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- Convenors:
-
Susanne Bregnbaek
(University College Copenhagen)
Tine Gammeltoft (University of Copenhagen)
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- Chair:
-
Tine Gammeltoft
(University of Copenhagen)
- Discussant:
-
Anne Line Dalsgård
(Aarhus University)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 23 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
Accounts of love are abundant in literary, philosophical, and artistic work, but less so in anthropology. What constitutes love culturally around the world? How does love do and undo us as singular individuals and as communities? How can we “undo” anthropology to capture love ethnographically?
Long Abstract:
Hannah Arendt famously argued that love is “not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political forces (Arendt 1958:242).” How does this resonate with ethnographic insights? Accounts of love are abundant in literary, philosophical, and artistic work, but less so in anthropology. We therefore propose examining what constitutes love in different socio-cultural contexts and intersubjective relationships around the world. How does love become a force of un/doing? How can we “undo” anthropology in such a way that we can capture love ethnographically?
Wishing to escape European romanticism we understand love not only in an ethereal and idealized form but as a practiced, embodied, experienced, contested, endured, longed for, desired, denied, repressed, awaited, fulfilled or unrequited force of life. We invite presenters to examine the cultural idioms and repertoires that give shape to “love,” but we also aim to move beyond cultural tropes to explore love phenomenologically – as a subjective and intersubjective experience – and socially, as a force of power and politics, a matter of doing and undoing. In this way, we wish to examine person-centered accounts of love, be they romantic, conjugal, filial, sexual, religious, etc., while also considering love as a political force. A force that may drive human efforts to address problems such as capitalism, colonialism, or climate change, and also a force with darker potentials. This panel explores the ethnography of love as a way of exploring how other ways of being can be “done” together.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 23 July, 2024, -Harriet Phinney (Seattle University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores instances when Vietnamese government actors sought to govern love and how single women embraced these efforts by putting love to work to reject marriage and satisfy their maternal desires. Personal and political, love was a vehicle for undoing patriarchal reproductive practices.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores three instances when Vietnamese government actors sought to govern love and the ways single women led and/or embraced these efforts by putting love to work to satisfy their maternal desires. After touching on Vietnamese syncretic love and discourses of romantic and revolutionary love, I turn to the 1959 Law on Marriage and the Family when voluntary love, for the first time, became the legal basis for marriage. The law, meant to disrupt/undo the patriarchal family, was part of a larger effort to create new socialist citizens. Women then drew on these ideologies of love in their paths to single motherhood. After the Second Indochina War, government actors again appealed to love, this time drawing on essentialist notions of love and sexuality to justify older single women’s desires for maternal love and to alleviate concerns that these women — who had sacrificed conjugal love for the nation — jeopardized patriarchal family happiness. In essence, love provided a basis for procreating outside the patriarchal family. In the third instance, the Vietnamese state, by providing in-vitro fertilization services for single women, sought to govern single women’s maternal desires by monitoring who could get pregnant and how. However, contemporary single women have rejected this form of biopolitics. Instead, like their predecessors, they chose to get pregnant with a man with whom they shared sympathy and understanding – a form of love – while simultaneously drawing on notions of companionate love to justify their decisions not to marry.
Julian Sommerschuh
Paper short abstract:
If love is central to Christianity, why do the Ethiopian Aari claim that conversion ushered in a decline in love? Examining indigenous and Christian conceptions of love, I trace a shift from friendship to selflessness and discuss love as a force for un/doing sociality.
Paper long abstract:
In Christianity, love is central. But among the Aari of southern Ethiopia, conversion to Christianity is said to have brought a decline in love. Why? In search of an answer, I examine indigenous Aari conceptions and practices of love and how they were affected by Christian conversion. I show that for the Aari, "love" (solma) traditionally involved being and eating together and cultivating bonds of affectionate friendship. Christian love among the Aari, in contrast, is centered on selfless service to others and the avoidance of conflict. The Christian vision of love was highly attractive to Aari when they began to convert in the 1990s. Coming from a world where the competitive pursuit of honor regularly undermined love, the converts hoped that adopting Christian practices of selflessness and conflict avoidance would allow them to more fully realize their long-held aspiration to be friends with everyone around them. Over time, however, Aari Christians realized that avoiding conflict and selflessly serving others were not enough to create the kind of loving sociality they valued. In telling the story of how Aari unwittingly forfeited love by embracing Christianity, the paper presents an argument about the quest for love as a driver of historical change and a force for un/doing sociality.
Andrea Verdasco (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
For refugee families that experience family reunion the concept of family will be reconfigured following a period of separation. I will examine how refugee mothers who experience violence following family reunion negotiate meanings of love and how they use their love as mothers to negotiate rights.
Paper long abstract:
When Amal arrived in England with her two younger sons she had been separated from her husband for over five years. After a long family reunion process, Amal and her family reunited. However, a few days after being reunited her husband purposely disappeared. Amal explains: ‘that day I will always remember; I lost my husband, and I also lost my life partner’. In conflict and war, families often become separated and may be reunited years later. In that period of separation and in the time following their reunification, the meaning of family and love will be challenged and renegotiated. In this paper,I aim to unravel the ethnographic stories of three refugee women who, following family reunion had to reconfigure their life worlds when their families broke down. I will explore how the three women experience love and loss and will use the concept of abandonment as a lens to explore my ethnographic material. I will explore how their love as mothers becomes one of their driving forces both towards the violence endured in their marriages and as a political force when negotiating their rights for themselves and their children vis a vis the welfare state. How do these women understand love after the loss of a partner or the violence endured in a new country, how do they understand love as mothers? How do they use this love to negotiate access to rights? I argue that negotiating love and family rights in refugeehood entails both instrumental and profound emotional reasons.
Gemma Aellah (BSMS)
Paper short abstract:
This paper calls for a need to make more space for evoking love as a political force within policy-making worlds . It draws on ethnography of global health policymaking practices on podoconiosis, a debilitating stigmatising disease of poverty affecting millions of people.
Paper long abstract:
When people imagine how policy gets made, they tend to think about bureaucracy and bureaucrats - the ‘rule of desks’, documents, and the faceless people who make them. The concepts are too huge to think about, so the human-side of policymaking is hidden. Anthropology, with its attention to social relationships and human connection, can offer insight into the everyday lives of those engaging in policy work. Lately, a lot of talk about global health policy practices has highlighted the awful side of humanity: annihilation, the ways policy practices can add up to the condemnation of whole segments of population to death or to half-lives, often called necro-politics, or power over death. However, ethnography of global health policymaking practices on podoconiosis, a debilitating stigmatising disease of poverty affecting millions of people, caused by walking barefoot on volcanic soil, offers some counter-narratives to this outlook. Ethnography revealed how love, in multiple forms, was a central driving force that helped both individuals and groups find ways to keep going when confronted with overwhelming feelings of impossibility of how to fix awful problems. This paper calls for a need to make more space for evoking love as a political force within policy-making worlds .
Cameron Warner (Aarhus University)
Paper short abstract:
What makes love good? The person who loves, what they love, or how they love? I will focus on guru devotion- love from a distance to someone who is not an equal. What can we learn from comparing guru devotion to positive figures like the Dalai Lama with guru devotion to destablizing ones like Trump?
Paper long abstract:
What makes love good? The person who loves, what they love, or how they love? In this paper, I will focus on guru devotion- love from a distance to someone who is not an equal. What can we learn from comparing guru devotion to positive figures like the Dalai Lama with guru devotion to destablizing ones like Trump? Central to my analysis is a question raised in Hannah Arendt's dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine: what is the difference between worldly-love and other worldly-love, between God as transcendent, and therefore anti-political, and God as imminent, incarnate in other human beings, where love can be quite political? I investigate the Protestant bias that excessive love leads to superstition and its relation to the secular rationalist bias that religion sullies politics and vice versa. The empirical basis for paper will combine reports on the US Presidential election this spring and fieldwork in India in April and May 2023 among the Dalai Lama's supporters following accusations of pedaphilia lodged against the Dalai Lama by internet trolls connected to the PRC government. Guru devotion might help to explain the seemingly paradoxical reaction of followers who love their leader more when he or she is attacked by outsiders. Given that premise, what does guru devotion do and undo to the communities led by charismatic leaders?
Rahil Roodsaz (University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
Sustaining love at midlife requires everyday negotiations with values of individualism, speed, and youthfulness. This paper suggests rhythmanalysis as a framework to investigate the political potential of enduring midlife love as an act of refusal to upgrade and as doing relationships differently.
Paper long abstract:
The political potential of love is often sought in relation to revolutionary or unruly practices of intimacy, such as non-monogamous relationships, collective childrearing, or communal property. Marginality is here perceived as a site of oppression as well as a site of survival, creativity and transgression. This paper investigates the political potential of love in what might seem an unexpected place, namely enduring love at midlife. It discusses how sustaining love at midlife requires everyday negotiations with societal values of individualism, speed, and youthfulness which either conflict or resonate with, for instance, work, parenting, or leisure temporalities. Temporalities that are particularly tangible around midlife when questions of the good life tend to occur, including: ‘have I made the right choices?’ ‘Am I happy?’ ‘Is this all there is?’. To capture enduring midlife love ethnographically this paper proposes rhythmanalysis to investigate the complex temporal underpinnings of late-modern, everyday, intimate life. How do people at midlife negotiate temporal complexities at the levels of daily life (e.g. love, work, household rhythms) and life course (e.g. changing rhythms of the ageing body, care for ageing parents, parenthood, increased work responsibilities)? Approaching love as phenomenological and socio-political at once, this analytical framework allows to investigate the political potential of enduring midlife love as an act of refusal to upgrade and to do relationships differently in a time when people and things have become increasingly disposable.
Nofit Itzhak (Universitat Rovira i Virgili)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers love as an ethics or model for action in Emmanuel, a French Catholic charismatic intentional community. Exploring the model of change that is implied in Emmanuel's ethics of love, I consider the ways in which it enriches anthropological thought on agency, action, and change.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers love as an ethics or model for action in the world, as expressed in the case of Emmanuel, a French Catholic charismatic intentional community and its development NGOs. Conceived of not as that which unites and brings together, but as an openness to the alterity of the other, I argue that love in the case of Emmanuel is fundamentally conceived of in terms of change. The model of change implied in this ethics, however, emerges as remarkably passive and un-dramatic. Within this framework, to act upon the world is achieved not by exercising one’s own agency or will, but by means of embodying, demonstrating, or circulating divine presence, or what members of Emmanuel come to refer to as “being a sign” of God’s love. By exploring the curious model of action that Emmanuel’s ethics of love gives rise to, I consider the ways in which it challenges and enriches anthropological thought on agency, action, and change, and the relationship between them.
Verónica Sousa (ICS, UL)
Paper short abstract:
Love and friendship remake what is undone by the difficulties of daily life for elderly women in Lisbon, Portugal. If we see love as unconditional, and thus political, it can undo social life as it remakes it.
Paper long abstract:
Loss, in and of itself, has the ability to undo, to unravel (Pinto 2014). Losses of persons and other living beings, of places, and of things can undo people and their lives as they have lived it, changing one’s life, one’s subject position, sometimes forever. Losses can change how one views the world, others, and themselves, sometimes reinventing forms of knowledge and their production and reproduction. Losses can cause illness, disease, and madness, and be their results. Uncertainty is its own sort of loss, a loss of a seemingly dependable imagination that lends certainty to life circumstances and to governance on varying scales. But once uncertainty becomes chronic and all-encompassing, once most, if not all, aspects of life become entirely precarious, one’s life becomes undone – and later, hopefully, remade.
In a Catholic elder day center in Lisbon, two women have experienced many forms of undoing - primarily from loss of loved ones and changes in their physical and mental abilities over time. However, their unconditional love and care for one another has allowed them to remake what has been undone, to move forward despite what has been lost. Their combined capacity for love has manifested in a refusal to accept the sometimes brutal realities of aging and disability under late capitalism, and to fight for each other's access to care, dignity, and freedom. Life's uncertainties in old age that undo persons can thus, with the confidence and certainty of love, remake one's social life for the better.
Lauren Cubellis (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
For Bakhtin, the power of dialogue lies in its capacity for love as a gesture of response. A community of clinicians has built an alternative therapy grounded in this formulation, and their practice reveals listening to be both a means of discerning love and a complex labor of love in and of itself.
Paper long abstract:
In the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, the power of dialogue lies in its capacity for love: to be heard and to be responded to, to attend to and respond to others. The labor of listening is nothing short of the labor of love. A community of clinicians has built an alternative psychotherapeutic practice grounded in this essential formulation, employing a radical intervention for psychiatric crisis grounded in the principles of Bakhtinian dialogism called Open Dialogue. The root cause of psychiatric distress, they argue, is the existential trauma of not being heard. Through the slow work of careful listening, the construction of a shared language, and the engagement of social networks in the provision of care, these practitioners foreground an understanding of psychic life that turns on the capacity to listen and be listened to; to love and to be loved. Many of these practitioners find themselves deeply changed by their engagement with this model. Situated on the margins of psychiatric treatment-as-usual, and facing relentless institutional, temporal, and financial pressures, their acts of listening to and for love exceed the boundaries of the therapeutic encounter and shape a radical political subjectivity that imagines an alternative psychiatric future grounded in mutual recognition. This paper draws on ten years of fieldwork with the international Open Dialogue community to posit listening as both a means of discerning love and as a complex labor of love in and of itself.