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SBR: Conceptions of Love

17:51 / 29.03.07

Kinda sparking off of the "Cultural Misunderstandings" thread, I'd like to talk about Love. Is love an emic or etic ailment? How do different cultures differentiate between types and styles of love? What effect do individual culures ascribe to love?

This is the thread to talk about how different cultures have created/interpreted idea about any of the emotions we would label "love". I realise that this is a fairly broad discussion and it might help to have a bit of structure/planning. I think a lot of a culture is expressed through it's stories, so as a seed for discussion I'd like people to write about who their culture sets up as an archetypal "lover".

I've got some stuff to write here about Romeo and Juliet as sacrificial and flawed characters, some stuff about psychological "love styles" and a bit of waffle about conceptions of deity as parent. But other than that, I'm empty. Please stick in whatever oars your boat might have.

This on wiki has a little bit about different cultural ideas of love, but hopefully it's a lot more complex and intereting than that.

More later, but I have to feed some children now. Thanks in advance.

19:15 / 29.03.07

I want to approach this in more detail when i have more time, but i seem to remember Maurice Merleau-Ponty did some work to point out that our perceptions/experiences of love are largely defined by our culture. Can't remember any specifics, but i'll try to dig up some texts.

The Ghost of Tom Winter

19:34 / 29.03.07

For the most part, it’s hard to have an etic viewpoint of love, especially if that viewpoint goes against their emic ways of love. What first comes to mind is the polygamy issue, I’ve known someone who thought it was our responsibility as humans to rise above natural instincts and become monogamous; others still that find that monogamy goes against natural principles of humanity. Etc.
So while one culture has defined single partners with love and anything else as being anti-love, sinful or just friendship based the other has broadened their definition to include more than one person and that way becomes acceptable.
This is probably pretty well-known to people here so I’ll stop talking about that.

I do believe though that a huge defining attribute on what love is is mass media. Romance comedy in particular (at least it used to be in my early relationship years). I find that since the situations of love are so over idealized people begin to wish for that to happen in their lives and when those expectations aren’t met for whatever reason they attribute the violator with “they don’t love me.” I think looking at the films that are widely popular is a good place to begin looking at how love is perceived in said culture.

19:52 / 29.03.07

This is probably an obvious question, with an obvious answer, but is the discussion strictly about "romantic love", and not, for example, maternal, spiritual, or brotherly love?

Pardon me, if it was already specified.

19:53 / 29.03.07

Talk about any love you want.

Closed for Business Time

21:07 / 29.03.07

I just Google/Scholared *love* and the first article that turns up is "The Sequence of the Human Genome" by Craig Venter et al. (including one author, surname Love)

If one explains love via biochemistry or evolution, it is almost certainly etic.

If one chooses to define love in terms of social institutions, emotions (also love) are culturally constructed, in that the meanings of the bodily sensations experienced in romantic episodes are not fully given by associative conditioning of brain- and body-states to interpersonal behaviours, but derive also from socially grounded language and symbol repertoirs that most often serve to control and stabilise a personal, or local group identity.
I'm not sure whether that conceptualisation of love is etic or emic. It could be etic in the sense that we could observe certain structural features across cultures, but emic insofar as we posit local meaning as a necessary and sufficient cause of love.

Or love could be a fiction. But that would truly S U K K.

Closed for Business Time

21:18 / 29.03.07

Of course the we I am writing above reflects a local identity as a social scientist, about the concept of love from a social science standpoint. So, I guess that's from the Western European social scientist subbacultcha 'spective.

Leigh Monster loses its cool

21:25 / 29.03.07

I think love is really the domain of art. I intended to read a lot of different sciencey/analytic type books on the subject of love last summer, because I was thinking of doing a thesis on this exact thread title. I got fed up with the books because as far as I could tell, any text that approached love from a non-artistic angle (etic, i suppose) rather than as something embodied in a specific instance, as in a love story--ended up talking around it and somehow always completely missing the point. Nearly every discussion of love I read relied often on anecdote, and even so, once the analysis of each anecdote began I usually ended up feeling like I was reading about a specific but elusive pathology, rather than about the love that's been so sung and celebrated and central to expectations of this world.

Which is kind of perplexing. Art and love are both feely-things rather than thinky-things, yet both are so much the products of culture, which seems like it ought to be a thinky-thing.

Anyway, if anyone knows of any good readings on love that are etic or "secondary," please let me know.
If I do take this topic on as a thesis, I'd probably do so by writing a collection of short stories, hopefully of various cultural contexts, instead of trying to write an essay.

*

21:26 / 29.03.07

If one explains love via biochemistry or evolution, it is almost certainly etic.

Maybe, or maybe it just happens to match the emic dominant in the society you're most familiar with. Scientific explanations, especially those on the borders of science and social science (i.e. evolutionary psychology and the like), are definitely not outside of or unaffected by culture.

Leigh Monster loses its cool

21:31 / 29.03.07

Or love could be a fiction. But that would truly S U K K.

yeah but would it suck or be inaccurate to say that love is a sort of fictional (cultural) interpretation of real chemical responses? I get a dopamine/oxytocin/what have you rush, and the way I respond to that feeling is dependent on my expectations of what love ought to be. Those expectations are obviously culturally informed, but my body will probably keep producing chemicals after that according to my expectations and how they are met by the other person. It's a self-actualizing fiction. That actually seems kind of cool.

Closed for Business Time

21:42 / 29.03.07

Oh, I agree. Hence "almost certainly". I should've phrased it better. Evo-psych, biochemistry etc is definitely local and contingent when scientists utilise their local knowledge to construst *valid*repeatable*quantifiable experiments that measure "love". Put differently, the material sciences of love has no choice but to operationalise the dependent variable (ie love, the how-much-in-love-ness number, LoveQ) based on a cultural or personal report of love. So either love as a scientific construct is based on a (sub)cultural stereotype, or it is based on a sample composed of self-selecting subjects, in which case there is no or little chance of determining the causal-material pathways that lead to love.

Closed for Business Time

21:47 / 29.03.07

... But the above (which is in reply to idperfections) doesn't mean that I deny a material, scientific cause of love. Only that it is not sufficient. Also, I believe that if my previous sentence is true, then love can reasonably be called etic.

BTW, isn't the premise of the thread - Love: etic or emic - already presupposing that this is a valid dualism?

*

00:32 / 30.03.07

Yeah, Mos... I think I'd crossposted with you; you explained yourself well in your next post.

05:30 / 01.04.07

Love is the most fun amphigory.

As far as I'm concerned, love is. Not 'love is...' but simply that, 'love is.'

Everything else, because it requires a modifying clause, is something else. Connected or involved with, or concurrent with love, but something else.

The idea that love is lust, or a lack of lust, or the condition of caring more about someone else's happiness or safety than your own... all not working for me. So, too, addiction or possessive jealousy feelings and urges.

Virtually nobody agrees with me on this, but I haven't seen anything come about that demonstrates to me, anything different or that I'm somehow incorrect in this definition. Love is the state of being, or recognition of being.

But, again, love is the best amphigory. Because it's so meaning-filled as to be effectively meaningless, in any way that's not extremely broad or terminally specific.

(And no one has posted 'Love is Barbelith' yet, which is kinda disappointing, but also pretty much a good thing. We're all on the ball, or totally off.)