Love in Families

This chapter traces how love was a factor in creating, sustaining, and curtailing family-household relationships, shaping who was included or excluded. It shows that numerous intersecting hierarchies, determined by patriarchal and colonial societies and cultures, influenced how love in families operated. In relationships structured by power differentials, for example, love was used to rationalise or justify unequal authority, to prevent the abuse of power, and as a means for those in the ‘inferior’ position to negotiate, ameliorate, or mediate relationships. Family members also used love, often in a material or symbolic form, to remember and memorialise relatives and advance a family’s social, economic, and political interests. Furthermore, familial love was one way in which individuals constructed public identities and was used as a concept to define human identities collectively, whether at the level of community, nation, or even species.