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. Amit Desai is Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research explores the connections between Hindu religious experience and nationalist identification among people in central India, and this has led him to consider questions of religious subjectivity, moral practice, power and transformations in personhood and sociality.
Evan Killick is Nuffield Foundation New Career Development Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sussex, specialising in the study of Lowland South American societies. Working with both indigenous and mixed-heritage peoples in Peru and Brazil his work considers issues of race, indigeneity, land rights and development.