SWEET SOMETHINGS.

Talk of Love
How Culture Matters
Ann Swidler
The University of Chicago Press,
$30, 300 pp.

Most "of my interviewees talk quite naturally in individualistic terms, about choice, about wanting to do things for one's partner, and about love that has to be spontaneous to be real. But in relationships they also find themselves interdependent in ways they have difficulty formulating in these terms."

This fascinating study by Habits of the Heart co-author Ann Swidler uses the way "ordinary" Americans think about courtship, love, and marriage to explore the influence of culture on behavior. The complex and often contradictory expectations people bring to the experience of love reflect the equally complex and contradictory ways they use culture to understand their lives. Against reigning interpretations of culture as "discourse," "schema," or "collection of practices," Swidler argues convincingly that culture functions as a "tool kit," containing "repertoires of meanings" from which people draw, in a variety of ways, in making and justifying choices. This allows her to explain, not only how culture influences decisions individuals make to enter into and remain within certain kinds of relationships, but also how individuals sort through conflicting cultural messages in periods of personal or social transition.

Swidler is more interested in culture than in love per se, and much of the book is devoted to a technical argument about the relationship between culture and action. However, because she allows those interviewed to speak for themselves throughout, the challenge of interpreting both the experience of love and the impact of culture is accessible even to the nonspecialist. At the same time, while she is not concerned ultimately with questions like the fate of contemporary marriage or the possibilities for genuine intimacy and enduring commitment in a "consumer age," she says much along the way that is useful to those of us who are and those of us, in particular, who care about the role of religion in shaping the culture(s) of love.

Talk of Love's most interesting conclusions concern the place of culture in social change. Culture drives social change but not through the transmission of controlling or enduring values as is usually assumed. Rather, culture shapes society, especially in periods of transition or instability, by supplying a "repertoire of capacities for action that can be mobilized for new objectives." Cultural experience forms the desiring or choosing self and provides the resources available for solving problems. Cultural values or ideologies endure because they generate or shore up useful strategies for action in the face of existing problems. To understand why certain cultural concepts retain force or influence, in this case, ideals of "love," we have to look at what problems they help to solve. Hollywood's "mythic love" narrative and its younger stepsister, "prosaic-realistic love," persist because they make it possible for persons schooled in American individualism, operating under the assumption that obligations must be freely chosen, to undertake and maintain binding, exclusive, and future-oriented life commitments. As Swidler puts it, the popular culture of love flourishes because "it both prepares people for and helps them to organize and carry through the aspects of marriage that depend on individual action."

If Swidler is correct about the role of culture, it suggests revisiting the question of what place ought to be accorded so-called "traditional" marriage. If, especially under conditions of cultural flux or upheaval, institutions play a more crucial role in influencing action than rules or values, it may be important to look at how to support the central practices we associate with traditional marriage even as we question its traditional forms in light of current social conditions and heightened sensitivity to issues of gender. Her study also underscores the importance of attending to what Margaret Farley in her book Personal Commitments called "the Way of Fidelity." Ideals of love shape persons capable of executing a contradiction in terms: a relationship "simultaneously perfectly free and perfectly binding." For marriage to last, however, the feelings, intentions, and virtues that make such an endeavor possible in the first place must be embodied in the day-to-day practices of life, in the mundane "deeds of love" as clearly as in the first declarations of love. Communities of discourse such as faith communities could play a more important role than they now seem to play in shaping capacities for this kind of "daily fidelity."

The contribution of this study to understanding how Americans mobilize cultural resources to make choices about intimacy, love, and marriage is somewhat limited by the self-conscious focus on a small slice of America. Swidler acknowledges that her interviewees were all white, middle- and upper-middle-class suburbanites from the San Jose area. Although she is therefore modest in her conclusions, one can't but wonder what more would be learned about both love and the uses of culture by extending the conversation. Moreover, little distinction is made between religious commitment and evangelical or fundamentalist expressions. Thus, while the study raises interesting questions for religion, for example, how "cast-off faith" might function as part of a cultural repertoire, we need a richer picture of religion to understand how most Christians draw on it.

Swidler does a wonderful job of showing why the important question is not "what is culture," but "how is culture used." If we agree with her interpretation, we are left with not only a more fluid, diverse, sometimes discordant picture of the relationship between culture and behavior, but a more complex account of what it might mean to be "countercultural." At very least, a truly countercultural faith must involve more than simply offering critique of prevailing values or norms. Rather, if culture acts most powerfully by equipping us to act within the world as we find it, we are back at an old question for the church: How do we enable people to envision and act within the world we only hope to bring about?

Maura A. Ryan teaches in the theology department at the University of Notre Dame.