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tags: Love Sociology
rel: Consuming Romantic Utopia - Eva Illouz
This is a book about the culture of love. It looks at middle-class Americans’ views of such matters as what love is, how one knows when love is ‘real’, what is required for a good relationship, whether it involves obligation or sacrifice, and where love fits into the larger scheme of life’s meanings.
Interviewed 88, white middle-upper class representatives of American mainstream.
Culture’s Confusions: Who Wrote the Book of Love?
Clifford Geetz - Culture is the entire way of life of a people, including their technology and material artifacts, or everything one would need to become a functioning member of a society. An historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.
Young, intense love and breakup: >But despite the intensity of the experience, it lacked staying power. “I was just so terribly overwhelmed, and then a month or two later it was all gone. It was almost as if it hadn’t happened.”
…uses people make of culture they have outgrown.
Thought
Outgrowing culture. When I look at my shelves of books, I notice that certain areas of the shelves (perhaps 10+ year old volumes) have lost appeal to me. I’m not certain that I’d purchase them again, or would even find the time to leaf through them.
They are important because they in some ways, acted as a scaffolding of texts that led me to my current interests (which make up the freshest, most accessible “quick piles” of novels.)
But it isn’t the case that all past sections of the shelves are filled with outgrown novels. Interspersed in all the shelves are favorites. Maybe these are the actual directions of movement.
We must think of culture less as a great stream in which we are all immersed, and more as a bag of tricks or an oddly assorted tool kit containing implements of varying shapes that fit the hand more or less well, are not always easy to use, and only sometimes do the job.
Love is a peculiar notion, both in its literary rendition and in ordinary life. One of its oddest aspects is the uncertainty about whether love does, or should, have reasons
Thought
Fall in love, via a dialogue where you both debate the above.
Inability to articulate reasons, Inevitability.
“We liked each other. We got along well.” “We got along. I don’t know what it is. It just seemed like the one.”
Two contrasting vocabularies apply to love in American Culture.
- love as a voluntary choice - with the question of whom one loves, and why, and what one gives and receives in the relationship.
- love as a commitment - a bond that is no longer purely voluntary, if it ever was. It is unique, irreplaceable and not fully rationalizable into a set of benefits given and received. Sometimes the emotional punch of the word “love” comes from its power to signify a relationship beyond choice—one in which the normal expectation of reciprocity need not apply. At other times love signifies the ultimate choice, based on the unsurpassed virtues of the beloved.
Interview - Richer, meaningful life together:
“I have seen us get from a good relationship in terms of sharing with each other and so on to one that’s much, much deeper… . It’s one that you can’t develop over a brief period of time, and also I think probably harder to develop with somebody that you meet at this stage in your life. Your having grown through your twenties with someone is good. Having first children and doing all those things, you could never do it again with anybody else. For me I would rather—I think intellectually that life’s experiences will be best shared with somebody going through all those stages together”
First, it seems evident that for these men, their cultural understandings of love are organized not around the logical coherence of a single image, metaphor, or theory of love but around a core situation or problem
The problem, as he sees it, is how two people can integrate autonomous lives, allowing each other room to enjoy their own pastimes, follow their own beliefs, and meet their own needs.
In the midst of the interviewed’s well-worked-out picture of respect and autonomy, his language shifted when discussing about the illness of his wife in favor of absolute commitment, sacrifice, and selfless love: “If you love someone… it is something you do for them. It is something you want to do.”
Thus in an interview where for more than an hour Donald Nelson never spontaneously used the word love, and downplayed any hint of romance (Why did he marry Nora? “It just worked out… . We got along.” How did he know she was the one? “Oh, I guess we wanted to see each other. There was no facade. We communicated.” Was the idea of love important? “Not at first. It kind of grew… . We liked each other. We got along well.”), he suddenly expressed a vision of love radically different in tone and substance from anything that had gone before.
This dramatic image is not in the uppermost of his mind, but surfaces not when asked about love directly, but when a particular scene is evoked.
Linda and George have a very close relationship. They have always preferred to do most things together and they have shared more of their thoughts and feelings with each other than with anyone else. Linda, however, is starting to feel that perhaps they should do more things with other people and develop some separate activities of their own. George says that this might lead them to grow apart and make their love for each other less deep. Linda says it might make their love deeper if they were more independent.
Thought
Intrinsic to the above is already present disconnect, favoring Linda.
What was interesting, first, was how strongly interviewees could react to a contrived situation about which they had little information.
Managing moral intuitions through analogizing: People in fact work out their moral intuitions through analogies to concrete cases for which they already know the “right” answers. But these interviews show just how many cases with potentially competing outcomes there are and how problematic “casuistry” really is. Any given situation, personal or imagined, might be assimilated to a variety of culturally available cases
How Culture Works: Love Stories
Basil Bernstein (1975), studying the language of working-class versus middle-class schoolchildren, has described the use of “restricted” versus “elaborated” codes (see also Heath 1983). Working-class children, he argues, speak in concrete terms, because they take for granted a small, known world of others who share the same references and assumptions. Middle-class children, on the other hand, develop elaborated codes, both more explicit and more abstract, that allow them to communicate in a public sphere with diverse others who do not necessarily share their particular experiences and points of reference.
People use culture to learn how to be, or become, particular kinds of persons. Such self-forming utilizes symbolic resources provided by the wider culture. Through experience with symbols, people learn desires, moods, habits of thought and feeling that no one person could invent on her own.1 Symbols also provide people continuing access to their inner lives—awakening, stimulating, or heightening capacities for judgment and sensibility. Culture equips persons for action both by shaping their internal capacities and by helping them bring those capacities to bear in particular situations.
American teenagers, for example, often live, rather than simply listen to, their Music, while many adults retain the musical tastes established when they were young. After young adulthood, music, like existential questions about the meaning of life, becomes more a pastime and less a passion. Being swept away by cultural experiences, from religious conversion to rock concerts, seems mainly an activity of the young. Young people are voracious culture consumers because they are still trying out (and trying on) the possible selves they might become. They are in the process of forming and reforming strategies of action, developing the repertoire of cultured capacities out of which they will construct the patterns of their adult lives. They seek out the shaping, and the shaking up, culture can offer. Both the chameleon- like cultural involvements of adolescents, in which they try out multiple styles, and the intensity of those involvements, tell us something important about how culture works in unsettled lives—for people who are in the process of constructing or reconstructing strategies of action.
Love and Marriage
the same interviewees who reject the “movie image” of love use it repeatedly in their own thinking.
Courtly love poetry emerged in Europe in the end of the 11th century and created a fundamentally new vision of love, self and society. For the courtly tradition, love was (1) a sudden and certain passion (“love at first sight”) for (2) an idealized lover. Love could (3) transform the self, making a person virtuous; but it also (4) separated individuals from society, leading them to defy social conventions in pursuit of a more personal destiny. The separate self and a conception of virtue in tension with social commitments is central to the appeal of the love myth.
Bourgeois love is
- a clear, all or nothing choice
- of a unique, other
- made in defiance of social forces
- permanently resolving the individual’s destiny.
they met, and it was love at first sight. There would never be another girl (boy) for him (her). No one could come between them. They overcame obstacles and lived happily ever after.
When interviewed, real love
- is no sudden or certain. It grows slowly and is often ambivalent or confused. Love does not require dramatic choice buy may result from circumstance, accident or inertia.
- there is no “one true love.” One can love many people in a variety of ways.
- the kind of love that leads to marriage should not depend on the irrational feeling in defiance of social convention, but on compatibility and practical traits that make persons good life partners.
- Love doesn’t last forever. Love requires continued hard work, compromise and change.
“I call this type of love ‘prosaic-realism’”
“Movie” love is intense, overwhelming, and sure, they said, but real love is often ambiguous, gradual, and uncertain
As for why I married the person I did, he was the right person at the right time at the right place. We met while we were going to school and we spent a lot of time together and we decided fairly quickly that we wanted to be married and share our lives.
rel:Eye Contact
Love at first sight:
Well, because he was the one I met, I guess. I could have married someone else had I met somebody else… . It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was like a steady growth of support and friendship and love.
We met at a time when, I don’t know, I guess we just happened to be right for each other at the right time.”
Codes
If holiday gift giving is ritualized and disenchanted, why do they persist?
Caplow notes that Christmas gift-giving occupies an important place in Middletown’s culture. People spend a great deal of time and money buying gifts; they fret about finding the right gift; many plan all year to complete their gift-giving responsibilities by Christmas. But when Caplow and his associates interviewed people about giving Christmas gifts, they found great ambivalence. Many people felt that Christmas had become too commercialized, that gift-giving violated the real meaning of Christmas, and that retailers promoted Christmas giving only to stimulate sales. They found the process of both buying and receiving gifts unsatisfying, feeling that most of the things they gave and received were useless. In short, Middletowners were highly critical of Christmas gift-giving. Then why, Caplow asks, did they continue this ritual despite their disenchantment?
The more important someone was to the giver, the more valuable the gift. Thus not to give a gift was to send a message: no gift would signal that the (non)recipient was not valued. Caplow argues that this system of meanings enforced conformity to gift-giving practices without “normative consent.” By this he means that people gave gifts not because they themselves believed in the practice, found it meaningful, or even acted from unthinking habit. Rather people were constrained by their knowledge of what their actions would mean to others.
Semiotic codes are often thought of as the “deep structure” of a culture, by analogy with the deep structures of language, the general set of invisible but necessary rules that make it possible for people to generate and understand particular utterances. I argue, however, that semiotic codes can be culturally powerful even when they are of recent origin, lightly held, or even widely mistrusted.