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.