swidler. talk of love. introducao

5/28/2018 Swidler. Talk of Love. Introducao

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T L K

L O V E

How C U L T U R E M T T E R S

nn Swidler

T HE UNIVERSITY OF CHIC GO PRESSCHIC GO ND LONDON


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2 INTRODU TION

investigate marriage a nd family life, but love has seemed too personal, toomysterious, and, I would argue, too sacred for serious sociological study.Now work on the psychology and sociology of emotions has made thestudy oflove respectable, and we have increasingly rich historical, sociological, and cultural work on love. My own research has been informed bythe important studies of Francesca Cancian (1987), Naomi Quinn (1987,1996, Strauss and Q uinn 1997), and most recendy Eva IlIouz (1997). Thereis also a large and growing popular and scholarly literature on the historyof love (Rothman 1987; Sternberg 1998), on contemporary dating andmarriage (Skolnick 1991; Scarf 1987; Lystra 1989; Kern 1992; Lindholm1998), on passion and intimacy (Luhmann 1986; Giddens 1992), and onhistorical trans formations of human sexuality (Laqueur 1990; Seidman1991; Ullman 1997; Bailey 1999). But we still know very little about themost important aspect of ove: what it actually means to people.

Students of culture usually study a society's core symbols its religious beliefs and practices; its art, literature, or music; its myths, folklore,and popular beliefs. Although love is a quintessentially personal, privateexperience, love is just as profoundly social and cultural.

Love is a central theme of our popular culture as well as our greatestart, from soap operas to Shakespeare. t is also one of the richest sourcesof the pervasive folk culture of gossip, commiseration, confession, andadvice-giving. Indeed, love recommends itself to students of culture precisely because, unlike many of the political and social attitudes sociologists normally study, love really matters to most ordinary Americans. t iscentral, not peripheral, to their lives.

Love also provokes moral deliberation. For many Americans, indeed, "morality" primarily involves conduct in t he personal sphere ofloveand sexual intimacy (see Sabini and Silver 1982 and Taylor 1994 on gossip). People may take it for granted that murder or stealing is wrong, butthey must stop to consider whether and when sleeping with someone ismorally right; the ethics of divorce, fidelity, and adultery; and the obligations of those who love each other. With the pervasive threat of divorce,men and women must continually consider and reconsider the ethicaldilemmas oflove and marriage.

Thus, from a sociologist's point ofview, love is a perfect place to studyculture in action. Here a rich and diverse cultural tradition permeates ordinary lives. Whether people's beliefs about love sustain them or leavethem disillusioned, whether people are confused or certain about love,whether they enjoy deep philosophizing or simply adopt convenient platitudes, for most people how they think and talk about love matters.

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AMERICANS

To explore how people think about love, three research assistants and Iinterviewed eighty-eight middle-class men and women from suburbanareas in and around San Jose, California. These were white, middle- andupper-middle-class representatives of the American mainstream, recruited through churches, neighbors, friends, coworkers, therapists, anda local community college. (The methodological appendix provides a detailed description of he sample, the interview, and a copy of he interviewguide.) These comfortable suburbanites were not so much "typical" as"prototypical" Americans. Their mainstream culture, with all its confusions and contradictions, provides the background against which mostother Americans define their understandings of love. As I point out below, my interviewees had a complex, ambivalent relationship to the dominant culture. Theywere often criticalof omance, disillusioned with promises of happiness ever after, and even uncertain about the concept ofloveitself. But like other Americans, including those from other cu ltural traditions or those whose relationships challenge mainstream expectations,they are continually aware of he discourses abou t love, commitment, selfdiscovery, and happiness the wider society makes available. Thus understanding the lineaments of hat culture matters far beyond the middle-classsuburban milieu of the far-flung San Jose suburbs.

Because I was interested in when culture doesn't work as well aswhen it does, I wanted to talk with people who had had enough life experience to test and perhaps alter what they once believed about love. I thussought to interview adults in midlife (interviewees ranged from twenty tosixty years of age, with the great majority in their thirties and forties) whowere or had been married. I included a substantial number who had beendivorced, to find out how people reshape their understanding of lovewhen it seems to fail them.These interviews were in someways very different from the standardsocial-scientific survey (see the methodological appendix). Lasting fromninety minutes to more than three hours, the interviews dealt with howpeople had grown up, what had led them to become who they were, whatwas important to them about work and family life The interview dealtmost centrally with love as a part of personal biography, asking peoplewhat they had learned about love, how their views had changed, and whatthey currendy thought. I tried to explore not only general beliefs aboutlove, marriage, and personal relationships but also mor e subde matters,such as how people recognize signs and symptoms of love, what people


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4 INTRODU TIONfind most confusing about love, and how people think about differentkinds oflove.What was most distinctive about these interviews, however, was thatthey explored confusions and uncertainties as well as thought-out conclusions. I pushed at what people told me. If someone said Communication is the most important thing in marriage, I tried to find out moreabout what she or he meant by that. Were there limits on what spousescould communicate? Did communication always work? What were concrete examples of communication that strengthened marriage? For interviewees who stressed personal growth, I asked whether personal growthmade love precarious. For those who emphasized commitment in relationships, I asked whether commitment constrained personal growth. Iprobed for the ways people thought through issues in their own past orpresent relationships, an d with some interviewees I also used structuredstories about hypothetical couples to pose dilemmas about love (see thevignettes in the methodological appendix). With these stories I sought toexplore the ways people put their ideas oflove to use when they are tryingto resolve problems (see Strauss and Quinn 1997).

I wanted to understand not only wh t my interviewees thoughtabout love, but how they thought. I was interested in the varying views often held by the same people, and in the circumstances under which oneunderstanding would give way to another. Inspired by Lawrence Kohlberg's studies of moral reasoning (1981, 1984), I was interested not just inthe conclusions people drew but in the ways they brought together cultural images, feelings, experiences, and ideas to think about a problem. Iwanted to know which views people would defend and which were onlycasual impressions, and what experiences, even of the sort that peoplenormally do not articulate, grounded those views.

The effect of the interviews was to explore not only what peoplethought but what resources they had for thi nking abou t love. Indeed, inthe course of the interviews I began to realize that most people do not actually have a single, unified set of attitudes or beliefs and that searching forsuch unified beliefs was the wrong way to approach the study of culture.Instead of studying the views of particular individuals, I came to think ofmy object of analysis as the cultural resources themselves the traditions,rituals, symbols, and pieces of popular c u l t u r e ~ t h t people drew on inthinking about love. I wanted to know how much people stretched thelimits of the cultural traditions they brought to bear on experience, andhow they combined or reappropriated elements of different traditions.

In exploring cultural traditions, I also interviewed ideological specialists ministers and therapists whose province it is to articulate the-

INTRODU TION 5ories of love. I wanted to understand how the cultural conceptions promoted by these experts were actually adopted by those who tried to usethem, and what alterations these lay users of herapy or religion made in theprocess. I also soughtto trace the influence ofnovels and self-help books tosee how the popular culture oflove touched the lives of my respondents. 2

ULTUREThis study's approach to culture is unusual in several ways. Rather thancontrasting two or more groups with different cultural understandings oflove, or describing an exotic culture unfamiliar to most readers, it exploresthe culture oflove among a relatively homogeneous g roup of middle-classAmericans. That is because it analyzes a different dimension of cultural lifethan most studies of culture do.

This book explores variations in the way culture is used The middleclass Americans I interviewed draw from a common pool of cultural resources. What differentiates them is how they make use of he culture theyhave available.

Uses of culture vary Some people (usually a small minority) try tolive ideologically pure lives. For them, every aspect of daily life must beexamined and made consistent with their beliefs. For others, mos t of lifeis unexamined, although a rich set of cultural traditions, from weddinganniversaries to bits of remembered advice from their mothers to thelyrics of popular songs, may seem to make life more meaningful. And stillothers are cynical about the culture most take for granted. This book ex-plores such variations in the ways culture is appropriated, mobilized, andlinked to experience.

Culture's influence can be understood only when we have newwaysof thinking a bout how cultural materials are actually put to use. How dopeople who share similar cultural understandings integrate them differently into their lives? One man may invest his adolescent ideal oflove withgreater and greater meaning as he matures, feeling ever more deeply thathis wife is his perfect sweetheart. Another may become disillusioned withhis earlier views, adopting a cheerful cynicism about love. The middleclass suburbanites I interviewed draw largely on a common set of culturalmotifs, but they differ in the style and intensity of their cultural practicesand in the substantive meanings they derive from common cultural ma-terials. It is this sort of variation I seek to understand.

Exploration ofthe varied ways culture is used can, I believe, reinvigorate the study of how culture affects social life. If we wish to explain individual action or wider social patterns in cultural terms, it will no longer


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6 INTRODU TIONdo to say Americans do it this way or the French do it that way becauseof heir culture. Cultures are complex and contradictory, and even a common culture can be used in very different ways. Thus, effective cultural explanation depends on understanding how culture is put to use.

In place of the traditional Weberian focus on ideas as the switchmen that directhuman motives, or Parsonian analysisof culture as normsand values, conte mporary analysts think of culture in semiotic terms, asdiscourse; in structural terms s schemas ; in performative terms spractices ; and in more embodied terms s habitus. Contemporary

culture theorists focus less on what particular individuals think or believethan on 1) how the larger semiotic structure-the discursive possibilities available in a given socialworld-constrains meaning (by constructing the categories through which people perceive themselves and othersor simply by limiting what can be thought and said) and 2) the ways thematerial and social environmen t directly penetrates actors to shape theirhabits and skills (Bourdieu 1977; Swidler 1986), their tastes (Bourdieu1984), their emotional vitality (Collins 1981), or their e mbodied sense ofself and situation (Joas 1996). Other theorists have attempted to understand how cultural meanings construct social structure itself. With verydifferent agendas, William Sewell Jr. (1992) and John Meyer (1983,1987)have both tried to show how preexisting cultural schemas constitute suchapparently s tructural realities as factories, organizations, and nation-states.

This book examines how culture works by analyzing what middleclass Americans say about their ideas and experiences oflove. But it doesnot confine itself to such materials. t also addresses the grand sociological tradition of cultural analysis, asking what new insights come from considering variations in cultural intensity and coherence and such processesas the adop tion, assimilation, and rejection of cultural materials.

OVERVIEW

The book proceeds in three broad steps. Part I, Culture's Confusions,draws on interview materials to reexamine the standard ways sociologistsand other social scientists have thought about how culture works in thelives of ordinary people. Chapter 1 considers how varied and sometimescontradictory people's ideas about love are and how difficult it is to say,for particular individuals or for a larger community, just what their culture consists in. Chapter 2 suggests thatwe think of cultures as tool kitsor repertoires of meanings upon which people draw in constructing linesof action. Cultures inculcate diverse skills and capacities, shaping people

INTRODU TION 7as social actors, to be sure-by providing them tools for constructinglines of action, not by molding them to a un iform cultural type.

Part II, Culture from the Inside Out, looks in greater detail at theways people use culture to organize individual experience and action.Chapter 3 examines the different forms culture takes-ranging from platitudes, hypocrisy, and cynicism through faith, commitment, and ideological conviction. By looking at variations in how deeply or systematicallypeople bring cultural understandings to bear on their experience, it raisesquestions about whether more deeply held or more coherent understandings affect experience an d action more powerfully than superficialor incoherent ones. Chapt er 4 proposes that the general approaches people develop for dealing with life, what I call strategies of action, are the crucialnexus at which culture influences social action. The cultural repertoire aperson has available constrains the strategies she or he can pursue, so thatpeople tend to construct strategiesof action around things they are alreadygood at. Chapt er 5 continues the examination ofhow culture structures action by comparing the way culture works in settled and unsettled lives.

Part III, Culture from the Outside In, examines how three external constraints on culture-codes contexts, and institutions-mediateculture's effects on action. Chapte r 6 describes two contrasting ways interviewees think about love- in mythic terms like those of the moviesand in prosaic-realistic terms stressing the messy complications of dailylife. t asks whybothmodes of hinking persist in the same people, and whypeople sometimes use one mode and sometimes the other. Chapter 7 explores the consequences for middle-class Americans of thinking aboutlove as a free, individual choice. t shows that people derive very differentimplications from the common vocabularyofAmerican voluntarism, andthat even the comm on language of choice (and the related rejection ofsacrifice and obligation) can be made to support both commitment andself-actualization. Chapter 7 then asks what institutional experiences reproduce the discourse of voluntarism as the preferred way for Americansto talk about love and commitment. Chapter 8 examines how culture,which is often quite incoherent i n the subjective experience of individuals, can nonetheless powerfully shape action. Well-publicized culturalcodes redirect action by I'eframing its meaning; contexts such as polarizedmeetings or contested political arenas impose their own logic on ideasand action; and institutional demands continually renew the plausibilityof cultural formulations people cqnsciously reject.

The conclusion turns to a setofbroad questions abo ut contemporaryempirical and theoretical work on culture. t ays out the larger questions


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8 INTRODU TIONthat I believe the sociology of culture should address: whether and in whatsenses culture is coherent or incoherent; what we mean when we claimthat somethin g has, or is a cultural logic ; and whether some cultu ral el-ements anchor or organize others.This is a book about how ordinary people talk about love, bothwhen they have it and when they lose it. t is also, inevitably, a b ook ab outwhat it means to be one kind of American. nd finally it s a book that will,I hope, force us to rethink our assumptions about the ways culture worksin shaping individual experience and in structuring collective action.

P R T I

Cufture s Corifusions:Who Wrote the Book if Love?

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