Full Description
Marriage and fertility rates are falling around the world, upending social security planning and threatening economic growth. In Love Apocalypse, anthropologists present their insights into this society-altering demographic shift, drawing on their research into the ways love, romantic relationships, and family are being transformed by cultural, social, and economic forces. Each case study in this volume examines a unique cultural context from either Asia (China, South Korea, Japan, India), Europe (Germany, Lithuania), or Latin America (Cuba, Peru), grounded in years of ethnographic research into how communities' experiences and perceptions of love, marriage, and family are changing in response to economic precarity, shifting gender relations, status competition, and diversifying cultural norms. It is increasingly clear that marriage and two-parent nuclear families will not be the universal norm of the twenty-first century even if this arrangement was largely idealized a mere generation ago. However, this does not mean the end of love, intimacy, or family but rather its transformation and the emergence of new intimate relationships and adaptations to the challenges and opportunities of life in the twenty-first century.
Contents
Contents
List of Tables
List of Figures
Introduction: Love "Apocalypse": Global Concerns about Marriage and Fertility Decline
Alex Nelson, Victor de Munck and William Jankowiak
Part I: Transformations of Intimacy: Individualization and Declines in Marriage & Fertility
Chapter 1: Gendered Obstacles of Love and Fertility in Contemporary Cuba
Heidi Härkönen
Chapter 2: Love's Fallout: Fertility Decline and the Individualization of Intimacy in South Korea
Alex J. Nelson
Chapter 3: China's Independent Women and the Decline in Fertility
William Jankowiak and Shelly Volsche
Chapter 4: Individual choice? On rise of love and decline of fertility in urban middle class India
Anna Romanowicz
Chapter 5: From Courtship to Contingent Intimacies in Lithuania: Love Nomads and Porous dyads
Victor de Munck and Ines Torras
Part II - Intimate Innovations: Emerging Adaptations to the Individualization of Intimacy
Chapter 6: Women's Householding in the Rural Andes: Othermothering, Chosen Families, & Demographic Transition
Mary Elena Wilhoit
Chapter 7: Becoming Childless in Reunified Berlin: Narratives of Low Fertility and Emergent Intimacies in Berlin
Meghana Joshi
Chapter 8: Choosing a World of Two: Childfree Intimacies in Contemporary Urban China
Birgit Herrmann
Chapter 9: Seeking a Spouse at the End of the World: "Marriage Hunting" and Neoliberal Capitalism in Japan
Erika R. Alpert
Notes on Contributors
Index
