“Is love outdated?” Find out what cutting-edge research says in the 16th episode of the Arqus Knowledge Pills

Can romantic love end? Does love remain a constant in our societies? Technological innovations and radical cultural changes suggest that a contemporary global revolution is occurring and love, as well as war and the climate, is at the heart of these changes. The main question now is to discover how these changes produce new and radical ways of constructing intimacy.

In the 16th episode of the Arqus Knowledge Pills, we explore the topic of romantic love together with Victor de Munck, Professor of Sociocultural, Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Vilnius University. Victor addresses the question “Is love outdated?” and gives us an overview of how the traditional model of monogamous romantic love has been challenged by contemporary lifestyles. Is love a constraint to our freedom? Could polyamory be the modern-day solution?

Discover what his research conducted him to answer!

Victor de Munck holds a PhD in Anthropology from the Department of Anthropology of the University of California (1985). He has had numerous faculty positions in the United States most recently from 1996 to 2019 at SUNY New Paltz, where he was Chair of the Anthropology Department for 6 years, and was promoted to Full Professor in 2012. Since 2019, he has been a Professor at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies of Vilnius University. In addition, he is on the Executive Board of the Society for Anthropological Sciences.

His main research focuses on various forms of love, particularly romantic and its transition to companionate love. He has written 60 articles, many published in the top journals in anthropology (e.g., Current Anthropology, Royal Anthropological Institute, American Anthropologist). His book, “Romantic Love in America: Straight, Gay, and Polyamorous Relationships”, won the prize for the best book in anthropology in 2019 by the Society for Anthropological Sciences.

Victor’s current research project has received funding from the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), agreement No. S-MIP-21-47.

The episodes of the “Arqus Knowledge Pills” are published on a regular basis and can be subscribed to on Spotify and other platforms (see below). Doriane Duvault (Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1) and Josephine Petzold (Leipzig University) are the moderators that lead listeners through each episode.

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