"O amor por": Modos de engajamento e trabalho do self

Sociologists have looked at how the participation in the world of high culture correlates with strategies to attain upward mobility, or attempts to solidify group bonds among those who share other circles of affiliation. In all of these positions high culture consumption is subordinated to a more encompassing series of social phenomena and presented as a resource to be exchanged for or converted into a different kind of capital: either symbolic, social or economic. In this paper, based on intensive fieldwork and archival research among operatic fanatics in Buenos Aires, instead of looking at the relationship between social affiliation and aesthetic proclivities I look at how these cultural practices are forms of social affiliation in themselves. By taking the metaphor 'the love for' literally, I use it as a template to produce a typology for practices of intense attachment, explaining how each of the types can be attributed to a specific kind of work on the self produced by the 'love for' something.