Columbia University Press Romantic Passion – A Universal Experience ?

What is this thing called love? And what about the "base" instincts of lust and sex? The latter have a well-travelled path of study among observers of non-western cultures. Anthropologists, for instance, have long been eager voyeurs of the "sexual lives" and "kinship structures" of "other" (primitive) cultures since the profession began more than a century ago. But love, that loftiest of romantic emotions, upon which so many of our highest (western) ideals are grounded, is generally ignored when we peek into the lives of others. Why bother to explore something that, whether we choose to admit it or not, we probably believe isn't there? This text shakes the Eurocentric foundations of ideas about love in the far-flung corners of the world, showing that we've been looking for love in all the wrong places. How does love manifest itself among polygamous groups? Where does the love element come in with arranged marriages? Is there a difference between infatuation and romantic love? The contributors find expressions of love almost everywhere they look, from the Inuit woman who went hunting and sealing with her husband because she could not bear to be apart from him for even an hour, to a Moroccan youth who reportedly said to his lover "If I do not see you for just half a day I go crazy" It looks beyond each society's central institutions in their search for expressions of love. They find, for instance, that arranged marriages and polygamy do not necessarily indicate a lack of romantic passion, but rather that people in such cultures may expect to look elsewhere for love. As they investigate the presence of love around the globe, contributors also look at the other side of the equation: rejection and grief. A collection on a topic that has already seen a surge of media interest in such magazines as "Time" and "Newsweek", this text should capture the attention of the social science community, and should be a useful reading for anyone interested in the romance of other cultures.