The primary distinction between the psychological and anthropological approaches to love lies in the former’s—particularly psychoanalytic—emphasis on sexual relationships. In contrast, anthropology, without dismissing the significance of such relationships, consistently integrates a wide array of cultural elements into its analyses. That love and its positive and negative consequences have long been central concerns for anthropologists is evident from early twentieth-century writings, such as those of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. Yet, the concept of love has almost always been interwoven with notions of emotions and feelings. As a result, it is quite common among anthropologists to employ the term “anthropology of love, feelings, and emotions”—though at times the word “love” is omitted due to its inevitable romantic and sentimental connotations. It is within this latter framework that our discussion proceeds.
We know that anthropology is devoted to the study of all human conditions across all times and places. For this reason, it was, from the outset, structured around four primary sub-fields: biological anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology. Accordingly, we may begin our discussion by examining the relationship between each of these four branches and the domain of emotions and love.
۱. The Biological Dimension: Human beings are living organisms, with all the inherent characteristics and needs of life—including sexual drive and reproduction. From this perspective, love and emotions are biological necessities, governed by physiological and evolutionary imperatives. The attraction between sexes, erotic relations, emotional attachments, and pleasures are not only regulated by neural systems and hormonal secretions, but also serve a specific biological function: to bring two beings closer in order to ensure the continuation of life through reproduction. While a romantic perspective might attempt to distinguish human sexual attraction from the instinctual drive seen in other animals, from an ethological standpoint, such a separation is untenable. Put simply, the sexual attraction between two humans cannot be fundamentally distinguished from that between two animals. What distinguishes human love from purely animal attraction are its non-biological and cognitive dimensions, not its biological and objective aspects. Therefore, concepts such as “love at first sight” or “sudden infatuation” are, within this framework, ultimately reducible to neural stimulation that receive interpretive representation in the brain. The argument remains consistent: when two individuals develop emotional attachment upon a first encounter, both the initial perception and the resulting emotional bond must be understood, at least in part, through sensory-neural mechanisms. Otherwise, we cannot fully define these individuals as human beings. In other words, no matter how “authentic” or intense this affection may be, it cannot be realized without a biological basis—even if it is perceived as “unconscious” or “involuntary.”
It is well established that a large portion of our behaviors and actions—particularly language, up to nearly eighty percent—are performed and interpreted unconsciously. However, this does not imply that the absence of conscious awareness diminishes the biological system’s influence. On the contrary, even unconscious mental responses are rooted in biological processes. Thus, in any experience of love, there must necessarily be a form of “biological event”—an event defined and interpreted through elector-chemical processes.
This relationship between a presumed linguistic or mental “unconscious” and a biologically grounded “lack of volition” is highly complex. When we turn to what is often called romantic literature, we frequently encounter signs of this ambiguity: disruptions in language, the failure or suspension of speech, the inexpressibly of a feeling, or even the description of love as a “pain”—a notion so deeply embedded in literary traditions. These are all clear indicators of a liminal state in which conscious and unconscious levels of language, cognition, and sensory embodiment become entangled in ways that defy easy articulation. This condition is almost always unstable: in other words, “love at first sight” describes a momentary state that cannot truly be repeated. Yet, the memory of that moment may endure with remarkable persistence.
“Mystical love” can be seen as a prime example of this phenomenon—just as “Platonic love” represents a form of attachment that is entirely disengaged from the physical body, defined instead in the realm of the mind and the metaphysical unconscious. Here, we are faced with a relationship akin to that which exists between “knowledge” and “cognition,” or between “intuition” and “ethnoscience.” What cannot be expressed linguistically is often assumed to belong to the metaphysical; what eludes our understanding of sensory and biological mechanisms is either deemed secondary or denied altogether.
As Michel Foucault has noted, we are often confronted with a kind of “utopian body”—one that we are compelled to conceptualize as external to ourselves, situated in a realm of transcendence beyond sensory perception, where the materialism of the body is negated and the immaterial delicacy of the spirit is exalted.
Yet, the biological account remains: love, in this view, is a life-sustaining mechanism shaped by over four billion years of evolutionary history. According to the most recent discussions in anthropology, what we refer to as “love” (or a more advanced form of intersexual attraction found in animals) is closely linked to the evolution of human bipedal ism—specifically, to the emergence of Homo erectus, approximately two to three million years ago. It is with the rise of upright posture that a new form of physical and emotional bond begins: the mother holding her child in her arms.
In quadrupedal animals—those with curved spines—this human-like system of cradling does not exist. But with the upright human form, the child is placed in the mother’s arms, and the mother’s hands become physically and emotionally dependent on the child, as they must constantly support and protect it. As a result, the mother finds it difficult to maintain life and livelihood on her own—leading to a necessity for a gendered division of labor and for the presence of a second figure (the partner) to support the maternal-child relationship.
Anthropological and anatomical studies show that two key developments in the human anatomical system contributed significantly to the emergence and strengthening of love as a social and emotional phenomenon.
The straightening of the spine necessitates closer physical proximity between man and woman to ensure the continuation of life. Second, this upright posture gives rise to the phenomenon of face-to-face love in humans. Unlike other animals, humans engage in love by looking directly at each other’s faces and touching them. The face thus acquires both an identity dimension and a sexual/erotic dimension.
No other phenomenon in identity formation holds as much significance as the face, which is the most important marker for social recognition and even self-recognition (as in the narcissistic mirror). This is because the erotic/love mechanism in humans transforms into a face-to-face interaction. Edgar Morin, the French sociologist, has extensively discussed this idea. Moreover, in processes defining and interpreting beauty—such as those in Umberto Eco’s “History of Ugliness” and “History of Beauty”—the face is consistently shown to hold paramount importance among the criteria of beauty or ugliness.
Another assumption put forth by ethologists is that “love” is an intrinsic aspect of life because it ensures its continuation, whereas “hatred” is not inherent to life and contradicts its persistence. Loving relationships, altruism, and sympathy are processes that help preserve and sustain survival. In contrast, violence and hatred—especially when they are not related to natural resources and thus not connected to life’s continuation (a distinction often made in Western thought)—lead us toward a depletion of our humanity and, in a sense, a depletion of the vital essence of life.
However, it is important to note that warfare among humans is essentially a form of tension akin to that seen among animals competing for vital resources (such as mates or food)—unless we accept that a profound cultural transition has occurred here, one that has introduced fundamental and complex changes with both positive and negative dimensions.
۲– The second dimension we can highlight is the historical and prehistoric aspect. Mythology here poses a risky ground for anthropologists because it can easily lead them astray. We have Johann Jacob Bachofen’s experience and his interpretation of Greek and Roman mythology to understand the concepts of family and kinship systems. The issue remains that what is called “love” in the language of myths—such as the gods of love and the battles among gods over love in anthropomorphic mythologies like those of Greece and Rome—bears very little relation to earthly love.
Moreover, once we move beyond the Ind-European framework, this gap widens further. Firstly, Iranian culture is fundamentally non-anthropomorphic and even struggles with these mythologies. Its distance from more remote mythologies—for example, those of East Asia, Australia, Africa, or Native America—is even greater because in those cultures, distinctions between living and non-living entities, between inside and outside, and between material and immaterial love differ sharply from Ind-European traditions.
However, even when we turn to the historical dimension, significant ambiguities persist regarding the concepts of “love,” “sexual relations,” and their connection to “family” and reproduction, even in the traditions closest to us—namely, the histories of Greece, Rome, and India. A review of Plato’s works and Socratic thought on topics such as beauty, infatuation, and seduction reveals a considerable distance between these notions and sexual relations aimed at reproduction or even heterosexual relationships between men and women.
Regarding per-Islamic history in countries like Iran, the information is incomplete, contradictory, and highly contested, especially on sensitive issues such as “incestuous marriage.” Yet, in post-Islamic history, for example among great medieval Persian poets like Saadi and Hafez, we observe a model of love, sexual relations, and family that closely resembles the Greek pattern and diverges significantly from what has been witnessed in modernity. Therefore, the recommendation of anthropologists studying emotions and love is to seriously begin investigations from the democratization of the concept of love, its various forms, and its relationships with family starting from the period of industrialization onward. The Romanticism of the nineteenth century, which lasted at least until the mid-twentieth century, and the major cultural shifts beginning in the 1960s in Europe and America—introducing topics such as LGBTQ+ identities and related issues—have raised entirely new questions. Anthropology has largely engaged with these developments, with key figures such as Betty Friedan, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Badinter, Françoise Héritier, and notably cultural historians like Alain Corbin, who have made significant contributions through rigorous analysis. Much of this work returns to a familial approach to love, rooted in the scholarship of Malinowski, Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss, and extending to Martin Segalen and Pierre Bourdieu within kinship studies. After the cultural shift of the 1960s in Europe and America—which then became globalized (the sexual revolution)—the concepts of eroticism and familial love grew increasingly distant from one another. Romantic love, largely a nineteenth-century construct, almost completely faded or transformed into what Tyler called a “survival”—that is, a phenomenon no longer firmly grounded but persisting exceptionally and enduring through its residual presence in social systems and peripheral cultural expressions.
۳. The third issue is language; language can greatly aid us in understanding a culture, and in exploring cultural phenomena such as love, we inevitably—especially during the height of twentieth-century Romanticism, but even in myths and historical or prehistoric narratives—find ourselves limited by language. Consequently, we must turn to literary systems, poetry, prose, and even the everyday language of people to gain deeper insight.
We know that in language phenomena, not only for communication but also for expressing feelings and thoughts, for thinking, and for creating nonverbal emotional connections, the main and largest part relies not on verbal language but on bodily language and all its subtle forms. Scholars such as Garfinkel and Schütz, in their work on “ethnomethodology,” have closely studied the minute movements, behaviors, and utterances within such interactions, leaving much room for further research. Questions arise, for example, about how our sensory systems (looking, body movements, smelling, seeing or being seen, and their artistic and literary representations) present, promote, transmit, and develop the phenomenon of love in all its dimensions. But when it comes to spoken language, the findings can be quite significant: for example, how do two people who love each other, depending on the type and intensity of their affection, interact through subtle behaviors such as holding hands, looking at each other, speaking about one another, and so forth? These might seem like trivial matters, yet both methodological and cultural studies (e.g., Hogarth, Hall, and others) have shown that these involve serious branches of the social sciences. Ethnomethodologists pose fundamental questions such as: how do two people—say, a married couple—recognize each other over the phone within mere fractions of a second? How do visual, auditory, or other sensory recognition systems function, and what is their relationship to love and affection? In any case, this dimension is highly complex and extensive, requiring broad engagement with literature, language, and imaginative representations—topics beyond the scope of this article.
At this point, we can reach the boundary of the fourth branch of anthropology—perhaps the most important one: culture. Culture is what makes us human, encompassing everything from language and mentalities to behaviors, actions, and reactions. As mentioned earlier, ethnomethodology has extensively explored this issue, as has linguistics. However, there is broad consensus that only about twenty percent of communicative data and messages are conveyed through spoken language, while eighty percent occur within nonverbal systems. This reality inevitably complicates the study and analysis of love, as the enduring question remains: how can we effectively study the vast nonverbal realm, and with what degree of depth and insight? And to what extent can we cope with the infinite interpretations that can arise from this domain? From a cultural perspective, we encounter what is termed “systems of representation”: the depiction and reconstruction of one material or mental reality within another material or mental reality. For example, when studying a “romantic” gaze between two people, we may observe a representation of a nonverbal system—an extremely challenging task. Yet, an even more difficult challenge arises when we view the transformation of a material system into a representation of that same material system, aiming to draw conclusions that, by definition, leave the door open to “arbitrary interpretations.” Before the discussion of representation, it was assumed that the material and the mental realms were distinctly separate and could be easily differentiated within culture. However, love precisely demonstrates that this division itself is an “interpretive” and “non-shared” phenomenon among two or more social actors. While touching and social distance— as Edward Hall explains in his valuable book The Hidden Dimension—have specific meanings within each culture (in particular contexts and averages), once we change spatial and temporal contexts within the same culture or move from one culture to another, all assumptions collapse, and “understanding” gives way to “misunderstanding.” And let us also consider that we must pay attention to neuroscience, psychology, cognitive sciences, and ethology, which fundamentally challenge the strict separation between what we call “culture” and “nature.” Love, affection, emotions, the sense of belonging, desire for closeness, seeing, touching, smelling, and exchanging with others are not uniquely human. Plants and animals exhibit these behaviors too, and one could even speak of relationships between very different pairs—humans, plants, animals, and objects alike. Cultural anthropology, therefore, cannot precisely distinguish between different systems of “love,” “affection,” and “attachment.” In other words, love for a mother, love for a spouse, love for a friend, love for a memory, love for an object, a plant, or an animal can all belong to the same category. Judith Butler, in her interpretation of the difference between “queer” relationships and “heterosexual,” “homosexual,” or “bisexual” relationships, emphasizes exactly this point: simply because two or more people love each other and wish to be together does not grant legitimacy to social classifications. In other words, Foucault also argues that classification is not meant to enhance better understanding or mutual comprehension among humans but rather to create normative positions that enforce greater order—often at the cost of erasing emotions and increasing violence. At first glance, this may seem paradoxical: how can a person love their mother in the same way they love their spouse or another friend? However, attempting to explain the nuances and complexities of these types of love solely through the permissibility or prohibition of sexual relations—which is a category distinct from affection and even love—means neglecting the cultural dimension. When we speak of maternal love, paternal love, marital love, friendship love, and so forth, words actually simplify very complex cognitive concepts to reduce a wide range of intricate feelings and emotions to things they are not, merely to make them explainable. The reality is that love is a complex system we still do not fully understand, extending far beyond humans and perhaps even beyond the realm of life itself. Many of the channels and situations we refer to in this regard are unconscious cognitive pathways that cognitive sciences have yet to explain.
Anthropology and Beyond Anthropology
For example, Freudian psychologists argued that if a man falls in love with a woman who resembles his mother, or a girl with a man similar to her father, or has aversions to such cases, these phenomena can be explained through instincts formed in childhood, such as the Oedipus complex. However, the anthropological perspective critiques Freud’s approach as Eurocentric in its entirety. Parent-child and inter family relationships possess countless complexities that vary significantly across cultures. Psychologizing human relationships is not supported by studies of the countless cultures observed around the world. The universality of stable, uniform, binary, heterosexual, non-kin relationships based on prohibition and exchange between exogamous groups for reproduction—even when proposed by prominent anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss—is no longer automatically accepted today. This rejection stems from the broad reinterpretation and redefinition of the concepts of “culture” and “nature” and their continuum relationship, as discussed in cognitive sciences, which gradually extends from the vital to the existential realm. Consequently, the traditionally binary system of love can be expanded into a ternary or even a multiple system in our understanding.
Equating romantic and emotional relationships with sexual relationships does not fully align—based on current data—with either humans’ cultural-historical realities or with the nature of other living beings. Crossing this boundary leads us directly into the realm of “nonverbal” or perhaps better said, non-linguistic communication. In other words, everything without exception—every movement, every sensation, all living beings, and even stones, mountains, and seas—can find a language beyond the capacity of our spoken language to encompass them, except where, as Barthes suggests, language discovers a small yet liberating opening such as literature, especially poetry. Poetry is where language chooses a form that frees itself from the hierarchical, normative, and classificatory pressures of grammar, which reflects social thought. The secret of poetry’s endurance over prose, and the endurance of imaginative prose over rational prose, lies precisely in this freedom.
Here, we must set aside sexual and erotic relationships, as including them would broaden the discussion excessively. However, within love systems, we increasingly observe an alignment between sensory anthropology and cognitive sciences, both of which are moving toward automatic (automatism) systems—material equivalents of unconscious systems within organisms. For example, the phenomenon often called “passionate love” or “love at first sight” was long dismissed by cultural anthropologists as an illusion. Yet today, new data shows this is not a mere illusion, as I will elaborate. To be part of any social system, we have no means other than our bio-cultural body. And consequently, we have nothing but our own bodies. However, for these bodies—ours and others—to form even a small society, they must be harmonized and synchronized with one another. This coordination must occur through highly complex systems, most of which are unconscious and operate within material and immaterial realities—neural, sensory, environmental, and others beyond our control. Of course, part of this coordination exists within conscious cultural systems such as education, traditions, and social norms. Thus, convergent and divergent systems, microscopic subsystems at the levels of behaviors and mentalities, interactions among humans and between humans and all beings (living and non-living), as well as various codification and decoding systems emerge—almost exactly in the sense Hall describes.
These systems create vast and infinite diversity, generating immense semantic distinctions among movements, sensations, representations, and the ways they are read and interpreted. Therefore, when two hands touch, or two gazes meet; when lover and beloved think of each other or embrace; when parents watch their children walk; when an old man plays with his beloved cat or dog; when a child claims a toy with all their being; when someone feeds pigeons with broken bread; when someone walks along narrow forest paths; when a flower is smelled; when hands touch the branches and rough trunk of a tree; when we look at the worn cover of a memorable book, or recall a beloved film; when we hear music, or simply feel happiness in absolute silence and darkness—each moment is rich with complex layers of meaning shaped by these intricate systems. In all these cases, we may be dealing with forms of “love”—but infinitely diverse loves, shaped by communication systems and complex cognitive networks that carry representations of countless times and places, sensory accumulations, and their intersections. What physical, neural, and hormonal processes occur inside our bodies in these moments, how we reconstruct the environment in our minds, whether we are awake in a dreamlike state or experiencing a surreal form of full wakefulness—all are open to discussion and analysis. However, not in a way that extracts them from positivist sociology. Here, we come closer to Gaston Bachelard’s masterpiece, “The Flame of a Candle”, which he believed to be a gateway to “imagination.” Here, we engage with Roland Barthes’ liberating and imaginative openness by Literary Semiotics, where he perceives it within the rigid, closed cube of language.
A Brief Typology
Imagination paves the way for a typology, each component of which can be examined as a distinct subject; for example:
– Platonic love: Although it is not directly related to Plato himself (in ancient Greece, “philia” referred to this type of love, while “eros” denoted physical or romantic love), since the Renaissance this term has come to mean a distant, often unfulfilled love that may not lead to physical union. It describes an affection one can have for another being without necessarily resulting in physical love. This concept is somewhat similar to what is called “Sufi love” in the East, although that term has carried ambiguities throughout history.
– Physical love: Based on a sexual/aesthetic system that involves both sexual orientation and sexual relations as well as sensory attractions, but not necessarily encompassing the broader emotional or romantic meanings commonly associated with the term “love.”
– And finally, “romantic love,” which deserves closer reflection because it is the common understanding and the type most often referred to in literature and social sciences. In various languages, it corresponds to concepts like “passionate love,” “love at first sight,” or “lightning love.” Researchers such as Helen Fisher (Rutgers University) have shown that in approximately ninety-five percent of cultures studied worldwide—from core to peripheral societies— the phenomenon of romantic love is present. What conclusion can be drawn from this? The conclusion is that romantic love cannot be considered an accidental construct tied only to modernity or Western pre-modern periods; rather, it is a universal system. However, the mechanisms by which “passionate love” ignites and whether it endures or fades is another matter. Just because two people fall in love “at first sight” does not guarantee that their love will last. Yet, the fact that such an event occurs and people enter into what is called “romantic love” is a reality present across cultures.
Opposed to this kind of love, there is another phenomenon known as the “Romeo and Juliet syndrome,” referencing Shakespeare’s play, which itself is a mythic structure recurrent in many cultures. What is commonly referred to as “unrequited love” or “doomed love” in everyday language describes two people who fall in love but whose love conflicts with social, political, customary, religious, or other systems. As a result, this love often ends only through self-negation—usually by the disappearance, separation, or death of one or both parties.
In this more or less universal structure, two actors enter a transgressive interaction system, where society allows such love only in terms of “death,” “complete separation,” or “social exile” of the lovers.
Conclusion
Love in today’s world serves as a practical solution for reconciliation between humans themselves and with nature. Here, I speak entirely from a pragmatic perspective, not from ideals or fantasies. We believe the continuation of the human species depends on its ability to harmonize with natural systems and to foster coordination among humans—through expanding systems of altruism, empathy, and love both between humans and between humans and other living beings, which are inherent realities of life itself. However, as the French anthropologist François Héritier points out, millions of years ago, with the emergence of gender-based division of labor (women centered in stability, men in dynamic roles) and the transformation of humans from herbivores to hunters and warriors, human biological systems underwent a fundamental divergence. This shift resulted, as Philip Descola describes, in the “invention of nature” and the extraordinary growth of culture as we know it today. But today, we have reached a point where we must reconsider that initial divergence. I present this as the theory of the “feminization of the world”—a return to those vital values that “feminine nature,” due to its origin in birth-giving, has preserved much better. Looking at our own context, one of Iran’s greatest opportunities in the past forty years has been the widespread entrance of women into social systems. Had this not happened, we would likely be facing a situation similar to the worst patriarchal regimes in the Middle East today. Femininity, beyond being a gender position, is a vital condition, and I believe we can trust the thesis of French historian Élisabeth Badinter, who views this position as more complete than the masculine one. Héritier’s thesis aligns with this as well, suggesting that the natural divergence separates men from their fully human position, rendering them incomplete beings—although technology and instrumental violence create the illusion of men’s superiority over women. It is important to note that masculinity is not a biological deviation but a cultural one. As François Héritier explains, its origin dates back about four million years ago—when hunting emerged. The hunter man, who later became the warrior man, represents this shift. Hunting itself is a deviation within the biological system because humans are naturally herbivores, not carnivores. Hunting is an aberration specific to the human system, and hunting tools later evolved into weapons of war. There is a clear and direct relationship between hunting and warfare, which can even be observed in the shape of weapons—most of which, as you know, have phallic forms. This topic has been extensively discussed elsewhere, so we won’t delve into it here.
Warfare systems are phallic systems of aggression, which brings our discussion somewhat into the realm of psychoanalysis and the relationship between psychoanalysis and anthropology. Therefore, in my view, love is fundamentally a practical phenomenon meant to save us from the conditions we face both globally and within our own societies. I will conclude with a quote from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: We have three spheres in our existence—the aesthetic sphere, the ethical sphere, and the religious sphere. The first is immediate and sensory; the second is the ethical, representing our growing demands; and the third is the religious, the system through which an individual’s life finds fulfillment and meaning. With these spheres, which are encapsulated in “love,” a person can achieve true happiness.
This text is a revised and fully rewritten version of Naser Fakhouhi’s lecture delivered at the Teachers’ Association, Tehran Iran, on November 25, 2015. Thanks are due to Ms. Mozhgan Rabbani for her initial transcription of the speech.
This text is an AI-generated translation of a Persian article originally published on Naser Fakouhi’s website (nasserfakouhi.com)(10/07/2025) . The original article is available at the following link:
