ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that nostalgia — as a social sensibility - itself has a mediatic function and this in two senses. First, and most literally, nostalgia mediates between past, present and future by processes of selection, amplification and representation. Second, nostalgia is mediatic in that it can only work through some sort of mediated archive of memories, official histories and everyday negotiations over what is most vivid and salient about history, experience and transition. These two mediatic functions take on a special force in the countries of ex-Yugoslavia because politics and cinema under Tito's rule were themselves sites of mutual mediation and representation. The discussion of die theme of nostalgia seems especially lively in the anthropological study of the post-Soviet world, notably as regards Central and Eastern Europe, of which Yugoslavia was a part. The most powerful aspect of Mitja Velikonja's analysis of the cultural nostalgia of the postsocialist societies is that at its very bottom, its source is hope.
