The Anthropology of Friendship

Sandra Bell, Simon Coleman, Sandra Bell, Simon Coleman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000323955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Friendship is usually seen as a vital part of most people's lives in the West. From our friends, we hope to derive emotional support, advice and material help in times of need. In this pioneering book, basic assumptions about friendship are examined from a cross-cultural point of view. Is friendship only a western conception or is it possible to identify friends in such places as Papua New Guinea, Kenya, China, and Brazil? In seeking to answer this question, contributors also explore what friendship means closer to home, from the bar to the office, and address the following: * Are friendships voluntary?* Should friends be distinguished sharply from relatives?* Do work and friendship mix?* Does friendship support or subvert the social order?* How is friendship shaped by the nature of the person, gender, and the relationship between private and public life?* How is friendship affected when morality is compromised by self-interest?This book represents one of the few major attempts to deal with friendship from a comparative perspective. In achieving this aim, it demonstrates the culture-bound nature of many assumptions concerning one of the most basic building-blocks of western social relationships. More importantly, it signposts the future of social relations in many parts of the world, where older social bonds based on kinship or proximity are being challenged by flexible ties forged when people move within local, national and increasingly global networks of social relations.

1 The Anthropology of Friendship: Enduring Themes and Future Possibilities

Sandra Bell and Simon Coleman

In his 1999 Reith Lectures, entitled 'Runaway World', the sociologist Anthony Giddens makes the following claim: 'There is a global revolution going on in how we think of ourselves and how we form ties and connections with others.'¹ According to Giddens, new forms of intimacy are replacing older connections in three key areas of our lives: sex and love; parent-child relations; and friendship. He argues that these transformations are occurring 'almost everywhere', differing only in degree and the cultural context in which they take place.

This is a book about one of the areas highlighted by Giddens: friendship. We hope to demonstrate that some fundamental and important transformations are indeed taking place in this aspect of human life. We agree with the argument of 'Runaway World' that social and economic forces affecting sex, love and the family can also have an impact on the creation and maintenance of relations between friends. However, while the world evoked by Giddens is one that appears to be tightly linked by common assumptions — 'We find the same issues almost everywhere'. he says — our approach is comparative and frankly sceptical of generic claims to characterize 'global' realities. Our conclusion is that friendship is much more complex than Giddens implies. It is also much more interesting.

For Westerners in general, friendship is a topic with much moral weight. From our friends, we hope to derive emotional support, advice and material help in times of need. Through the ambiguities and ambivalences involved in establishing and keeping friendships alive, we learn about how others see us and therefore, in some sense, how to view ourselves. Can Western notions of friendship and intimacy be seen as evident in other societies, however? Our book juxtaposes case-studies drawn from contemporary Europe with others focusing on China, East Africa, Brazil² and ancient Iceland in order to provide some answers to this question.

For anthropologists, the study of friendship is particularly pertinent at the moment. Some thirty years ago, Robert Paine noted that ethnographers conducted lives in which friendship was probably just as important as kinship; yet their academic preoccupations tended to dwell far more on the significance of blood ties for the construction and maintenance of social relations (1969:505). Currently, anthropology is attempting to reappraise traditional ethnographic topics and methods, impelled partly by observing numerous challenges to older social bonds based on kinship or proximity. A consideration of the role of friendship in social life, not least as a means of producing an anthropology that understands kinship more explicitly in the context of other forms of social ties, is — we argue — long overdue.

The task is of course a challenging one, posing fundamental questions about our understandings of agency, emotion, creativity and the self; but it is a challenge we cannot afford to ignore. After all, the development of some form of friendship is inherent within anthropological practice. Fieldworkers usually have to establish cordial and even close relations with informants if they are not to become like ethologists, observing interactions while remaining aloof from close social contact. The ambiguity and complexity of the fieldwork relationship offer us, however, some initial clues to the questions to be posed by any comparative study of friendship: Do both sides of the cultural 'divide' understand the relationship in compatible ways?; How does friendship differ from, say, 'comradeship' or extended collaboration?; Can we describe as friendship something that has a necessarily highly pragmatic, as well as a possibly affective, dimension? Reflecting on fieldwork in Morocco, Paul Rabinow concludes with a description of his friend and informant, ben Mohammad (1977:162):

Through mutual confrontation of our own situations we did establish contact. But this also highlighted our fundamental Otherness [...] I could understand ben Mohammad only to the extent that he could understand me — that is to say, partially. He did not live in a crystalline world of Otherness any more than I did [...] Different webs of signification separated us, but these webs were now at least partially intertwined. But a dialogue was only possible when we recognized our differences [...]

We perhaps understand why, towards the end of the book (Rabtnow 1977:160), a picture of ben Mohammad is included with the poignant caption: 'A wish for friendship may arise quickly but friendship does not.' Rabinow's broad comments, influenced by a phenomenological approach to ethnographic analysis, illustrate some of the questions of inteipretation involved in establishing and understanding social relationships in the field. Implicit within them is not merely the issue of how two individuals are to regard each other, but also the question of whether it makes sense to think of friendship as existing in mutually comprehensible ways across cultures. It is this second issue that lies at the heart of our book. Paine (1969:506) warns us that it is important to be aware of whether one is talking about friendship as 'a cultural artefact and a social arrangement, or as a set of universal needs'. We leave aside, for the most part, the question of whether friendship expresses and meets trans-cultural requirements for human well-being and emotional satisfaction. Such issues have been more directly addressed by social psychologists although their data have largely been drawn from studies of interpersonal relations in contemporary, Western societies (Duck 1983; Bliezner and Adams 1992). We are more concerned with the cultural and social aspects of friendship as they are explored in the varying case-studies that make up the chapters of this volume. Generally, we focus less on relationships between fieldworkers and informants than on local understandings of friendship, mediated through the interpretation of the ethnographer.

In the process, we must be prepared to acknowledge the particularities and ambiguities inherent within our own perceptions of intimacy. Pitt-Rivers (1973:90; see also Carrier's paper in this volume pp.21—38) points to the difficulties of transferring certain notions of motive and selfhood to cultures that do not share the individualism of European and North American societies. Paine notes (1969:513) that the Western, middle-class idea of friendship as involving a personal, spontaneous, private relationship between particular individuals implies a degree of autonomy that is a 'sociological luxury', unaffordable in many other societies. Here, he is writing in a Simmelian tradition according to which the personal and the collective exclude each other.

Voluntarism as a defining quality ol friendship is also challenged in a cross-cultural survey presented by Cohen (1961). He shows that relationships are frequently prearranged in many contexts and, even where an element of choice exists, friends often cannot terminate their relationship without pain of serious social sanctions. Neither are all friendships accurately described as informal in as much as they may be ritually sanctioned and formally regulated to the point of invoking incest taboos. For example, Cohen discusses the Kwoma of New Guinea where friendship between men who are not 'true kin' is instituted through blood bonds, while incest taboos apply to the friend's close female relatives (356). Such observations cannot be taken to deny the importance of the voluntary principle in many examples of what ethnographers call friendship: they can however be used to deny the principle's universality in the sense understood by most people in the West.

Even while advocating the possibilities of comparison across cultures. Brain feels it necessary to characterize forms of friendship in terms of Western/non-Western distinctions that would be familiar to Cohen. Brain argues (1976:105-6) that friendship has lost emotional expression and ceremonial patterning in Western cultures: it seems to provide a means of escaping from rigid role structures so that formalization is seen as the antithesis of a genuinely friendly relationship. In societies where friendship plays a more specific role, according to this view, the rights and duties between partners are often more overtly and formally expressed.

Nonetheless, the study of friendship can involve the fieldworker in observing a phenomenon that does not necessarily contribute to community ideologies and institutional stability in obvious or easily recordable ways. Relevant relations between persons may in some societies (despite Brain's and Cohen's points about formality) have inchoate, irregular and sometimes even secret dimensions. Much work in anthropology has instead reflected attempts to discern regular, long-term patterns of social organization, particularly in societies where centralized political control has been absent or distant. Brain (1976:13; cf. Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940) emphasizes, for instance, the importance attributed to kinship by many anthropologists in search of overtly expressed principles of arranging social groupings:

Text-books decry the lack of any detailed treatment of 'bonding' and 'amity' as elements in social organization, but most anthropologists, having made a ritual obeisance to the importance of emotional ties outside structured kin groups, have apparently despaired of describing them in detail - most probably due to their delicate and non-articulate nature.

Aside from kinship and affinal relations, corporate associations linked with principles of territorial, political or ethnic affiliation have tended to provide the organizational means through which anthropologists have identified order in human relationships (Jacobsen 1973:5). Analyses of the processual, the idiosyncratic, the affective and the non-public aspects of social relations — all elements of at least some models of friendship — have often been far less evident. Admittedly, notions of the appropriateness of affect as well as Western privacy and idiosyncrasy in relations of friendship cannot be assumed to be universal. However, we argue that it is important to examine long- or medium-term social relations that, even if influenced by social rules and conventions, may involve relatively 'unofficial' bonds constructed between persons. More broadly, we contend that relationships such as those of friendship that often do not depend solely or predominantly on ties of kinship, fixed positions of roles and statuses, permanent geographical proximity, ethnicity or even common cultural background, are becoming more evident in everyday experience, both in the West and elsewhere. They are therefore emerging - or should be emerging - as an increasingly important aspect of ethnographic analysis and representation.

A non-Western case that illustrates the shifting yet socially highly significant creation of networks of amity is provided by Jacobsen (1973). He describes the personal bonds developed between itinerant urban elites in Mbale, Uganda, as emerging in contexts of geographic mobility, where tribalism and kinship ties are seen as a liability (12). While Mower-class' Ugandans are perceived by elites as being concerned only with parochial issues, Jacobsen's informants seek ties of sociability and companionship with perceived equals — those people unlikely to make economic demands on them or burden them with social obligations. Networks of connections are thus constructed which reduce the anonymity of urban society without involving participants in taking the responsibility for constituting a fixed corporate group, and which are sufficiently flexible to accommodate the likelihood that individuals will move to other towns in response to the demands of work. Aguilar's paper in this volume (pp. 169-184) similarly shows how East African pastoralists transcend or at least bypass localized kin by developing 'globalized friends', in other words contacts required to secure people's inclusion in regional and even national networks of association.

Aguilar's chapter also reflects a shift in the perspective of anthropology that has great relevance to an understanding of models of friendship. Many scholars have concluded that the literary device of describing societies or cultures as isolated social and cultural units fixed in islands of time and space is both methodologically and ideologically dubious (Fabian 1983: Wolf 1982). Furthermore, the scale of trans-national, or at least supra-local, interactions between individuals and groups is on the increase (though this is not to say that such interactions are understood in similar ways by all participants). These processes can hardly be said to be new in themselves, of course, as for instance non-industrial forms of trade have indicated. The likelihood is nevertheless growing that the people who are important to one's social relations will not live locally (Allan 1996:20). In many shifting social contexts, ties of kinship tend to be transformed and often weakened by complex and often contradictory processes of globalization. At the same time new forms of friendship are emerging. Such processes incidentally transform the relationship between informant and anthropologist. We live in a shrinking world, where friends and collaborators, including those from 'the field", read our products (Grindal and Salamone 1995:2). Our relationships with those we describe must be accountable in new ways if we are not to destroy relations of amity established with those whom we study.

Thus the development of an anthropology of friendship is overdue on a number of counts. Anthropologists are focusing the ethnographic gaze on Western societies more than ever before and are forced to confront contexts where unstable networks of intimacy, frequently unrelated to kinship ties, constitute key arenas of social interaction and identity formation. In addition, the oft-quoted division between Western and other societies, even if a useful shorthand descriptive strategy, is becoming an increasingly crude way of delineating supra-local processes that are breaking down old cultural divides and erecting new ones in unpredictable places. Both physical and mediated contacts between representatives from all parts of the globe have increased, with the result that new etiquettes for mutual interaction are being devised all the time. More generally, the study of friendship may force us to pose key questions of all of the taken-for-granted social and cultural fields in which we live and work. It may for instance require us to reconsider the role of affect in the lives of the people we study as well as in our own fieldwork experiences.³ We must also ask whether our disciplinary expertise in the study of kinship has encouraged us not only to neglect other forms of human association but also to privilege its distinctiveness as a means of organizing social relations.

Friendship and Kinship

Many anthropological and sociological works contrast friendship with kinship along lines of achievement/voluntarism versus ascription/constraint in the establishment and maintenance of social relations (see also the brief discussion in Abrahams, this volume, pp. 155—156). For Allan (1996:84), the fact of being aware of a formal, ascribed kinship connection between two people tells one nothing of the actual content of that relationship, at least in a Western context. Friendship, on the other hand, is defined solely on the basis of the social contact which really exists and is continually worked upon: participation depends on the relationship created over time between the particular people involved, while what brings people together in friendship may not be what keeps them together (cf. Rawlins 1992:2). Pitt-Rivers seeks a slightly different form of contrast from his anthropological analysis of relevant literature. He notes: 'Friendship, far from being commonly regarded as the essence of kinship is usually opposed to it [...]' (1973:89) before illustrating his point with Fortes's data on the West African Tallensi and Ashanti. Pitt-Rivers concludes that, for many writers: 'The concept of friendship is an invention of soi-disant "civilised society" which has abandoned kinship as an organising principle" (90).

The sense that friendship has little chance to flourish where ki...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 The Anthropology of Friendship: Enduring Themes and Future Possibilities
• 2 People Who Can Be Friends: Selves and Social Relationships
• 3 Friendship: The Hazards of an Ideal Relationship
• 4 The Importance of Friendship in the Absence of States, According to the Icelandic Sagas
• 5 Building Affinity through Friendship
• 6 The 'Bones' of Friendship: Playing Dominoes with Arthur of an Evening in the Eagle Pub
• 7 Expressions of Interest: Friendship and guanxi in Chinese Societies
• 8 Friendship, Kinship and the Life Course in Rural Auvergne
• 9 Friends and Networks as Survival Strategies in North-East Europe
• 10 Localized Kin and Globalized Friends: Religious Modernity and the 'Educated Self' in East Africa
• Index