Now it appears that was a strictly Eurocentric view. Over the past few years researchers have been tuning in love’s old, sweet song in remote hamlets and time zones. They are encountering it even in so-called primitive societies where prearranged marriage is the rule. One far-ranging 1992 study reported finding evidence of the phenomenon in as many as 147 of 166 different cultures. Its absence in the other 19, say study authors William Jankowiak of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Edward Fischer of Tulane University, probably reflects a deficiency of their study methods, not of local ardor.
Is an epidemic of love ravaging the planet? More likely, researchers are simply paying closer attention to a subject long regarded as “too mushy” for serious investigation. When Jankowiak chaired a session on romantic love at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco last month, conference planners tucked it into a relatively tiny room at an awkward hour. More than 50 people managed to cram into the room anyway, including a small battalion of reporters and a “Prime Time Live” TV crew-a mob compared with a 1987 session on the subject that drew around 25. “I was astounded,” says Jankowiak, w worked three years to put the session together. Anthropologists themselves were hardest to attract at firs “There’s been a general sense of embarrassment about romantic love as a topic,” says Boston University anthropologist Charles Lindholm. “Afterall, we’re not poets and we’re not pornographers. So what do you ask people?”
The sudden upwelling of romantic interest may have been helped along by the publication of a provocative recent book, “Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce.” It is author Helen Fisher’s contention that evolution programmed us for the whole trajectory of love, from infatuation to divorce. According to Fisher, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, United Nations demographic records since 1947 indicate divorce tends to peak after the fourth year of marriage because of an inherent “four-year itch”-a sort of seven-year itch for our time. The itch, she argues, comes down from ancestral couples, who needed to stay together only until a child was weaned from total dependence. After that, both parents might choose a succession of partners, to maximize the chances of their genes surviving.
That would suggest our forebears were either prescient Darwinians or quick-thinking philanderers. But Fisher is convinced she’s right. “I think the basic human reproductive strategy is serial pair bonding, in conjunction with clandestine adultery,” she says. Colleagues remain noncommittal about the thesis, although they think it’s a start. Says Jankowiak: “Helen was the first one to really bring a theory on this. Certainly we will have to look at some evolutionary elements.”
The persistence of arranged marriage in non-Western cultures may be the chief reason that researchers have overlooked love there. In rural Morocco, says Haverford College psychologist Douglas Davis, young people were expected to marry first cousins on the father’s side. Such marriages helped keep landholdings in the family. “So it made sense that there wouldn’t be traditional notions of romance there,” says Davis.
When love does bloom in the backcountry, it’s often attributed to pernicious outside influences. Anthropologist Victoria Burbank reports that when she first visited an Australian Aboriginal community in 1977, village elders were blaming Western films for the growing number of adolescents running off “to love each other,” in defiance of prearranged marriages. Elder elders told her that, actually, affairs of the heart long predated the arrival of Westerners, but when European missionaries did show up in the ’30s espousing romantic love as a requisite for marriage, the idea gained legitimacy. Adolescent girls were thus able to take advantage of Western ideas, Burbank wrote, but “what we would describe as ‘romantic love’ does not seem, after all, to be a Western introduction.” (The West evidently started something, though: when Burbank returned to the village in 1988, she found that pregnancy among single women had increased by 500 percent.)
In many cases, researchers say, romantic love is not given as a prime reason for marriage. California State University, Los Angeles, anthropologist Jim Bell found that among the polygamous farmers of southern Kenya, a man almost always married first for practical reasons. If he could afford more wives, he might then marry for romance-which, Bell found, can sound the same in Kenya as anywhere else. As one uxorious 80-year-old said of wife No. 4: “She was the wife of my heart … I could look at her and she at me, no words would pass, just a smile.”
Psychologist Davis and his collaborator-wife, Susan, also wonder whether gender bias has had something to do with anthropology’s love blindness. For decades the profession was dominated by men, and in traditional societies females generally don’t talk to males about intimate matters. In their Moroccan studies, the Davises noticed that women opened up more readily to her, men to him. At times it must have felt just like home. “He got data about sex; I got data about relationships,” she says.
Among anthropologists little doubt remains now that love can turn up anywhere. Even in their notebooks, apparently. At the San Francisco meeting, Leonard Plotnicov, editor of the journal Ethnology, confessed that he took a second look at field notes he made during a 1960s sojourn in Nigeria and was astonished to find them “full of people talking about love.” Jankowiak is encouraged by the growing attention to the subject. “What we’re doing is giving documentation of a core philosophical tenet of our society that we’ve been told is fool’s gold,” he says. “It’s going to make it possible to talk about it [in academic circles] without giggling.”
Some researchers, nevertheless, doubt love will get much more prominence at scientific meetings than it has in the past. Scientists, they believe, may simply be too hard-nosed to spend much time on subjective matters. In the deep purple mists of antiquity, a couple of Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths named Harold Arlen and Leo Robin wrote: “Love! Love! Hooray for love! Who is ever too blase for love?” But what do songwriters know about it, anyway?
