Intimate Aspirations
If one believes the pundits, society itself is breaking down. Parents are unable to control their children. Teenagers, lacking parental ‘role models’, embrace the brutal intimacy of the ‘gang’. Ever-increasing numbers of people live in single-person households, whilst long-distance, cross-border, and electronically mediated relationships are losing their stigma and becoming inevitable features of ‘modern life’. ‘New’ sexual practices, extra-marital relationships and sex industries are on the rise in many countries, prompting interventions from governments and publics concerned that the moral fabric of society is being torn apart. From the South China Sea to South London, we can hear the rhetoric of ‘a broken society’.
At Cambridge, we do not believe that societies are ‘breaking down’, but we do think that they may be starting to operate in new ways. The themes that predominate in accounts of social breakdown concern fundamental transformations in people’s most intimate aspirations: how they interact with those closest to them, the forms of relationship they aspire to have, and the kinds of person they aspire to be. Our Intimate Aspirations research track is therefore dedicated to investigating what kinds of ethical shifts and social innovations are actually taking place in the intimate sphere. What is the connection between these intimate aspirations and the broader society in which they are embedded? What can explain the massive transformations in intimate lives that appear to be occurring across the globe?
Social anthropology is uniquely placed to investigate this. The discipline’s long-standing interest in kinship and relatedness, combined with its methodological commitment to long-term intensive ethnographic fieldwork, equips it with the tools necessary to observe, analyse and interpret the most intricate moments in which the social fabric is ruptured or transformed. Moreover, its strong tradition of comparative analysis allows such issues to be tackled on a global scale.
Our Research Priorities:
- To develop new methods, which will allow us to better access our research participants’ intimate lives, and their thoughts, feelings and aspirations, whilst remaining strongly committed to ethical research practice and the spirit of collaborative anthropology.
- To investigate what makes intimate aspirations arise. Maintaining a strongly comparative frame, we seek to address how changes wrought by innovation at the level of policy, economics, and religious practice within specific societies create new ethical systems of relating to others, and new ways of existing in the world.
- To chart the consequences of new practices of intimacy. What concrete changes are taking place in relationships between partners, across generations, and between women and men? What new understandings of kinship, gender and sexuality are being forged?
- To examine the role of intimate relationships in social life. For many people, their intimate relationships are the most important thing in the world. While anthropology has long acknowledged this, the role of notions such as ‘love’, ‘care’, and ‘enduring solidarity’ needs to be plumbed much more deeply. Even in the same relationship, these terms can carry radically different connotations. Moreover, the emotional tenor of a relationship changes through time; and the experience of this in turn moulds, fulfils or thwarts intimate aspirations. How, then, does the experience of intimacy contribute to one’s understanding of what it means to be human? How might this relate to broader patterns of social change?
- To rethink the ‘mainstream’. Much of the anthropological literature on intimacy focuses on so-called ‘non-normative sexualities’. Yet one cannot presume that being ‘normative’ is simply the default option – it is itself the outcome of both choices and broader social factors. Are people ‘mainstream’ because they seek to conform with norms, or because they wish to cultivate virtues, adopt particular personas, or emulate exemplars? How does this influence what it means to live a ‘mainstream’ life? What factors influence whether or not ‘mainstream’ living takes on the force of moral normativity? Can rethinking the ‘mainstream’ in this way shed new light on so-called ‘alternative’ lifestyles?
- To investigate how and why an increased public scrutiny of intimate relationships has emerged in diverse societies around the world. Through comparative research, we will investigate whether apparently global changes in intimate aspirations are linked to other transformations on a global scale, such as the spread of neoliberal capitalism, modernist techniques of governance, or the global circulation of both images of intimacy and tropes of moral outrage. To date, there has been no sustained comparative investigation into these questions. By developing a comparative framework, we aim to develop rigorous accounts and theories of why intimate aspirations follow the trajectories they do.
- To explore why the social and natural sciences have become increasingly concerned with ‘affect’, ‘subjectivity’ and ‘the emotions’ in recent decades. We will trace the routes that interest in these concepts has taken within academic research, projects of governance, and technological and commercial innovation. We will also draw on ethnographic research to develop new and different avenues for their study, including the anthropology of law, administration and the built environment.
