Westerners believe that love makes life worth living; that sex is a natural desire different in kind from love; and that only cynics reduce our love life to a calculation of economic or genetic factors. In this volume, essays explore these and other assumptions about the relationship between romantic love and sex. This represents the first interdisciplinary social science study of love and sex. Contributors ask and answer questions such as: Is love just sex idealized, or is it a transcendent and divine emotion? Is love a cultural construct that is shared by members of the same culture, or is it a matter of personal taste? What keeps promiscuous people from using condoms even when they know they are at risk? Are black professional men so "rare" that their conceptions of love and sex differ from those of white professional men? Are brutal sexual fantasies an exclusively male domain, and are they always excluded from love fantasies among "normal" adolescents? Is divorce a culturally induced response to evolutionary reproductive strategies that compel individuals to maximize their genetic legacy? Are marriages or relationships less satisfying or stable when an actual mate falls short of the fantasy of the ideal mate? Is there a universal core to love and sex that is camouflaged by other cultural norms such as modesty and sexual segregation? Is rape perceived as more "acceptable" when the rapist says he was motivated by "love"? What do cult movements and romantic love have in common? As they attempt to answer these and other questions, the authors extend our understanding of the variety of ways that love and sex are conceptualized, connected, or separated.

Romantic Love in America: Cultural Models of Gay, Straight, and Polyamorous Relationships introduces the reader to the love and sex lives of two polyamorous, five gay, and eight straight individuals. Coupled with rich interview material, Victor C. de Munck provides a guided tour through the variable geography of love relationships as studied in the social sciences. de Munck describes evolutionary, cognitive, social, prototypical, triadic, and neural theories of romantic love and sex, concluding with an American cultural model of romantic love that also includes its relational properties as a dyad.

Methods textbooks generally offer prescriptive advice on how to perform certain techniques, how to develop specific strategies, how to analyze your results. But, as all experienced ethnographers know, this fine-sounding advice rarely provides ample guidance in dealing with real people in real field settings. That is where this casebook differs. Selecting many key methods regularly used by anthropologists - participant observation, consensus analysis, simple surveys, scaling, freelisting and triads, networks, decision modeling- the editors commissioned scholars who have completed studies using these techniques to describe them in the context of real field work. Using cases from health, community politics, family relations, and child development (among others) in settings as diverse as an Arkansas college campus, a Mexican barrio, a Thai village, and a Scottish business, the student is given a clear understanding of the diversity of methods used by anthropologists and the complexities surrounding their use.

Macedonia has had a troubled and remarkable history. From Ancient Macedonia, the country of Alexander the Great, through Roman dependency, Bulgarian rule and Ottoman principality, the modern nation state is a complex mixture of ethnicities, historical allegiances, and religious beliefs. United with Yugoslavia under Tito, and with a modern history of Albanian resistance and disputes with modern Greece, it is also absolutely central to the stability of the Balkan region. This is the first anthropological survey of the Republic of Macedonia, which seeks to untangle the many complexities of the country; addressing Sufism, Islamic influence, the role of ethnic Serbs, Albanians, Greeks, and Bulgarians, the cultural heritage of Macedonia and its modern political relevance. This will be essential reading for students and scholars of Balkan Studies, International Relations, and Anthropology.

American Lovers: A Study of Romantic Love, Gender, and Sexuality introduces the reader to the love and sex lives of fifteen people: two are polyamorous, five are gay, and eight are straight. Coupled with rich interview material, this book provides a guided tour through the variable geography of love relationships as studied in the social sciences. Victor de Muck describes evolutionary, cognitive, social, prototypical, triadic, and neural and "style" theories of romantic love and sex, concluding with a generic American cultural model of romantic love that importantly delves into its relational properties as a dyad.

Macedonia has had a troubled and remarkable history. From ancient Macedonia, the country of Alexander the Great, through Roman dependency, Bulgarian rule and Ottoman principality, the modern nation state is a complex mixture of ethnicities,historical allegiances and religious beliefs. United with Yugoslavia under Tito, and with a modern history of Albanian resistance and disputes with modern Greece, it is also absolutely central to the stability of the Balkan region. This is the first anthropological survey of the Republic of Macedonia, which seeks to untangle the many complexities of the country; addressing Sufism, Islamic influence, the role of ethnic Serbs, Albanians, Greeks and Bulgarians, the cultural heritage of Macedonia and its modern political relevance. This is essential reading for students and scholars of Balkan studies, international relations and anthropology.