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.
ALEX J. NELSON is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Indianapolis. His research explores the ethnology of romantic love, erotic entrepreneurship in commercial sexual economies, and the transformation of love, marriage, and gender relations in South Korea, where he has been conducting ethnographic field research since 2013.
VICTOR C. DE MUNCK is a professor of anthropology at Vilnius University in the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies. He has conducted field work in Sri Lanka, Macedonia, Lithuania, Russia, and the US He is the author of Romantic Love in America (2019) and coauthor of Cultural Models (2014).
WILLIAM JANKOWIAK is a professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has authored more than 124 articles/book chapters and nine books (five edited). His research is conducted primarily in Northern China and in the US. His most recent book is Illicit Monogamy: Inside a Fundamentalist Mormon Community (2023).
