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

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 15. Religion & Cultural Consumption

Abstract

Nostalgia is a powerful social fact: it animates populist projects, fuels cultural markets, and organizes everyday attachment. Yet existing scholarship often critiques what nostalgic narratives celebrate without specifying how nostalgia is produced. This article theorizes nostalgia’s structure rather than its content. I define nostalgia as sacred symbolic longing, a present affect in which actors recognize, through confrontation, a past symbolic order that once felt natural but is now gone.

Drawing on Clifford Geertz, I treat symbolic orders as systems of meaning that carry an aura of factuality. Drawing on Jeffrey Alexander, I treat icons as carriers that transmit moral meaning through sensory experience. And building on Yağmur Karakaya’s analysis of nostalgia as collective memory practice, I show how the same cultural form can be activated in individual biographies. Nostalgia arises when an icon reanimates a displaced order.

I develop a four step model. First, actors inhabit an order in which objects and routines are mundane because they are continuous with life. Second, the order is lost, either by slow drift or by rupture. Third, a trigger appears: an object with the same aesthetic surface as before now condenses the depth of the earlier world and makes it newly available. Fourth, actors experience longing and sacralization: they re enter the earlier world while simultaneously perceiving it as a world, not simply the way things were.

Empirically, I analyze 750 highly upvoted YouTube comments about Billboard year end number 1 and number 10 hits, 1975 to 2025. Commenters repeatedly describe songs as portals to vanished homes, relationships, and moral atmospheres. Nostalgic accounts intensify with temporal distance and cluster around sensory detail and relational loss.

The article offers a meaning centered mechanism for nostalgia, connects micro reencounters to macro politics, and extends icon theory by adding dynamic temporality.

Author

• Steven Koh, Yale University