lecture

love as a cultural experience

whom do you love? (Gell)

  • ‘Umeda’ - Sepik District of New Guinea:

    • everybody knows everybody

    • structural predestination

    • “Umeda social institutions operated entirely without the assistance of love as a motive, or as a basis for recognised relationships”

    • having a partner or not having a partner at all

    • “Umeda social institutions operated entirely without the assistance of love as a motive, or as a basis for recognised relationships”

    • marry first, love later

  • France:

    • love as conversational

      • love is produced through “vomiting huge amounts of confessions to your potential partner”

where does this idea of love come from?

a history of “romantic love” (Macfarlane)

  • the search of the one » the idea of marriage = love

  • love is shaped and experienced through an idealised vision of marriage, that is experienced independently on whether lovers are married or not

  • ‘love as marriage’

  • 9th century Europe

  • the ideal of the mystic unity between man and woman through God

    • transcendental relationship, overwhelmed by emotions

  • passion ‘herded’ into marriage

    • several sexual codes prohibiting sexual relations before and after marriage

    • celibacy and later age of marriage

romance, love and oppression (Giddens, Macfarlane)

  • 16th - 19th century » secular, romantic love:

    • secularisation of love through romance

    • romantic love ideology combined frustration, eroticism and desire

    • romantic love as sublime n transcendent love

  • romantic love, devotion and the oppression of women:

    • male romantics n female romantics as unequal

    • tales of women as romantic and devout lovers

    • tales of men as romantic, troubled seducers

      • have these roles switched, with the introduction of ‘femme fatales’ and feminism and in extreme cases, incels?

an empire of love? (Povinelli)

  • 19th n 20th century » a colonial ideology of love

  • Christian missionaries, colonialism and capitalism imposing ideas of love as “romantic love”

  • colonial anthropology argued that love was alien to other cultures

    • the ‘natives’ were not used to experiencing love in the way that Western society did

  • ‘the intimate couple’ as a narrative of modernisation

  • the imposition of an ideal of love that indigenous people did not share

    • fulfilment of a ‘civilising’ mission