Abstract
Distant Love is a rich and stimulating book written in an accessible style and is a welcomed full-length addition to the field of cultural sociology. Usually the effects of globalization on intimate life are overlooked or given a mere chapter in books covering the subject. This book will be of particular interest to those sociologists who are interested in the changing nature of intimate relationships. The authors, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, are building on ideas from their book The Normal Chaos of Love (1995) to examine personal life in the global context.
The book consists of 11 chapters and examines the changing landscape of what we mean by love and family. In the introduction, the authors outline the premise of the book and aim to present an analysis of what they term ‘world families’; namely intimate relationships between people residing in or originating from different countries or continents through a cosmopolitan approach (p. 2).
In the following nine chapters, the authors bring to light some of the lived experiences of the global chaos of love, with every kind of imaginable distance relationship: couples of different nationalities, people who travel for employment or marriage, wombs for hire, and the calamities of internet relationships (p. 2). The book finishes with a rather comical yet not unrealistic postscript from the future, detailing the dispute between the Near Love and Distant Love factions over the nature of love and the conflicts between geographical and cultural distance and proximity in intimate relationships (p. 189).
The authors argue that in order to truly understand the complexities encountered by world families we need to take the cosmopolitan position and view them through a dual lens of country of origin and host country culture and the different power plays existing within these different machinations.
The authors identify three positions on intimacy and love in current sociological debates: namely, ‘nation-state’, where the family resides in one household, with one nationality and identity; ‘universalist’, which sees modern love with its diverse paradoxes of freedom having emerged in the historical, cultural, political and legal context of the West; and ‘cosmopolitan’, which demonstrates that in world families Western representations of love and cultures of love and the family from other countries and continents are somewhat intertwined and partly exist in a state of conflict (pp. 3, 65). Viewed from this perspective, world families bring together elements of tradition and modernity, closeness and distance, the familiar and the strange, likeness and difference – combinations that link different eras, countries and continents and echo the turmoil of the globalized world in the intimate life (p. 65).
The importance of some of the issues raised in this book is significant in two ways: namely, for how people are constructing and conducting their intimate lives in a global context, and the broader implications for socio-cultural change. These case studies provide some excellent material for class discussions. It makes a clear contribution through its focus upon the field’s inherent debates, which students may not access as readily in other materials.
While investigating multicultural families may not be new, to my knowledge what is novel about this cosmopolitan approach is endeavouring to expand on the usual approach of looking one-dimensionally at how multicultural families adapt or incorporate the host nation’s (usually the Western) culture, or alternatively seek to maintain their country of origin’s cultural values, to an approach which considers how both these aspects play out and involve negotiation and/or come into conflict on a daily basis in the lives of world families.
The chief strength of this book is to pave the way for further research into global intimate relations in a way that takes into account the struggle of world families who are confronted on a daily basis with a clash of love cultures (between the nation-state and country of origin) and the associated struggles of gender, wealth and power.
Readers may find the volume of case studies overwhelming and observe that there often appear to be more questions raised than answered. However, I do not think this should be a criticism. Moreover, it is an invitation by the authors to open up research into the plethora of concerns surrounding personal relationships in a global age.