Western versus Eastern cultures

The division between societies of Western and Eastern cultures is widespread in world scholarship and is most typical in cultural and cross-cultural studies. Why is it that this division, though quite simplistic, has become so popular among researchers? The Tendency … Continue reading

Modern and Traditional Models of Relationships in Spain

Interest in love studies has been on the rise among Spanish researchers in recent decades. Scholars explored the general processes of love relationships and culturally specific aspects of Spanish cultural models of love (Karandashev, 2019, 2022). Let us look at … Continue reading

Cultural Features of Mangaian Romantic Love

Early anthropological studies portrayed the sexual culture of Polynesian love. Those studies downplayed the love and emotions of indigenous people in the South Seas. For example, the cultural anthropology of Mangaian love presented the freedom of sexual intimacy and love … Continue reading

Three Other Things That Make Mangaian Love “Romantic”

As noted elsewhere, Polynesian sex and love are more complex emotional phenomena than people in Western culture previously thought. Mangaian love presents an example of this. Early anthropological research distorted the nature of Polynesian heterosexual relationships. They portrayed men and … Continue reading

Three Things Make Mangaian Love “Romantic”

How romantic is Mangaian love? Mangaians are the Polynesian people living in the Cook Islands in the South Seas. The early studies of Polynesian love misrepresented Polynesian heterosexual relationship culture as sexually energetic and sensually obsessive, along with free sexual attitudes … Continue reading

Polynesian Love in Mangaian Culture

Is Polynesian love the same as that in Western European and North American cultures? For a long time, love was considered an exclusively Western concept. According to Western European and North American scholars, ethnographic studies of love add little value … Continue reading

What Is Polynesian Love?

Many western scholars have traditionally believed that love is a uniquely western concept. Some researchers attempted to demonstrate that love was absent or had a low value in other cultures, especially in the cultural groups in Polynesia. Later ethnographic studies, … Continue reading

The Sexual Revolution in Sexual Equality

The liberalization of sexual morals due to the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s was a key process that altered the idea of romantic love in the second part of the 20th century in North America and Europe (Karandashev, … Continue reading

What Is the Sexual Revolution?

The word “sexual revolution” is commonly associated with rapid and substantial changes in cultural attitudes toward sex in the United States of America and many West- and North-European countries in the 1960s and 1970s. Later in the 1980s and 1990s, … Continue reading

Romantic Love Can Be Good for Relationships

Romantic love elevates our relationship and makes it romantically beautiful. Nevertheless, romantic love can hide some perils of disenchantment and disappointment. This is why cultural attitudes toward romantic love differ over time and across cultures (Karandashev, 2017). What are the … Continue reading