the United States. Accordingly, whites who feel that blacks are unfairly cutting ahead of them do not see the way the “the history of whites cutting ahead of blacks” remains embedded in the United States’ demographic structure and continues to write itself in the present. Hochschild’s Louisiana friends do not consider themselves racist because they see racism as explicit hatred for another Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident exped
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Structural Amnesia Term Timeline in Strangers in Their Own Land
The timeline below shows where the term Structural Amnesia appears in Strangers in Their Own Land. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3 – The Rememberers
...that nostalgia is a barrier to economic progress. Hochschild sees this as a kind of structural amnesia , a term coined by anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard when he noted that the Sudanese Nuer...
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Chapter 8 – The Pulpit and the Press: “The Topic Doesn’t Come Up”
Hochschild returns to the idea of structural amnesia , suggesting that Louisianans focus on problems like people who “cheat the government” in order...
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