Introduction

In her book, Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture, Doris Bachmann-Medick (2016) argues that since the 1970s the development of the social sciences and humanities has been marked by a variety of “cultural turns.” These denote transdisciplinary orientations that engage the attention of researchers and determine the direction of their inquiries. In Bachmann-Medick's view, to be described as a “cultural turn,” a new research orientation must become “a tool and medium of knowledge itself” (Bachmann-Medick 2016, 16). This means that the object of inquiry in a given research field must have transformed into a broader analytical category that can be applied to study many unrelated phenomena. In her book, Bachmann-Medick identified and analyzed “the interpretive turn,” “the performative turn,” “the reflexive/literary turn,” “the postcolonial turn,” “the translational turn,” “the spatial turn”, and the “iconic/pictorial turn.” At the same time, she admitted that her list was by no means complete, and that the emergence of new “cultural turns” was a hallmark of the contemporary social sciences and humanities.

Today, the catalog of “cultural turns” can certainly be expanded to include the “nostalgic turn” (see, e.g., Bonnett 2010, 2016; Cross 2015; Jacobsen 2020a, 2022a; Lizardi 2015, 2019; Niemeyer 2014; Salmose 2019). In 2001, Svetlana Boym observed in her now-classic book The Future of Nostalgia: “The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia” (Boym 2001, xiv). Since then, the importance of “nostalgia” as a concept for describing and analyzing contemporary reality has been constantly increasing. This notion is used today to investigate diverse phenomena, such as the soaring popularity of populist parties (Bauman 2017b, 2017c; Gandini 2020), the vogue in music, film, and literature to draw on styles and genres of the past (Leggatt 2021; Reynolds 2010; Rudaitè 2018), the trend to use retro fashion in order to increase sales of services and products (Cervellon and Brown 2018; Cross 2015), and a range of other developments. Multidimensional, as it is, the “nostalgic turn” is analyzed by researchers from a variety of disciplines. Michael Hviid Jacobsen addressed this issue in his 2020 book: “Sociology, psychology, anthropology, historical science, political science, literary studies, business studies and so on have now discovered nostalgia as a potent and inexhaustible source of knowledge about individual behavior as well as about ongoing cultural changes” ( Jacobsen 2020b, 2).