Friendship (Anthropology)

Friendship until recently has been a subject of only secondary importance in anthropology. Anthropologists have always tended to view friendship in relation to kinship, generally comparing friends to kin. In non-Western societies, kinship was often considered as the chief set of relations upon which communities were structured. Friendship was mainly regarded as a residual category for people who were neither kin nor enemies. In studies of Western societies, kinship was no longer thought to have a central role in organizing social life. But precisely because of the greater instability and diminished functions of the family, anthropological interest was directed at revealing how significant it still was as a set of social relations. Friendship, in turn, was taken to be basically affective in character and too informal to be treated as the main focus of research.

The few studies of friendship conducted between the 1950s and 1970s (Reina 1959; Paine 1974; Gilmore 1975) emphasized the instrumental functions of friends and their structural significance. Analyses of social networks (e.g. friends, patrons and clients) in urban centres (cf. Whyte 1955; Boissevain 1974) also attempted to uncover a structured form for urban relationships. Instrumentality, or the exchange of practical and emotional support between friends, was the chief aspect of friendship emphasized by functionalism. But this is only one of the possible characteristics of friends. Above all, friendship is often perceived and valued as an affective and voluntary relationship, in which sociability and equality between friends are stressed. Although these elements tend to be cross-culturally present in friendship relations, distinct discourses emphasize different values. For instance, among English middle-class people, friendship privileges personal disclosure as a way of counteracting the impersonality of the work sphere (Rezende 1993). For the Arawete of lowland Amazonia, friendships between married couples stress not only economic cooperation but also sexual mutuality (Viveiros de Castro 1992). Among women in Andalusia, friendship values the possibility of sharing secrets without the fear of gossip (Uhl 1991). Discourses and practices of friendship also vary within cultures. Factors such as gender, age and class affect how friendship is perceived and experienced. Thus, the study of friendship in itself, rather than as a comparative instance for the analysis of kinship, can become one possible means for the investigation of central cultural values and notions.

Next post:

Previous post: