“We Don’t Search for Songs, We Search for Memories”: Nostalgia, Iconicity, and Sacred Symbolic Longing

Steven Koh, Yale University

What is nostalgia? This article argues that nostalgia is not sentimentality or psychological regression; instead, it is “symbolic longing,” an affective recognition of a past symbolic order that once grounded meaning but no longer carries its former aura of factuality. Building on Yagmur Karakaya’s influential demonstration that nostalgia is a collective cultural process and drawing from Jeffrey Alexander’s theories of iconicity, the article develops a more general account of how such longing emerges and operates. Symbolic longing becomes visible when we trace how meaning structures are lived, disrupted, and made newly available: (1) Living the order: When a symbolic order is actively inhabited, it carries what Geertz called an “aura of factuality”—a taken-for-granted coherence that feels simply “real.” (2) Losing the order: The symbolic order dissipates when the social, spatial, or institutional conditions that once anchored it shift—sometimes gradually through slow alterations in one’s networks and routines, and sometimes abruptly through major anomic transitions in place, role, or circumstance. (3) Iconic trigger: Later, a materially grounded or sensuously compelling symbol—a song, scent, garment, photograph, or texture—functions as iconic carrier of the displaced order, condensing and transmitting its meaning. (4) Symbolic longing: Through these iconic triggers, individuals may momentarily re-enter the symbolic world that once sustained them, realizing this time that it was an order and not a factuality ("the way things were"). This encounter can feel "sweet"—its very distance giving it a faintly sacred quality.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 48. Collective Identity, Memory, and Nostalgia