Wired brings us a new word: Solastalgia.
In interviews Albrecht conducted over the past few years, scores of Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don’t grow any more. Gardens won’t take. Birds are gone. “They no longer feel like they know the place they’ve lived for decades,” he says.
Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They’re suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven’t moved anywhere. It’s just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.
Albrecht has given this syndrome an evocative name: solastalgia. It’s a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it’s pining for a lost environment. “Solastalgia,” as he wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, “is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.'”
Solastalgia is brand new idea, and Albrecht seems to be the only pioneer at the moment. He’s applying it to climate change (he seems a bit of a crusader on his blog), but it makes alot of sense for China. After all, cities have been transformed “overnight”, as we so often hear. Gone are the one story homes and courtyards, replaced by skyscrapers. The skies have darkened with pollution. And a couple of decades before that started, all the birds and insects disappeared.
It would certainly explain this study finding one in five adults in Shenzhen have, albeit vaguely, “mental problems”. Shenzhen was a fishing village twenty years ago – now its nearly a megacity. This is often explained as being a result of Chinese culture, such as face saving, suppressing or not communicating emotions, the pressures of collective obligations, etc. But isn’t Beijing psychologist Tian Guoyan describing something like solastalgia when he says “The old meets the new, the East meets the West, and that leaves a lot of people totally confused”?
I like the concept of Solastalgia, and I can certainly feel it when I’m back home in America.
That said, I don’t know if Shenzhen is the best example of the social effects of Solastalgia, since most of the people in Shenzhen weren’t even there when the city was still a sleepy fishing village. Not only has the infrastructure and economy of Shenzhen been created in our life time, the main population of the city was also constituted during the same time frame.
It might be an interesting concept, Dave, but it’s an horrendous word-formation.
Quite apart from issues of spelling consistency (you have ‘solostalgia’, where the original article you excerpt seems to have ‘solastalgia’), it is notoriously bad form to combine Latin (solacium) and Greek (‘algia’) root words (OK, there have been some ‘successes’ – television the most conspicuous – but in general it is crassly inelegant and unnecessary). And then we have the bizarre ‘tal’ fragment in the middle – presumably by false analogy with ‘nostalgia’ (but there, the root words do actually include a ‘t’: the first element of the combined term is ‘nostos’, meaning journey home). I’m sure there must be a better and more appropriate term for ‘familiarity’ (in either Latin or Greek) than ‘solacium’; but, being a rather out-of-practice Classicist, I can’t think what it would be for the moment. I’ll get back to you if I have any brainwaves!
Shenzhen might be the most extreme example of a Chinese city that has grown and modernized very quickly, but I think urban residents anywhere in China are going to suffer these sorts of problems of dislocation, alienation, confusion, and anomie. People who’ve lived in Shenzen for 25 years or more might have an even stronger sense of this disorienting transformation of the environment around them – but they’re only a fraction of 1 percent of the population of the city now. And it’s the same, to a lesser extent, with every city in China – they’ve almost all doubled or trebled in size in the last 20 years; many of them have been built almost from scratch in that time; many of their residents today, a significant majority probably, grew up in much smaller towns and cities far away, or even on farms in the countryside. And even ‘temporary’ expat residents like me are bewildered by the differences we witness after just a few years here – shifts in population, changes in culture, massive transformation of the built environment.
No, I don’t think “having the ground moved from under your feet -algia” is a specifically Shenzhen problem at all.
Ah, Matthew and I were posting at the same time, and in very similar vein.
As a follow-up, I further object that perhaps this ‘solastalgia’ idea is not quite appropriate to the Chinese situation because – as I’ve often observed in my own blog – things change so quickly here that we seldom have a chance to achieve any level of comfort or familiarity with our surroundings.
@Matthew and Froog:
You’re right, Shenzhen’s a bad example. Should’ve thought that one through. But things like the extermination of sparrows were countrywide, as is rapid development, and perhaps one could posit a sort of culture-wide version of solastalgia, as suddenly all of China is chirpless, gardenless and smogged over within the memory of older generations today (not the young ones).
@Froog: if you’ve got a problem with neoclassical compounds, are you infuriated by medical texts? Or do those mostly keep their Latin out of their Greek? What about taxonomical terms? Or the word anthropology? It’s been a while since I touched morphology.
Thanks to Froog for explaining better than me the point I was trying to make 🙂
Thinking more about solastalgia, I think it might have an effect on Chinese psyches, but it also might not. One of the stranger things I’ve seen in Tianjin over the years is that many Chinese (but not all) have no fondness for older ways of life and their environment. There’s a sense, perhaps a residue leftover from the Mao years, that destroying parts of the past is acceptable if the end result is “good.”
Perhaps this is just in Tianjin and reflects the psychology of a Tianjin people who lagged behind in development in the postwar years, but I suspect I’d find similar attitudes in Beijing too, what with the way historical sites are incessantly vulgarized in the capital.
If solastalgia exists in China, then the attitude I’ve outlined above would seem in natural conflict with that concept.
@Matthew: yeah, I’m not thinking Chinese solastalgia is consciously expressed.
I was more thinking that if there is a sort of evolved sense of place that can be disrupted by rapid and large environmental change, people in China would be a nice case study. And it would be largely self-inflicted. No disagreement that what people would outwardly express, of course, would be along the lines of “modernization good, backwards feudal ways bad”, and not really in sync with the theory mentioned here.
Dave, I think hybrid Greek-Latin formations are only ever created for popular use. All branches of the sciences tend to be pretty strict about keeping the two languages separate. I think medicine, pharmacology, and biology, are probably the strictest disciplines of the lot in regard to that.
The only academic term I can think of off the top of my head that is a hybrid is sociology – but that is one of the newest of the branches of academia.
I rather doubt if the Chinese get too upset about the disappearance of the sparrows, or even about the disappearance of clear skies and breathable air; but the gradual eradication of the hutongs in Beijing is transforming a whole way of life for many people – that’s got to be having a big effect, I’m sure.