Narratives of unwanted change: Nostalgia in a Latvian former fishing village

Like authenticity or identity, nostalgia may be claimed to be a founding notion of folklore studies. Yet, the uneasy legacy of romanticizing the past, critiqued as the epistemological bias of the discipline, seems to hinder folklorists from participating in current interdisciplinary trends that seek to redeem nostalgia as a critical, creative, and productive mode of thought rather than a sentimental, distorted, and conservative spatiotemporal perspective. Drawing on recent reappraisals of nostalgia in the humanities and social sciences, this article reconsiders the role of folkloristics in the study of its narrative forms. Narratives about the environmental and sociocultural superiority of the past, encountered among residents of a former fishing community in Latvia, represent a traditional way of dealing with unwanted change. At the same time, they demonstrate the diversity of personal engagement with the feeling of loss.