Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience?

Although not a historical study of love and romance, this is an important book for historians interested in emotion and culture for three reasons. It provides important anthropological data about love in many societies. It reminds historians as well as other social scientists of the important prejudices earlier Western observers established about sexual and romantic behavior among many people of color, in Africa and Latin America as well as the Pacific islands. Finally, it issues a challenge to the historicization of love that fails almost entirely. This aspect of the book has received some media attention - social scientists unseat claims that love is a cultural variable by showing that love not only makes the world go round but goes round the world. The book's essays certainly caution against too facile a rendering of the alternative proposition, that love varies by culture, but they simply evade the real issues. Those of us who believe that emotional formulations do change, sometimes signficantly, need not step back.

The book opens with a theoretical section, with several arguments about the nature and universality of romantic passion. Love's transcendance, its availability to people of all stations and ages, sounds the main themes here. Several essays note historians' findings that certain key societies frown on love, which the authors admit complicates the research task of determining what actually goes on; but they are absolutely convinced that, beneath the surface, the emotion runs a fairly constant course. A second section follows on anthropological studies of several current cases, in which love is common and central. Evidence of growing interest in love in China since the mid-1970s forms the stuff of one essay; other intelligent contributions try to work through the relationship between Western and other concepts of romantic love in the Cook Islands and elsewhere. Here, careful comparative analysis suggests differences in emphasis - for example, on the role of physical appearance or first impressions - along with a fairly standard emotional content. A final section takes a slightly wider view, dealing for example with changes in the love experiences among the Inuit in recent decades, or the cultural context for romance in Morocco, or love contacts in Trinidad. Another historically oriented essay deals with love in Northeastern Brazil, as it can emerge even in relationship to arranged marriage. The essay clearly suggests (as against the simplest rendering of the universality theme) that love-based unions have increased notably in recent times, compared to the later 19th century. A final essay takes up love amid Mormon polygamy.

Most of the essays seem well-researched, and relevant historical and sociological literature is widely cited. Many are directed at Western stereotypes about the absence of love in other cultures, claiming that most Westerners assume a dominance either of loveless arranged marriages or of animal-like sexual lust outside their own orbit, such that the pervasiveness of love is downplayed. I don't know whether these stereotypes in fact exist. Certainly, some earlier missionaries and anthropologists were wrong about non-Western sexual practices, and may therefore have ignored the actual experience of "finer" feelings. My own guess is that most Americans currently would agree with the editors in assuming that love is a universal. But perhaps I err. In any case, the essays collectively demonstrate that love does occur in all the right places, and not just Western places. They also make a good case for the need to move beyond official social pronouncements against love, to studies of actual relationships.

What the collection does not do (and what many essays do not in fact even pretend to do) is demonstrate that love does not vary greatly depending on cultural/economic setting. Moving beyond official standards does not mean that these standards do not count. The fact that love increases in modern times, in Morocco, Northeast Brazil and China, meshes nicely with what most historians of the subject, including those who have traced the process in the West, would expect. The volume, to the extent it addresses the issue at all, confirms that love is less common where it is officially disapproved - which is not to say that it is nonexistent. Some of the more enthusiastic essays that try to make more of the universality point either deal with entirely contemporary situations, or fail to distinguish between mentions of love and a serious effort to determine its frequency and effectiveness, or both. Interestingly, there is no careful assessment of the role of love in agricultural societies - despite good individual sections in the essays dealing with Brazil and with Trinidad. This, historically, seems to me to be the main issue: love ran afoul of the property arrangements on which most agricultural societies depended, and so it was discouraged (which does not mean that it was totally eliminated).

This is a thoughtful collection that accomplishes two important purposes. It's a pity that some theoretical overenthusiasm and publisher hyperbole ventured a third purpose that falls flat. The larger claims for love as some kind of culture-free human propensity do not deal with actual historical evidence and argument, including those provided in key essays in the book's final section. There's a good bit of strawmanship in claiming the novelty of discoveries of love and some misleading impressions of continuity over time and of universally effective instinct, in the book's early going, when theory and biopscyhology hold sway. In fact, the book contributes overall to a better understanding of love as a complex variable, capable of change and of fascinating shadings in definition and impact depending on cultural context.

Peter N. Stearns Carnegie Mellon University