1 SVERKER HYLTÉN-CAVALLIUS Nostalgia for Futures Past The Politics of Generational Memory In his book The Symbolic Construction of Community, British anthropologist Anthony Cohen argues that communities are symbolic constructs (1985). 1 People gather around symbols in the belief that others interpret and ascribe the same meaning to these symbols. Thus, what people share in the community is not a common interpretation or a set of common values, but a belief that they do so. An illustrative example are the national flags. In one flag, people will from different viewpoints store ideas of democracy, equality, racial purity or cultural pluralism, great pasts and pitiful presents, or vice versa. The polysemic character of symbols, their ability to open up to an endless variety of interpretations, is what makes them such strong bases for community. A problem for any community then is how to secure interpretation from arbitrariness. Cohen sees this as the reason why communities do so much work on elaborating borders (cf Barth 1969). Through clear distinctions against others, it is possible to show which interpretations and values work and which don’t. Among the kinds of symbolic centres of community Cohen discusses ”folk histories” or ”meta-histories”. 2 These are selective constructions of the past that usually rather provide a source of action and change in the contemporary world than make the members withdraw from present demands (Cohen 1985:99). In the following I will discuss how a kind of ”folk history” is created in popular music events among Swedish senior citizens, and how this might be seen as the core of a generational community in the making. 3 But I shall also point out some of the ”limits” of such generational memory politics, both in terms of its uses and in terms of its possible consequences. Remembering the War Years and ”Folkhemmet”: Retrospecitve Utopianism Even if the word ”pensioner” entered the Swedish language around a century ago, the modern old age pensioner in Sweden came about through a series of socio-economic developments during the 20 th century. In the early 1940’s, two larger organizations were formed, both with three 1 I thank Professor Don H. Doyle at Vanderbilt University, Professor Barbro Klein at Stockholm University and SCASSS, Uppsala, and my wife Charlotte Hyltén-Cavallius, Stockholm University, for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 2 NB that he uses these concepts in Malinowski’s sense. 3 In this text “generation” refers to people born during a limited period of time and thereby sharing historical experiences made at a similar age, as in popular concepts such as “Generation X” or “the Baby boom generation”.