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The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives
The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives
The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives
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The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives

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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.

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Release dateAug 1, 2010
ISBN9781845458508
The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives

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    The Ways of Friendship - Amit Desai

    Introduction

    Valuing Friendship

    EVAN KILLICK AND AMIT DESAI

    The study of friendship is haunted by the problem of definition. ‘Who (or what) are friends?’ is a common refrain in much of the sociological and anthropological discussion of the subject. This problem has led naturally to attempts to stabilize the category, and has resulted in typologies enumerating different kinds of friendship, organized by privileging some criteria over others (for example Paine 1969: 518; Adams and Allan 1998: 9–10). Is friendship a relationship characterized by autonomy, sentiment, individualism, lack of ritual and lack of instrumentality? Or are these requirements peculiarly Western expressions of friendship imposed on other places and times? A clear picture seldom emerges from such discussions and even less a consensus to use them as a basis for future work. In response to this academic reality this collection uses only the broadest of criteria for considering a relationship as one of friendship, that it is not primarily thought of as being one of kinship, in whatever manner the latter might be locally understood. This position means that we include relationships that might be considered as kinship and emphasize that relationships of friendship do not necessarily map neatly on to local conceptions of kin and non-kin.

    Rather than dissect the category of friendship itself, we aim to study the spaces, histories and ideologies that allow and shape its constitution as a particular type of relationship (in the context of other types of relationships) in different places around the world. As such, the chapters in this volume show the analytical benefit of opening up the definition of friendship. For us friendship is interesting precisely because it evades definition: the way in which friendship acts to express fixity and fluidity in diverse social worlds is exciting and problematic for the people that practice friendship, and for the social scientists that study it.

    In focusing on friendship's contrast to kinship our aim is not to show that friendship and kinship are mutually exclusive; indeed several of the chapters in this collection demonstrate the close interweaving, and at times inseparability, of the two concepts. Rather, this approach emphasizes what we feel is usually the most important aspect of friendship to its practitioners, that it is a relationship that stands in contrast to other ways of relating. Furthermore, while recent developments in anthropological thought suggest that we dispense with a narrow definition of kinship (i.e. one that is based on biology) and expand it by using concepts such as ‘relatedness’ (Carsten 2000, 2004) that can also encompass friendship relations, we contend that such an approach is not a sufficiently powerful analytical category to explain how friendship is constituted in the way that it is in different places. As we will discuss in more detail below, it is imperative to retain the analytical distinction between friendship and kinship since it is this aspect that appears to be of crucial importance in giving friendship its moral force in so many societies around the world.

    One view has been to link a perceived rise in the contemporary importance of friendship, particularly in Western societies, to economic transformations associated with the rise and spread of capitalism since the eighteenth century. In this view a more collective past has given way to a more individualized present in which kinship is reduced to the nuclear family and ties of friendship have increased in importance (Adams and Allan 1998: 9–10; Oliker 1998; Giddens 1992, 1999). Such conclusions have been questioned from a variety of positions, not least by work that has shown the importance of friendship in European societies prior to the industrial revolution (Hanawalt 1986: 267; see also Brain 1977; Bell and Coleman 1999; Spencer and Pahl 2006). While economic change may affect the way in which different relationships are constituted – as attested to by Rodgers, Obeid and Santos in this volume – the idea of a clear progression from an emphasis on kinship to one on friendship is clearly simplifying a complex reality. Rather, alternative ways of structuring relations emerge in relation to ideologies of kinship and personhood. Indeed, if there is something that all the contributors to this volume demonstrate it is that friendship is not confined to European and North American societies, it is not a new phenomenon, and it cannot be associated with the so-called onset of modernity.

    The argument for a link between friendship and modernity is implicitly linked to the idea that the notion of the person as individual was, as Mauss put it, ‘formulated only for us, among us’ (1985 [1938]: 22; see also Paine 1969; Allan 1996; and Course in this volume). In some societies people are understood to be constituted through social relations, such that no pre-existent, individual self can be said to exist and persons themselves are partible (e.g. Strathern 1988). As Spencer and Pahl note, if this is the case then ‘consequently, there is, as it were, no internal source for the creation of personal, spontaneous affection that is characteristic of some forms of Western friendship’ (2006: 40). Some of the chapters in this collection appear to contest this position and question the notion of Western individualism. For example, as Course notes among the Mapuche in Chile, relations with friends appear to constitute an indigenous realization and demonstration of the autonomous volition that they believe lies at the heart of the person. In the case of the Mapuche, persons can be said to create themselves through a constant process of engaging with others. Evans, in her work on southeast London, also problematizes the stereotype of the Western person as an individual. Drawing on a phenomenological preoccupation with inter-subjectivity, she reveals the inescapable sociality at the heart of what it is to be a child.¹ She suggests that:

    Rather than thinking about human relations in terms of a dichotomy between those societies characterized by situated persons engaged in personalized relations of exchange and those typified by autonomous individuals participating in the impersonalized relations of the market (Carrier 1999), we might more usefully think of a continuum of situatedness…Along this continuum it becomes clear that, due to particular historical circumstances, some people have more choice than others, both within any one society and when comparing one society with another, about whom they are able to bring themselves into being in relation to. (Evans this volume)

    Finally, the study of the ideologies and practices associated with friendship relations cross-culturally brings up a whole raft of issues, from the place of sentiment and construction of the person, to the importance of equality between participants through the relative significance of debt in maintaining or negating relationships. Here the diversity of local approaches to friendship becomes clear. While Desai shows that in rural India love and affection are taken to be the cornerstone of ritual friendship, Killick argues that in Peruvian Amazonia it is precisely the delayed, reciprocal exchange of objects that lies at the heart of friendship relationships. Similarly, Evans attests to the constant negotiation that occurs in friendship relations among boys in London while Obeid shows how fixed and inescapable relationships of friendship can become in a Lebanese village. Such examples emphasize the value of bringing together examples from a broad range of different places. This applies to the conduct of ethnographic research too, since fieldwork is often carried out through the idiom of friendship between the ethnographer and ‘informants’. Thus, friendship is not only a valid subject of anthropological inquiry but also an important part of the process of ethnographic knowledge production itself.²

    Friendship and Kinship

    Even though it appears as a central feature of many people's lives around the world, friendship has received little intensive consideration. While political and economic relationships or those based on kinship have been studied in great detail, those of friendship are often implicitly seen as less important. In part, the relative lack of scholarly investigation of the ideas and practices of friendship can be linked, particularly in anthropological studies, to a continuing emphasis on the importance of kinship. This preoccupation was due in part to what was seen as the important organizing role of kinship in stateless societies. It can also be connected to the discipline's early attempts to ‘establish ethnology as a science as exact as physics or chemistry’ (Bouquet 1993: 114) and to researchers who saw in the apparent laws and structures of kinship the potential for a methodology more akin to that of the natural sciences (see Holy 1996: 144–55). Even with the advent of the new kinship studies brought on by Schneider's critique of traditional anthropological approaches to the subject (1980 [1968], 1984) and developed by scholars such as Strathern (1981, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c), Weston (1997 [1991]) and Carsten (1997, 2000, 2004), this focus has, in important respects, been retained.

    Within anthropology the general approach has been to analyse relations of friendship in terms of kinship. According to this view such relationships are ‘pseudo-’ or ‘fictive’ kinship modelled on the ideas and structures of kinship within a given society.³ More recently, Viveiros de Castro has suggested that relations of ‘formal or ceremonial friendship’ should be considered in many indigenous Amazonian societies as ‘para-kinship’ relationships, because of their use of the ‘conceptual and practical symbols of affinity’ (1995: 14).⁴ Such a view has had two consequences. The first is that kinship connections between two people tend to be emphasized at the expense of other aspects of their relationships. As Paine has written: ‘For example, where we observe behaviour in the field between persons who are known to us to be cousins, we are very likely to analyse this behaviour in our writings as ‘cousin behaviour’; but it may be no such thing; rather it may be behaviour between friends’ (Paine 1969: 505). The second outcome of this view has been that anthropologists have tended to subsume their discussion of friendship within the study of kinship. This trend has continued even with the movement away from structuralist understandings of kinship relations.

    Ever since Schneider's (1984) blistering exposition of the biological assumptions inherent in much anthropological scholarship on kinship, the process by which the latter is socially created has been emphasized. One corollary of this view has been to move beyond ideas of kinship based on reproduction and genealogical connection and instead to use more general concepts such as ‘relatedness’ (Carsten 2000, 2004). The discussion of ‘cultures of relatedness’, while usefully opening up the categories by which human beings regard themselves as connected to one another, a project under which this volume falls, also carries a danger of masking the boundaries that people might themselves posit in the articulation of those relationships. In this case, by subsuming friendship under a general category of relatedness, we miss what friendship does differently to kinship for the people who practice it, and the different ways in which the two general forms of relationship might be constituted in a particular society (see also Santos, this volume).

    Little space is given to the discussion of friends and friendship in any of the chapters of Cultures of Relatedness; where it is mentioned, it is regarded as relatedness. This is most clear in Stafford's contribution. Having noted that the cycle of laiwang in China ‘centres mostly on relationships between friends, neighbours, and acquaintances’ (Stafford 2000: 38), he writes that ‘the point is that the cycle of laiwang… is a crucial element in the building up of relatedness between those who are not related (or not closely related) by kinship’ (Stafford 2000: 47). Stafford argues that this shows that ‘in China, as elsewhere, people make kinship’ and stresses ‘the social malleability of such connections’ (Stafford 2000: 52). His aim is to show how Chinese forms of relatedness are a continuum stretching from the formality of patrilines to the informality of secret friendships. However, our contention is that in taking this position there is a danger that indigenous distinctions between such social institutions become invisible.

    In contrast to Stafford's chapter stands Alan Smart's (1999) contribution to Bell and Coleman's volume on friendship. In this chapter he argues, following Yang (1994), that guanxi, which Stafford noted is usually linked in scholarly analysis to the cycle of laiwang (2000: 44), is both associated and contrasted with friendship: ‘friendship is simultaneously a base on which guanxi ties can be built, and a cultural resource for criticism of (certain kinds of) guanxi practice’ (Smart 1999: 129). Hence, if all of these forms of relating are merged under one term then the distinctions between them, and the use of those distinctions by their participants, are liable to be masked. Santos (this volume) makes a similar point for Chinese society, and thus emphasizes the usefulness of retaining separations between different types of relationship.

    In addition to ‘relatedness’, other encompassing concepts for all forms of intimate relations have been put forward. Pitt-Rivers (1973) proposed using the concept of ‘amiable relations’ while Brain even suggested using the term friendship itself in this manner. For Brain, friendship referred to feelings of ‘amicability’ or ‘love’, and he argued that ‘

    There would even be a case for maintaining that all kin relations within our kinship group are based on friendship and personal choice. One chooses this or that uncle, this or that cousin, even this or that brother and sister to be friendly with’ (Brain 1977: 16).

    Such instances highlight one of the main problems with the use of such general or encompassing terms, which is, as Holy notes, that they ‘[do] not specify what precisely relatedness is meant to involve, how it is to be defined and how it should be distinguished from any other kind of social relationship’ (Holy 1996: 168). Carsten has responded to Holy's criticism by arguing that the real value of the concept of ‘relatedness’ is that it allows anthropologists to make comparisons between very different ways of conceptualizing relations ‘without relying on an arbitrary distinction between biology and culture, and without presupposing what constitutes kinship’ (2000: 5). Thus, Carsten notes that ‘

    Rather than beginning with a domain of kinship already marked out, the authors in this volume describe relatedness in terms of indigenous statements and practices – some of which may seem to fall quite outside what anthropologists have conventionally understood as kinship’ (Carsten 2000: 3).

    While we embrace this expansiveness, we believe, as shown in the discussion of the Chinese example above, that such an approach can mask indigenous distinctions in their relationships by replacing talk of kinship with yet another all-encompassing, if more fluid, analytical category. Nuanced understandings of the place and forms of friendship may be unexpected casualties of this approach. Our position is thus to follow Carsten's advice about not beginning with social categories and domains already marked out but rather allowing for broad and multiple definitions of what counts as friendship. The authors in this volume all take the statements and actions of the people under study as their departure point for analysis. This means that we consider the very real differences (as well as similarities) in the types of relations with others that people talk about and use.

    There are clearly some societies in which ties centring on ideas of kinship do take precedence over any other relations. Campbell (1964), in his work among Saraktsani pastoralists in the Greek mountains, shows how the overarching claims of kinship and affinity can reduce any other forms of relations, particularly those with outsiders, to little more than economic transactions (cf. Loizos and Papataxiarchis 1991: 20). Papataxiarchis makes a similar argument for married women on the Greek island of Lesbos: ‘Friends are conceived as of the (same) house…and assist each other in tasks that otherwise are assigned to female relatives. Friendship among women, then, is a substitute for kinship, it is expressed in the terms of domestic kinship, it is susceptible to the fluctuations of domestic life, and it usually fades in time’ (Papataxiarchis 1991: 157).

    Yet, the view of women contrasts with those of men in the same society. Papataxiarchis argues that men in the uxorilocal village of Mouria find the burdens of affinal kinship oppressive and thus seek out unrelated men from the locale with whom to form close friendships, ‘friends of the heart’ (Loizos and Papataxiarchis 1991: 21). For such men this leads to the two realms, of kinship and friendship, being ‘kept strictly apart’ (Papataxiarchis 1991: 160–1).

    In this volume, both Rodgers and Obeid write about societies (Southern Mozambican villages and Lebanese pastoral centres respectively) which similarly place a greater moral emphasis on kinship relations. They argue that these relationship types should not be considered as mutually exclusive. Rodgers suggests that ‘Good friendship and good kinship existed in a kind of dialectical arrangement. In some instances, kinship even appeared to me to be invented or exaggerated in the course of enthusiastic efforts to establish or develop friendships.’ Similarly, Obeid argues that friendship, even though considered a separate type of relationship constituting an autonomous realm, ‘is part of an all encompassing ideology of sociality at the heart of which lies kinship’. Both friendship and kinship have value for the people of this Lebanese village, but they are in no way commensurable: it is largely kinship that furnishes the concepts that constitute the ideology of friendship. Such examples emphasize the complex processes of identification and separation of kinship and friendship concepts in the practice of everyday life.

    In contrast to societies in which ideologies of kinship dominate social relations, stand those where friendship is a central idiom. In his study of Telefolmin society in the Western Highlands of New Guinea, Craig notes that an emphasis on their kinship structures would obscure the central essence of Telefolmin social organization – individuality:

    Despite the feeling of group pride, there is little practical reinforcement of group unity…Moreover, as personal obligations are not defined in terms of common group membership or formal kinship, a man cannot rely on others just because they are fellow villagers or are particular kin of his. Rather, it is the number and quality of his personal friendships that count. That is, the Telefolmin do not think in terms of kin and non-kin, but in terms of friends (i.e. kin with whom there is a long history of close association) and strangers (who may be known kin). (Craig 1969: 177)

    In this volume Killick similarly stresses the importance that Ashéninka people in Peruvian Amazonia place on independence and their similar reasons for preferring relationships of friendship to those of kinship.

    Again this apparently fixed separation is complicated by the evident blurring of distinctions between kinship and friendship. In her work with gays and lesbians in San Francisco, Weston reports the varying attitudes of gay people in considering friends as family. On the one hand she notes that ‘gay (or chosen) families’, encompassing as they do lovers, co-parents, adopted children, children from previous heterosexual relationships, and offspring conceived through alternative insemination, appear to dispute the old saying that ‘You can pick your friends, but you can't pick your relatives’ (Weston 1997: 2–3). On the other, however, she quotes individuals such as Lourdes Alcantara:

    I know a lot of lesbians think that you choose your own family. I don't think so. Because, as a Latin woman, the bonds that I got with my family are irreplaceable. They can't be replaced. They cannot. So my family is my family, my friends are my friends. My friends can be more important than my family, but that doesn't mean they are my family…‘Cause no matter what, they are just friends – they don't have your blood. (Weston 1997:36)

    This example emphasizes that no relationship is ever either one thing or another. Indeed, it is this very fluidity that makes friendship such an important form of sociality.

    Sentiment and the Person

    We have suggested above that the task of defining friendship, either by attempting to uncover its ‘essence’ or by proposing typologies, is likely to frustrate as much as it illuminates. Yet there is a fundamental question, which is one of definition, that requires some discussion: is the concept of friendship so dependent on particular, culturally specific concepts of the person that to assume that it exists everywhere is wrong?

    At the heart of this discussion is sentiment. Most scholars suggest that without sentiment, one cannot talk about friendship. In some societies, friendship appears to its practitioners as being constituted by nothing else. Looking at Greece, Papataxiarchis writes that ‘in friendship the feeling is the relationship’ (1991: 178). Taking a somewhat broader view, Brain asserts that ‘no culture fails to emphasise the essential loyalty and love between friends…Affection and loyalty are implicit in all friendships and in all societies’ (1977: 18). In this view, just as sentiment (or the appearance of it) makes the relationship possible, so the lack of it (or more precisely, the mutual lack of it) will eventually cause its demise (Pitt-Rivers 1973: 97).

    By way of contrast, Carrier (1999) offers a critical perspective on the whole issue of sentiment and friendship. Agreeing that unconstrained sentiment lies at the basis of friendship, he argues that this very fact prevents it from being a human universal. For the idea of friendship and the unconstrained sentiment it involves presupposes a very particular concept of the person, one that is capable of such sentiment. As he writes, ‘without people who can be friends…we cannot speak of friendship’ (1999: 21). This concept of the person as an individual, or autonomous, self has, according to this view, a specifically European and North American genealogy. In the West, as a result of profound changes which have separated the spheres of economy and society, the self has come to be identified as being prior to social relations, and thus the sentiment that makes friendship possible is seen as emanating from within the person. As such it is beyond the messiness of social or economic interest and is thus able to offer unconditional affection. Drawing in part on Strathern's The Gender of the Gift, Carrier contrasts this situation with that of Melanesia where there is no stable category of the self. In Melanesia, social relations actually constitute personhood and there is no irreducible or inviolate core of the individual. Of course sentiment exists, but it cannot be of the unconstrained internal type that characterizes friendship; affection is not regarded by Melanesians as enabling relations between people, but rather results from the kinds of relations one engages in. Sentiment that is embedded in this way cannot, by definition, be unfettered and free. Melanesians, in Carrier's analysis, are people that cannot be friends.

    These are valuable insights and the link between constructions and histories of the person and ideas of friendship is important and needs further study. But in highlighting two ideal types (the West and Melanesia),⁵ Carrier neglects to pursue the exciting possibilities that his analysis suggests. For us, his conclusions raise a number of issues. Firstly, just as the West and Melanesia have developed particular notions of the self due to different histories of social transformation, we must be able to envisage multiple configurations and possibilities of the relationship between history, personhood, sentiment and friendship. We cannot claim that just because the West has a particular history of the development of the individual with a corresponding construction of unconstrained sentiment, others cannot have similar notions of an autonomous self (with or without the same articulation of sentiment) having had very different histories. After all, a pre-Christian and pre-industrial Aristotle asserts that friendship is only really possible between people who see themselves in each other (Sherman 1993: 98).⁶ Such a claim requires that there is something essential and innate about persons and therefore that there is a fairly stable concept of the person. What we would suggest is that while social relations such as friendship may be culturally specific, the presence of a particular set of formations in one society does not preclude a similar set of formations in a very different society. As Course shows in this volume, the Mapuche of Chile have a concept of the autonomous individual self, together with the capacity to make friends. Indeed, for the Mapuche this capacity is a necessary element of personhood. But unlike the Western ‘person who can be a friend’ that Carrier describes, unconstrained sentiment is not at the heart of the Mapuche's articulation of this crucial relationship. Friendship in this case is about something else, and is doing something else; but it nevertheless involves an idea of the individual. This particular articulation is not derived from ‘the West’ as a result of colonialism, but is, as Course makes clear, an indigenous category intrinsic to a peculiarly Mapuche ontology of the person.

    A further issue raised by Carrier's discussion is his proposition that the development of the ideology of friendship in the West is essentially a reflection of an elite male social position. Others have made similar arguments. Allan laments the fact that many sociologists have understood friendship in fairly limited terms: they have seen it as being primarily about sentiment, which, in their view, can have little or no social consequence (1989: 2). As such, friendship for them has been regarded as fairly unimportant and idiosyncratic. Allan suggests that researchers ought to examine what kinds of power relations are masked by the ideology of autonomy and personal freedom in the making of friends. Carrier takes up the challenge and puts a theory of power at the heart of his argument about the cultural uniqueness of friendship for the West.

    An understanding of power is essential as Carrier shows; so, however, are processes of negotiation and creativity whereby dominant models of personhood are contested or sidestepped by alternative configurations of friendship and sentiment. Caste in India, for example, has long been seen as a major constituent of personhood. But it cannot be the all of personhood. The way in which friendship is articulated and experienced serves in many cases to provide an alternative basis for thinking about personhood distinct from caste (see Osella and Osella 1998). This raises a possibility that Carrier seems to ignore in his contrasting and exclusive vision of the West and Melanesia: that there may be multiple ideas of personhood in any given society, which are held and acted through by the same persons in different contexts. The chapters by Desai and Froerer in this volume demonstrate how contradictory models of personhood (and thus of the relations between persons) do exist alongside one another: ones in which caste is clearly important, and others (in friendship relations particularly) where it is less so. In contrast to studies of Indian society, which have emphasized the importance of caste and kinship in the making of personhood, Froerer demonstrates how proximity and locality are important sources of personhood too: to a great extent it is where you live, even within a small village, that determines your friendships which may cut across caste and kinship lines. Similarly Desai shows how the articulation of sentiment provides an alternative basis for thinking about relations between people, away from the undoubtedly important ones of caste and kinship. He also demonstrates how unconstrained sentiment – seen to constitute the basis of ritual friendship in central India – does not have to be located in any one person but can provide the rationale for such relationships over several generations.

    Sentiment may have a role to play in various constructions of friendship and personhood, both in the West and elsewhere. We recognize, however, that friendship need not be understood as involving sentiment as a primary constituent. This is particularly clear in Killick's discussion of inter-ethnic

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