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Friendship is an essential part of human experience, involving ideas of love and morality as well as material and pragmatic concerns. Making and having friends is a central aspect of everyday life in all human societies. Yet friendship is often considered of secondary significance in comparison to domains such as kinship, economics and politics. How important are friends in different cultural contexts? What would a study of society viewed through the lens of friendship look like? Does friendship affect the shape of society as much as society moulds friendship? Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe, this volume offers answers to these questions and examines the ideology and practice of friendship as it is embedded in wider social contexts and transformations.
“This is an excellent and timely volume. In some respects it is a playful volume: rather than claiming to provide answers, Desai and Killick invite the reader to join them on a fascinating and wide-ranging journey through contemporary meanings of friendship – I recommend that you take up the invitation!” · Journal of Biosocial Socience
“The local focus of the anthropologists who contributed to this book allows for [a] contextualization in the way that many previous studies have not. In addition to its other fine qualities, this book is well and consciously edited. The themes in the introduction are faithfully addressed by each author. This foreshadowing, the cross-references between chapters, and the succinct summaries at the end of each chapter add to the coherence of this work and make it read more like a monograph than an edited collection. As a result, the reader must conclude that the study of friendship can no longer be neglected even if it has perhaps not assumed its place at the center of inquiries as the authors of this book collectively argue it should.” · Anthropos
“…ideal for undergraduate teaching on sociality, personhood and relatedness, but [it] also opens up broader discussions on the discipline’s evolution beyond structuralism, bias on the institutional, and the friendship ties that bind anthropologists and the people they study with.” · Anthropological Notebooks
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Valuing Friendship
Evan Killick and Amit Desai
Chapter 1. On ‘Same-Year Siblings’ in Rural South China
Gonçalo D. Santos
Chapter 2. Ayompari, Compadre, Amigo: Forms of Fellowship in Peruvian Amazonia
Evan Killick
Chapter 3. Friendship, Distance and Kinship-Talk Amongst Mozambican Refugees in South Africa
Graeme Rodgers
Chapter 4. Friendship, Kinship and Sociality in a Lebanese Village
Michelle Obeid
Chapter 5. A Matter of Affection: Ritual Friendship in Central India
Amit Desai
Chapter 6. Close Friends: The Importance of Proximity in the Formation of Friendship in Chhattisgarh, India.
Peggy Froerer
Chapter 7. Making Friends, Making Oneself: Friendship and the Mapuche person
Magnus Course
Chapter 8. The Value of Friendship: Subject/Object Transformations in the Economy of Becoming a Person (Bermondsey, Southeast London)
Gillian Evans
Afterword
Simon Coleman
List of Contributors
Index