In this book, renowned anthropologist Michael Jackson draws on
philosophy, biography, ethnography, and literature to explore the
meanings and affordances of friendship-a relationship just as
significant as, yet somehow different from, kinship and love.
Beginning with Aristotle's accounts of friendship as a political
virtue and Montaigne's famous essay on friendship as a form of
love, Jackson examines the tension between the political and
personal resonances of friendship in the philosophy of Hannah
Arendt, the biography of the Indian historian Brijen Gupta, and the
oral narratives of a Kuranko storyteller, Keti Ferenke Koroma. He
offers reflections on childhood friends, imaginary friends,
lifelong friendships, and friendships with animals. He ruminates
particularly on the complications of friendship in the context of
anthropological fieldwork, exploring the contradiction between the
egalitarian spirit of friendship on the one hand and, on the other,
the power imbalance between ethnographers and their interlocutors.
Through these stories, Jackson explores the unpredictable interplay
of mutability and mutuality in intimate human relationships, and
the critical importance of choice in forming friendship-what it
means to be loyal to friends through good times and bad, and even
in the face of danger. Through a blend of memoir, theory,
ethnography, and fiction, Jackson shows us how the elective
affinities of friendship transcend culture, gender, and age, and
offer us perennial means of taking stock of our lives and getting a
measure of our own self-worth.
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