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.