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- Convenors:
-
Chandreyee Goswami
(University of Edinburgh)
Ila Ananya (University of Cambridge)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to explore friendship as an anthropological enquiry and examines its various meanings within broader socio-political and historical contexts.
Long Abstract:
While friendship has long been a popular topic of philosophical, literary, and media discussion, anthropological research on friendship remains limited. Anthropologists who have engaged with friendship have attested to the difficulty of defining it, even as it remains ever-present in all its joys, contradictions, strains, and ambiguities. Importantly, they have also emphasised its cultural variations, highlighting how friendship can differ significantly across cultures, and challenging the conventional Euro-American view of it as voluntary, flexible, and non-institutionalised.
A key question now is how to advance this emerging but distinct field. This panel is an invitation to consider what might emerge when we treat friendship ethnographically or place it at the centre of our studies of migration, religion, gender (among others). This opens the field not only to notions of affection, support, and care, but also to viewing friendship as a relationship involving dilemmas, competition, and conflict; a relation that takes work, and shapes our individual and social subjectivities.
Our provocations include, but are not limited to: How do we study friendship at all? What does it mean to decolonise studies of friendship? How are friendships mediated across time and place, and what is the relationship between friendship, identity, and biography? What place does friendship hold within other relationships, and how do they shape each other? What moral and affective considerations shape friendships? How might political action be strengthened or curbed by friendships? What might friendships illuminate about broader social structures during times of crises like the ongoing genocide?
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores a critical junction of art, friendship, and resistance in the Malay art world to consider whether ‘friendship is more important than politics’ (Alyokhina 2014)
Paper long abstract:
Whether legitimized on the basis of nobility or democracy the State demands obedience beyond the call of friends. Malay interlocutors indicated a bifurcated, gendered response towards friendship, which implied specific attitudes towards the ‘moral experience’ (Throop 2014) of life in the Singaporean state. Unpacking visual fieldwork materials, this paper explores a critical junction of art, friendship, and resistance in the Malay world (‘alam Melayu). The late artist Mohammad Din Mohammad, my friend, collaborator, and key interlocutor insisted that 'friends are more important than wives' (situating friendship above kinship), recommended that people befriend angels, jinn, and death, and said we should be ready to die for our friends. Mhd Din expressed a firm view regarding friendship in the widely discussed foundational myth of the Malay state, the Sultanate of Melaka (1402-1511), where two friends fought a duel to the death; Hang Jebat betraying the Sultan for his friend, Hang Tuah ultimately betraying his friend for the Sultan. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork in Singapore and Malaysia, peppered with insights from ‘practical philosophy’ (Deleuze 1988) this paper outlines an Indigenous theory of friendship at the foundation of Malay subjectivity and the state. Illustrated with Mhd Din’s artwork, in conclusion, I question the notion that: ‘Friendship is more important than politics’ (Alyokhina 2014)
Paper short abstract:
This paper interrogates how one can anthropologically study friendship in a context that straddles colonial and post-colonial ideas, practices, terms, and a sense of identity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines how researching friendship in a post-colonial context involves navigating between Euro-American and local understanding of friendship. I argue that exploring friendship in non-western settings may not necessarily require rejecting the conventional idea of friendship as a selfless, disinterested relationship, where one can express their true self. Rather, the English term “friendship” is often perceived with Eurocentric assumptions that anthropologists critique. Drawing from my ethnographic research on friendship in Northeast India, a borderland region with a history of ethnic conflicts and militarisation, I argue that what is needed is to acknowledge the co-existence of different terms with friend and friendship and the overlaps and differences in the meanings of these relationships. Recent and limited anthropological scholarship on friendship encourages us to look at how friendship is understood and practised in different cultural contexts, particularly in the non-West, non-Anglophone world. The problem, however, is how one can research friendship in contexts where there is usage of both local terms and the English term “friendship.” How should one approach these local terms, which may be co-terminus to friendship but also transcend in their meanings and usages than the conventional notions of friendship? How one researches in a multi-lingual, multi-cultural contexts in which one word can have different connotations, modes of intimacy, and ethics of relationalities. This paper attempts to shed light on the challenges, ambiguities, and possibilities of researching on and through friendship in a world caught between its colonial past and post-colonial present.
Paper short abstract:
Taking inspiration from the anthropology of ethics, this paper suggests that friendship may be studied in both everyday and extraordinary contexts. Focusing on Han Chinese practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, it explores the poignancy and limitations of 'Dharma friendship' at an extraordinary time.
Paper long abstract:
This paper engages the methodological question of how we study friendship by drawing inspiration from the anthropology of ethics, which explores moral life in ordinary and extraordinary contexts. I ground my discussion in my long-term ethnographic research on Han Chinese engagement with Tibetan Buddhism in China, where ‘Dharma friendship’ serves as a principal institution and organising principle within Buddhist communities, particularly in the absence of robust formal institutions.
Dharma friendship, as lived in these settings, typically involves mutual support, spiritual camaraderie, and shared moral commitments. Yet these relationships can also be marked by partiality and limitations. While Dharma friendships often foster profound interconnectedness and care, they can also obscure the full human complexity of those involved, limiting the ability to recognise and respond to deep personal struggles.
To explore this tension, I focus on an extraordinary case: the suicide of a mutual Dharma friend and the processes of meaning-making that followed among her friends and fellow practitioners. Seen from a certain perspective, this event revealed both the poignancy and limitations of Dharma friendships. While we reflected on our shared experiences with, and commitments to, our deceased friend, we also grappled with the ways our relationships had failed to apprehend or address the nature of her situation fully.
Through this case, I highlight how extraordinary circumstances amplify and expose dynamics latent in everyday contexts. This approach advances the anthropology of friendship by advocating attention to how friendships are lived, understood, and contested in their routine unfolding and moments of rupture.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on the practices of friendship among young Salafi women, a conservative Muslim group in Indonesia. Among them, friendship is founded on relations of “competitive equality” where each member is considered a competing party who desires to be equally good.
Paper long abstract:
The Salafi community is recognized as one of the most conservative Muslim groups, adhering to the strictest interpretations of Islam based on the model of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, which often differ from the typical practices observed in Indonesia. To sustain this type of piety is more feasible with the support of an equally pious social setting. This paper analyses the practices of friendship among young Salafi women in Indonesia. It focuses on Yayasan Mar’atun Shalihah (YMS), a Salafi-based educational institution for young adult women. Based on ethnographic fieldwork within this institution, I found that rather than endorsing the concept of pure equality (or what anthropologists often name as dyadic relation), friendship is founded on relations of “competitive equality” where each member is considered a competing party who desires to be equally good. Being bound by Salafi ideology alone is, however, not enough to give rise to emotional connectivity and a sense of belonging as a mutual friend. Rather, the existence of a “strong spirit in learning” is regarded as a precondition of the emergence of emotional aspects in their relationship. Emotions evoked through a shared vision and competitive equality of zeal to pursue goodness indicate connectivity that sustains long-term spirit to continuously participate in the Salafi-based pious practices.
Paper short abstract:
(Post)socialist contexts often frame 'Friendship' as the most natural bond among ethnic or national Others, raising distinctive anthropological questions. Drawing on research in China and Vietnam, this paper argues for the enduring importance of 'Friendship of Peoples' even long after the Cold War.
Paper long abstract:
As the most salient political relationship among (post)socialist states, Friendship is gaudily present in many multi-ethnic and international settings involving China, countries of the former-USSR, Vietnam, North Korea and elsewhere. Drawing on fieldwork on borderland and minority communities in China and Vietnam, this paper explores settings in which friendship is both an important everyday practice for conducting research, and an ethnographic 'fact’ demanding analysis. Where the idea of ‘Friendship’ in big-F official form is already valorised as the most natural relationship among people of different ethnic, national or racial backgrounds - including outsider anthropologists - one encounters a context distinct from many global locations where anthropologists have valuably widened understandings of friendship by studying relationships that may not always be explicitly named as such. But what if political framings of inter-state or interethnic Friendship do not line up with lived realities on the ground? How do people, including researchers conducting fieldwork, negotiate culturally varied conceptions of the relationship in the face of political projects which frame Friendly, reciprocal bonds as understood in the same way by all parties? And what happens when the supposed participants in these Friendships past or present are engaged in geopolitical conflict, as evident in Ukraine or the South China Sea? This paper will argue for the enduring importance to anthropologists of state-socialist 'Friendship of Peoples' even long after the manichean friend/enemy Cold War era.
Paper short abstract:
The political dimension of friendship emerges in relation to feminist demands for change in Basque festivals (Spain). Personal relationships drive the bid for equal participation, serve as mutual support in the face of resistance, and provide pleasure that sustains and results from activism.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is part of a research project entitled "Dislocating the boundaries of knowledge, gender and kinship. Friendship as politics and redefinition of affection and reciprocity".
The interest of the present work is to focus on the political dimension of friendship in the sphere of feminist demands in festivities. It analyses the importance of the bonds between women as a driving force to promote the equal participation of all people in festivities, as mutual support to promote changes that provoke resistance in the community, and as a source of pleasure that in turn, is the sustenance and result of activism.
It draws on the author's autoethnographic experience in the demand for women's participation on equal terms with men in the Alardes of the Bidasoa region and on her ethnographic work in these and other festive settings. Specifically, she explores the management of friendship between groups of participants of different ages in the struggle for equality in Irun and Hondarribia (Gipuzkoa) and another group of female friends associated in Plazara dantzara ("Dancing in the square") in the Baztan Valley (Nafarroa).
The explicitation of the political dimension of affective relationships leads us to look at their importance in social movements, in this case in the festive sphere where the common struggle against inequalities is both a battleground and a source of pleasure, where friendship functions both as a bulwark to resist social disapproval and as a refuge to protect oneself and catch one's breath.
Paper short abstract:
How do members of an ecumenical LGBTQIA+ congregation in the Philippines conceptualise their relationships with both biological family and social family made up of friends and fellow churchgoers? How does the author simultaneously navigate between dual identities of kin and researcher?
Paper long abstract:
Since its conception, queer studies has been a burgeoning field through which friendship as a form of social kinship is elevated as a valuable and fruitful resource. The significance placed on ‘found’ or ‘chosen families' as focal networks of care amongst LGBTQIA+ people across various cultural contexts not only exemplifies the mutability of kinship as an interpersonal connection but also disputes heteropatriarchal norms that frame biological kin and the nuclear family as inherently superior to friends and other social relations. However, much of this research – particularly that conducted in the Global North – tends to characterise the formation of these social kin as the result of LGBTQIA+ people’s estrangement from their biological relations or as a response to adversity more generally, be it homophobia, racism, poverty, or indeed all of the above. In response, this paper explores a chosen family formed under mutually held missions of socially progressive religiosity and politics, following members of an ecumenical LGBTQIA+ affirming Christian church based in Metro Manila. Drawing on my doctoral research conducted in the Philippines from 2022 to 2023, I discuss how congregants conceptualised and cultivated relationships with both their biological families and their chosen family from the church, spheres that were differentiated between yet existed comfortably side-by-side without hierarchy. I also reflect autoethnographically on how I navigated between my dual identities as both kin and researcher, having been folded into the church as a member of the congregation myself months before selecting the chapel as my thesis fieldsite.
Paper short abstract:
In Korhogo city (Côte d'Ivoire), two people may refer to each other as yawogɛlɛ freinds. This means that they have a formal friendship relationship, after they recognized an exceptional affinity. This allows us to re-examine friendship and its links to other relationships, such as kinship.
Paper long abstract:
In Korhogo city, situated in the northern region of Côte d'Ivoire, two people may refer to each other as yawogɛlɛ friends, i.e. partners in a yawolo relationship. During ceremonies, while working in the fields, or on the way to the market, everyone may encounter someone they ‘love’ (dɛnɛ) and with whom they desire to become a yawolo friend. Initially, it is acknowledged that there exists an exceptional affinity between the two individuals. In order for it to be socially recognized, there must be an exchange of goods and services between the families of the two friends. To a certain extent, this mimics the marriage proposal procedure. The yawolo friendship is in accordance with what anthropologists refer to as formal friendship.
In both discourse and practice, two fundamental characteristics of yawolo friendship emerge. Firstly, it involves a strict reciprocity in the expectations placed on the other partner; comprising of moral, physical and financial support to cope with challenges of life. Secondly, the two partners have distinct roles, as evidenced by the use of the terms “husband”/”wife” or “parent”/”child” to refer to the other, even when they are of the same age and gender. Engaging in a yawolo friendship grants access to potential networks of solidarity that extend beyond the realm descent and marriage. The yawolo friendship borrows language codes and services from other relational modes, while establishing itself as a mode with its own modalities. This allows us to re-examine friendship and its links to other relationships, such as kinship.
Paper short abstract:
Employing autoethnography, this paper explores the overlaps and dissonances between researching friendship and researching friends.
Paper long abstract:
Employing autoethnography, this paper explores the overlaps and dissonances between researching friendship and researching friends. To do this, I parse through my experiences of two different research projects. Over the past few years, I have been working with colleagues on researching friendship – we have examined the connections between feminist movement building and friendships, published a popular anthology on friendship by South Asian women and queer folx, and we are now editing an academic anthology on friendship. Initiated during the pandemic, this collaborative project was the source of much joy and solace. Simultaneously, I have also been working on my doctoral research. Based on in-depth interviews with Indian doctoral scholars enrolled in Women’s Studies and allied disciplines in universities in the US whose research fields are in India, it examines how coloniality structures the knowledge thus produced. Some of the interlocutors of this research were my friends and colleagues within academia. Unlike researching friendships, researching friends was characterised not by a sense of emotional closeness between researcher and researched but by friction and discomfort. In reading these experiences through one another, this paper attempts to unpack the affective elements of centring friendships and friends in academic research.
Paper short abstract:
I explore how friendship and siblingship are intertwined with each other through interviews with 33 adult sibling pairs. I analyze friendship and siblingship through binary oppositions, and focus specifically on friendship as a form of siblingship.
Paper long abstract:
While anthropologists have a rich tradition of studying close relationships, such as marriage, parenthood and kinship, there is still a lack of knowledge about friendship. To fill this gap, I explored the intertwining and opposition of friendship and siblingship through in-depth interviews with 33 pairs of adult siblings, collected in Russia in 2016. I reveal ambiguous nature of siblingship and friendship, analyzing how research participants described their relationships with siblings and friends through binary oppositions such as ‘obligations – freedom’, ‘one’s own – alien’, ‘depth – shallow’, ‘always – now’, and ‘immutable – situational’. I consider how participants conceptualize sibling relationships in terms of nature, social norms, shared past, and friendship to illustrate the intertwining of friendship and siblingship. I focus specifically on friendship as a form of siblingship and draw attention to two different perspectives on friendship. When siblings have close connections, these bonds can bring together the positive aspects of kinship and friendship, creating unique relationships. However, when sibling relationships are strained, kinship ties can become a container for relationships that are often perceived as forced. While these relationships continue to be called “friendship” by research participants, the meaning of friendship is changed.
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to discuss how friendships are forged, managed, twisted and mended among aspiring youths in a sensitive borderland.
Paper long abstract:
Manipur, a state in India's North East is currently witnessing serious instances of violent conflicts since May 2023. More than 200 Kuki people have been killed, 200+ villages burnt, 7000+ houses burnt, 360+ churches and synagogues burnt, 41,425+ Kukis have been displaced (Thingkho le Malcha 2024). In such context, what does it mean to be a young Kuki person who has dreams and aspirations? Situating friendships at the confluence of aspiration and conflict, this paper deals with the Kuki youths in Manipur. It aims to understand the complexity of aspiration – desiring to conform to societal ideas of success and masculinity – and how it is entangled with friendships. In other words, how are friendships forged among youths, in this case mostly young men, who encounter the shared experience of violence-induced precarity, and what are its moral, instrumental, ethical and affective registers? The paper also explores ruptures of forged friendships in a volatile borderland and as a consequence, the dilemmas and resilience of social relationships. The ethnographic materials in this paper are primarily based on participant observation among young ‘aspirants’ at a coaching centre in Manipur. In-depth interviews were also conducted with some of the interlocutors.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues for a semi-anonymous relationship among community dwellers (gaaifong) in Hong Kong Tea Restaurant as a form of guanxi-friendship. Focusing on its semi-anonymity and exchange of embodied concern, it wishes to shed light on anthropology of friendship, China and restaurant.
Paper long abstract:
Friendship has been understood to be based ‘on spontaneous and unconstrained sentiment or affection of some sort,’ (Carrier, 1999) with a strong Cartesian tradition. Previous scholarship in greater China region has continued such tradition, leading to the notion of guanxi (Yang, 1994), which ‘absorbed much of the attention that might be devoted to [friendship].’ (Smart, 126) Other understandings (ie Kipnis, 1997) saw guanxi and friendship as one totality, opposing the divide between emotion and instrumentality. The importance of 'tong' in Chinese character (同; common) and relationships, namely tongxue (classmates) and tongshi (colleagues), demonstrate how shared identity forms basis of friendships. (Smart, 1999)
Based upon my 14-month fieldwork as a waiter in a Hong Kong caacaanteng (茶餐廳; Tea Restaurant), a casual dining restaurant serving an eclectic menu of mixed origins for the public at a reasonable price, this paper interrogates the relationship develops among waiters and customers. It argues that the relationship thus emerged, gaaifong (街坊; community dwellers), should be understood as a form of semi-anonymous guanxi-friendship, based upon the constraint of server-customer relationship. It focuses on how greeting and naming one another forms a face-to-face gaaifong community through long-term patronage and exchange of embodied concern (關心;guanxin). Anonymity affords such relationship where people break off from their daily roles and backgrounds, fostering friendships among regulars and workers. This paper wishes to shed light on anthropology of Friendship, China and restaurant.