Posted by Siggy

https://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/2026/03/25/journal-club-cross-culture-study-of-love/

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This month, the ace journal club discussed

“A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love” by Jankowiak and Fischer (1992). (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3773618?seq=1, requires journal access)

The journal club meets once a month on Discord, using text or voice as club members prefer. We discuss a variety of academic works in ace studies, ranging from gender studies to psychology. Don’t worry about journal access, we can provide access. If you’re interested, please e-mail me at asexualagenda@gmail.com for an invite.

Summary
This study looks at a collection of over 160 ethnographies of cultures across the world to determine how widespread romantic love is across cultures. They look for examples of personal anguish, longing, love songs, elopement, and folklore. They identified passionate love in 88.5% of the cultures, and argued that this is enough to basically be a cultural universal.

Framing and Context
– We once read another paper by Jankowiak, about the (non-)universality of kissing.
– The current paper positions itself against the idea that romantic love is unique to Euro-American culture.
– It’s not clear to us how many people actually believe this narrative in the modern day. One of the examples that the authors provide doesn’t match their characterization. “The historian Philippe Aries (1962), for example, argues that affection was of secondary importance to more utilitarian ambitions throught much of European history.” Aries is not saying love is unique to Euro-American culture, but rather, makes a claim about the cultural priority of love relative to other concerns.
– The paper defines romantic love as “any intense attraction that involves the idealization of the other, within an erotic context, with the expectation of enduring for some time into the future”. This is contrasted with the companionship phase of love.

Cultural universals
– The references 95% as a threshold for proving that something is a cultural universal. Though they fall short of this threshold, they argue that it’s close enough. We compared this to p-hacking, when researchers describe a non-significant result as “on the cusp of significance”.
– If the motivation of the paper is to prove that romantic love is not unique to Euro-American culture, then they need only find one culture where it exists apart from Euro-American influence. It’s not necessary to prove that it’s a cultural universal.
– The motivation for arguing that it’s a cultural universal seems to be to argue that romance has a biological basis.
– We talked about anthropology’s larger project of identifying cultural universals. In general there are very few (language, cooking food, wearing clothing and jewelry, the incest taboo). But in modern anthropology this may be out of fashion.

Methodology
– The authors use folklore as evidence of romantic love. We discussed some potential issues. For example, some things may be deemed acceptable for a cultural hero but not necessarily in reality.
– The authors have to place some degree of trust in the ethnographers’ opinions. For instance, they would accept as evidence an ethnographer’s affirmation that romantic love was present.
– A few examples of evidence were provided, and they seemed unambiguous to us (though they likely highlighted the most unambiguous examples).
– They argue that among the cultures where romantic love was not evident, this may be because the ethnographies simply didn’t talk about it. This seems plausible to us.

Ace perspectives
– Do aces believe that romance has a biological basis? It’s a question that we often don’t seem to ask. We shared some mixed opinions. The underlying feelings may have a biological basis, but our way of conceptualizing it, expressing it, and prioritizing it are culturally mediated.
– We asked ourselves, how would we approach this topic if we were conducting the study? Rather than asking whether love is a cultural universal, we wanted to understand what the internal experiences looked like, versus how they are expressed. What factors do people prioritize when making decisions? How do different cultures define the line between romance and sex? What about the line between passionate and companionate love? Of course, the data to answer these questions may not have been available in most ethnographies.
– The paper specifically calls out that when they say romantic love is universal, it’s not necessarily universal among individuals. Rather, in every culture, there are some individuals who fall in love.
– Part of their definition of romantic love is that contains the erotic. But it’s not clearly present in the examples provided, and they haven’t really provided evidence that they always go together across cultures.
– We talked about the medieval European trope of courtly love, which often did not emphasize the sexual aspect. It was about a knight in love with a married woman (such as his lord’s wife), pining for her from a distance without necessarily even knowing her. To better study romantic love in other cultures, we may need to better understand our own culture’s conceptualization of romantic love.

https://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/2026/03/25/journal-club-cross-culture-study-of-love/

http://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/?p=13205