Article
Progress in Human Geography
1–18
ª The Author(s) 2011
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10.1177/0309132511426606
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Geographies of friendships
Tim Bunnell
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Sallie Yea
Monash University, Australia
Linda Peake
York University, Canada
Tracey Skelton
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Monica Smith
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Abstract
Friendships are an important part of what makes us, and our geographies of various kinds, human. We consider
how geographers can contribute to efforts to afford friendship greater prominence in the social sciences. The
main part of the article considers three strands of work on friendship that push the boundaries of research in
human geography: (1) geographies of affect/emotion and the ontological construction of the human; (2) children’s
and young people’s geographies and the (re)production of social ordering; and (3) geographies of mobility and
transnationalism in a world of increased human spatial movement and social relations at a distance.
Keywords
affect, conviviality, friendship, intimacy, social networks, subjectivities, trust
I Introduction
Friendship is a means through which people
across the world maintain intimate social relations both proximate and at a distance. Friendships, it seems to us, are an important part of
what makes us, and our geographies of various
kinds, human. Yet this importance is not reflected
in published work in human geography. As
in other social science disciplines, although
decreasingly so in sociology and anthropology,
‘friends’ and ‘friendship’ are more likely to be
consigned to the preface or acknowledgements
of books and articles than to feature in conceptualization or substantive content. This article contributes to a small but growing body of social
science work that considers friendship, through its
entanglements with relations of power, to cast
light on important expressions of being human,
Corresponding author:
Tim Bunnell, Department of Geography and Asia Research
Institute, National University of Singapore, 1 Arts Link,
Kent Ridge, Singapore 117570
Email: geotgb@nus.edu.sg
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Progress in Human Geography
in terms of individual emotional and social and
cultural well-being (Bell and Coleman, 1999;
Dyson, 2010).
Our intended contribution is a specifically
geographical one. Geography, we argue, is
important in the making, maintenance and
dissolution of friendships, as well as in the types
of friends that are important within particular
space-time settings. Technologies of communication such as digital spaces occupied by personal networking sites such as Facebook, or
Cyworld in South Korea, may mean that it is
increasingly possible to sustain, and even form,
friendships at a distance (Ellison et al., 2007)
but, in a Foucauldian sense, material spaces such
as schools, universities, workplaces, pubs
(Coakley, 2002) and even prisons (Dowler,
2001) continue to constitute the key technologies of friendship. Friendships are also productive of lived spatialities that can confer or deny
particular freedoms, fears and possibilities. Children, for example, may be permitted to go with
friends to places that they would not be allowed
to visit alone (Skelton, 2000); adults may only
wish to enter ‘unknown’ places if in the company of friends; while whole worlds of spatial
possibility may be imagined to open up through
making friends in ‘high places’ or, conversely, to
be closed off through having ‘friends in low
places’ (Crow, 1994).
Friendship, an interpersonal relationship
between two or more people that is voluntarily
entered into and may be similarly dissolved
(Bowlby, 2011), like many other social relations
and phenomena, clearly has geographical
dimensions. But how does conceptualization of
friendship advance understanding of human geographies? We identify three ways. The first has
to do with geographers’ ongoing concern with the
social and ontological constitution of its boundaries that has opened the analytical space for
accounts of affect. It is through affect, and its manifestation through emotions (see Dewsbury,
2009), that friendship is brought into, and out of,
being. While friendships may at first appear to
be strongly correlated with social networks based
on kin and location – class, nationality – or on
embodied materialities – race, sexuality – they
cannot be mapped off them; friendships are neither determined a priori nor reducible to such networks. Rather it is the tracing of friendships
through the affective social worlds that people
inhabit that reveals a new dimension to the social
while simultaneously contributing to its theoretical understanding.
Second, while friendship networks form a
meso-scale of analysis, between dyadic relations
and broader structural categories (class, gender,
sexuality, etc), the latter can also be (re)produced
and strengthened through the work of friendship.
As such, friendship is not merely important in its
own right but also plays a role in broader processes of social ordering and transformation.
While the same may be said of ‘household’ or
‘neighbourhood’, friendship networks are comparatively more fluid and less spatially bounded.
In addition, the sometimes ephemeral nature of
friendship brings a new dimension to geographers’ well-established analyses of social networks; friendships can be both extremely
short-lived or very long-lasting. The meanings
attached to friendship moreover take on different
connotations in different contexts and cannot
simply be read off from a western centre or from
adult-centred accounts.
Third, friendship is a form of intimacy that
appears increasingly important in our urbanizing,
mobile and interconnected world. It is not
necessary to buy into a wholesale shift from
Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft formations to suggest that the social glue that holds people together
today is often very different from that in the past.
Nigel Thrift, for example, has sketched the role of
friendship and conviviality in ‘keeping cities
resilient and caring’ (Thrift, 2005: 146). Most
significantly, according to Thrift, unlike loving
couple relationships, friendship offers a ‘lighttouch’ model of intimacy and compassion, which
appears to be realistic and achievable today. In
this sense friendship in the 21st century speaks
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Bunnell et al.
significantly to what it means to be human.
Friendship, if not a basic human need, suggests
a desire for human contact.
The second section of the paper looks to cognate disciplines in the social sciences where
there has been reflection on the marginality of
friendship and where there are efforts to afford
it greater conceptual prominence. This not only
provides clues as to why the norms and practices
of friendship have not featured prominently in
human geography, but also helps us to identify
ways in which geographers can contribute to the
wider social science literature on friendship. In
the third section, we look more specifically at
geographical dimensions of certain types of
human interactions which nonetheless tend to
downplay or even obscure friendship as an
important concept. In work on both locally situated and spatially extended human interactions,
we argue, friendship dynamics have tended to
be subsumed in broader categories, most notably
‘community’ and social/ethnic ‘networks’,
respectively. Revealing this largely hidden presence forms a useful starting point for foregrounding ‘friendship’ as a concept in human
geography research. In the fourth and main section of the paper we detail three subfields of
human geography, each of which exemplifies
one of the three aspects of friendship’s conceptual significance noted above.
II Friendship in social science:
towards a geographical
contribution
While thinking and writing on friendship may be
traced back to the classical scholarship of Plato
and Aristotle (Price, 1989), the concept has not
featured prominently in the social sciences. In
this section, we review works, mostly in the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, which
reflect on friendship’s marginality and suggest
ways in which the concept may be extended.
This forms the starting point for us to reflect critically on friendship’s position in human
geography and to identify ways in which geographers might also contribute to expanding the
conceptual purchase of friendship. Work in the
social sciences pulls friendship in two different
directions: outwards, to social, economic and
political effects beyond personalized, dyadic
relations (e.g. Rawlins, 1992; Zelizer, 2005); and
inwards, to intimate social relations, associated
emotions and intercorporeal affects (e.g. Fine,
1981). These outward- and inward-oriented
aspects of friendship each have their own geographies. Our concern is with how they may be
integrated into geographical understandings of
friendship that are grounded in sites and everyday spatial practices while also being attentive
to the ways in which intimate relationships are
embedded in wider social and political
formations.
Outward and inward aspects of friendship are
just one example of the various ways in
which the concept has been discussed. Another
broadly cited difference concerns ‘positive’ and
‘negative’ framings of friendship. On the one
hand, there are long-standing conceptions of
friendships as egalitarian relationships, entered
into on the basis of free choice (de Montaigne,
1972, cited in Dyson, 2010). On the other hand,
understandings of friendships as being bound up
with individual interests and power relations can
be traced back to classical philosophy (Bell and
Coleman, 1999). Both of these divergent framings continue to inform academic as well as popular understandings of friendship. Our aim is not
to choose between them, but to draw upon
insights from both. In this vein, Jane Dyson
(2010) has shown in her research with girls who
collect leaves in the Indian Himalayas that
friendship can be a medium through which
dominant sociocultural ideas are at once contested and reproduced. Dyson provides an analysis that contextualizes friendship in everyday
practices in a particular social and cultural
milieu. Recognizing the wider contextual variability of friendship may be an opportunity for
human geography which prides itself on being
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Progress in Human Geography
attentive to spatialized patterns of diversity. Yet
contextual variability presents its own further
definitional challenges: even if it is possible to
identify workable conceptualizations of friendship in one context, to what extent can these be
said to apply in other times and other places?
It is important to note that similar concerns
may be raised with many other terms that have
a much wider currency in human geography and
the social sciences more broadly. It is recognized, for example, that there are many patriarchies that are locally embedded rather than one
overarching patriarchy; this has not weakened
that term’s analytical purchase, but rather
enhanced it. The absence of a universal understanding of friendship is therefore not in itself
problematic, especially given that friendships
exist in different forms in all societies and are
increasingly spatially extenuated. However, any
geographically sensitive attempt to understand
and define friendship must clearly consider the
term in relation to kinship ties as well as to other
forms of intimate non-kin relationships, such as
civil union and marriage. With regard to the former, friendships and family relations are not
mutually exclusive, but an important distinction
concerns possibilities for ending friendships in
ways that are not possible with kin. Unlike family ties, in other words, friendships do not simply
exist (although this is not to say that kinship relations are fixed and require no ‘work’ to maintain
them). Rather, friendships require – and may
even be defined in terms of – active, ongoing and
necessarily reciprocal work (e.g. Vertovec,
2004). Similarly, friendship is a far less stable
bond than that of marriage or civil unions which
are formalized through a contract with agreed-to
principles entered into by both parties. For this
reason, as Rawlins (1992, in Tillmann-Healy,
2003) notes, friendships ‘have no clear normative status’ since they are non-binding by virtue
of the absence of blood ties or formalized contracts and are thus the weakest and most amorphous of social bonds. As regards other non-kin
relations besides marriage, studies of intimacy
in the social sciences to date have primarily
focused on sexual relationships (Giddens,
1992). Much of this work centres around intimacy in the context of commodified sexual
encounters, particularly in sex tourism (in anthropology see, for example, Brennan, 2004). While
sexual relations may develop from or even lead
to friendships, there is clearly a much wider set
of intimate relations – friendships – that have
received relatively little academic attention,
including in geography.
So why has friendship occupied a marginal
position in human geography and what might a
geographical perspective on friendship mean? In
what follows, we seek to answer these questions
by taking clues from work in sociology and
anthropology. Michael Eve (2002) attributes what
he sees as the marginalization, even trivialization,
of friendship in sociology to two main issues. The
first concerns a tendency to associate friendship
only with dyadic, informal relations. Friendship
is considered largely to float free of ‘external’ conditions of social and economic life and is thus
deemed to have little or no ‘structural’significance
(e.g. Werking, 1997). The second issue for Eve is
broader, yet related, and concerns assumptions
about the nature of the modern world. While in
‘traditional’ societies power and social structure
was/is based on instrumental, personal relations,
these are considered by sociologists to be at best
residual in ‘modern’ social contexts ‘where one
is not supposed to ‘use’ friends, where the ideology of merit is strong, and ‘nepotism’ is disapproved of’ (Eve, 2002: 389). Unsurprisingly, the
suggestions made by Eve for extending the significance of ‘friendship’ concern moving beyond
personalized, dyadic relations. Rather than
focusing on one-to-one relations, for example,
Eve highlights the existence of chains of connections and groupings or clusterings of
friend-like relations. Job ‘contacts’ are thus said
to involve more than just dyadically conceived
friendships and entail effects of a wider series
of relationships. As we have already noted, this
serves to extend the term outwards, prompting
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consideration of the ‘backcloth’ or ‘ambiance’
for friendship practices.
These sociological deliberations cast light on
some geographical dimensions of friendship.
Most clearly, extending the term outwards serves
to bring into view spatial locations or sites – especially around educational spaces and workplaces –
in, and through, which friendships are made and
maintained. More broadly, attending to context,
it is possible to examine social and cultural geographical variation in such issues as: what is
deemed to constitute an appropriate friendship?
Who is friends with whom, under what circumstances, and with what kind of expectations
and consequences? While the importance of
contextualization for sociologists concerns the
possibility of scaling up friendship into morethan-dyadic groupings, geographers might be
expected to proffer a more active or constitutive
role for space and place. In addition, efforts by
sociologists to demonstrate wider social, economic and political effects of friendship suggest
other possible geographies. Ray Pahl’s examination of the role of various intellectual elite friendship groupings in ‘effecting or preventing change
in Britain’s cultural or economic life’ (Pahl, 2002:
418) evokes network spatialities. Social capital
and associated networks – including friendship
and neighbourly interactions – have featured prominently in sociology for well over a decade
(Putnam, 1995). However, in taking social networks as their primary unit of analysis, such work
has often overlooked the interpersonal spatial
dynamics of friendships. Given sociology’s more
general ‘relative indifference to analyzing informal ties like friendship at all’ (Adams and Allan,
1998: 2), it might reasonably be expected that such
everyday practices of friendship would have
received more attention in other disciplines such
as anthropology or social psychology.1
While sociologists conducting recent reviews
of ‘friendship’ certainly imagine the concept to be
much more central to anthropology than to their
own discipline, some anthropologists do not see
things that way. Fernando Santos-Granero has
suggested recently that ‘there is a paucity of major
studies on the subject of friendship in tribal societies, where kinship is made to encompass the
entire field of sociality, and friendship appears
as a subsidiary relation’ (Santos-Granero, 2007:
10). Existing studies of Amerindian social life, for
example, have tended to emphasize consanguinity (i.e. relation through kinship) and affinity
(i.e. relationship through marriage) to the neglect
of non-kin relationships. To Santos-Granero,
this forms part of a more widespread tendency
among anthropologists to presume that friendship
has little chance of flourishing in societies
where kinship structures remain strong (though
see Dyson, 2010). A way in which to extend
friendship in anthropologies of traditional societies, therefore, is simply to consider it as a form of
interpersonal relationship that may be differentiated from kinship and affinity. As SantosGranero puts it, people ‘seek out each other’s
company, exhibit mutually helping behaviour,
and are joined by links of mutual generosity and
trust that go beyond those expected between kin
or affines’ (Santos-Granero, 2007: 2). The categories are not mutually exclusive but SantosGranero shows that friend-like relations such as
trading partnerships in Amazonia can create
bonds which are qualitatively different from, and
even stronger than, those based on kin or affinity
alone. More widely, as anthropologists have
increasingly focused their ‘ethnographic gaze
on Western societies’, they have been forced to
‘confront contexts where unstable networks of
intimacy, frequently unrelated to kinship ties,
constitute key arenas of social interaction and
identity formation’ (p. 5).
Two ways in which work on friendship in
anthropology contrasts with sociologists’ concerns also help to build geographical perspectives. The first relates to the boundary-crossing
potential of friendships. Some sociologists have
cast friendships as being of minor significance
because they largely fail to cross key sociological
boundaries such as class (Garrett, 1989; Rawlins,
1992), but recent anthropological work points to
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Progress in Human Geography
possibilities for relations of friendship to ‘transcend the divisions imposed by such collective
mechanisms of inclusion and identity as kinship ties, settlement membership, or ethnic affiliation’ (Santos-Granero, 2007: 13). While such
possibilities vary from one historical and
geographical context to another, the potential
clearly exists precisely because of the personal
nature of friend-like affinities. At the same time,
given that friendship connotes a relation to others,
it always involves racial, class, sexual and gender
dynamics which (re)create what is acceptable and
what is not. Geographers must attend to the ways
in which friendships can enable boundarycrossing sociospatial relations and yet in other
cases also reinforce geographies of exclusion and
‘distinction’ (Bourdieu, 1989). In geography, Phil
Hubbard’s (2001) work on the ways public space
is (heteronormatively) ‘sexed’ and transgressed
by gay groups, for example, points to important
possibilities for unpacking the role of gay friendships in the politics of public place (un)making.
A second point of differentiation between sociological and anthropological perspectives follows on
from this and concerns the value afforded to the
personal and non-instrumental dimensions of
friendship. While these are viewed as a source of
friendship’s marginalization among many sociologists, some anthropologists consider affective,
intimate and emotional aspects to be important
in their own right. These too, clearly have geographical dimensions, not least in terms of spatial
practices of friendship formation, maintenance
and dissolution.
In sum, work in both sociology and anthropology allows us to identify ways in which
issues of geography may be important to developing further social science research on friendship. Whether contained by, or cutting across,
conventional categories of social identity, and
whether social and more-than-dyadic or understood as highly intimate one-to-one relations,
friendships are both produced through, and productive of, geographies of various kinds.
Moments of friendship formation can be viewed
through their constitutive geographies, whether
specific sites such as neighbourhoods, schools and
workplaces or broader contexts, ‘ambiances’ and
‘habituses’, including both public and private
spheres. Meanwhile, the processual nature of
friendship means that life courses often map
complex network spatialities of friend-like
relations. If this is true in tribal or traditional societies that have conventionally been the focus of
anthropological research, then it is even more so
in modern societies that are characterized by high
levels of human spatial mobility and sophisticated
technologies of long-distance social relations
(Allan, 1996). In the next section, we examine
ways in which existing work on social relations
that is framed geographically – both in situ and
at a distance – has often overlooked or obscured
friendship.
III Friendship’s hidden
geographies
The most straightforward geography of friendship is one that we have alluded to already and
concerns variation in what friendship is or means
in different sociocultural contexts. Attending to
such contextual variation is about much more
than differences between modern, western societies (conventionally studied by sociologists)
and ‘other’, traditional societies (conventionally
or stereotypically studied by anthropologists). In
addition, it is important to resist ‘ethnocentric
evolutionism’ (Smart, 1999: 130) in presuming
that varieties of friendship find their most
advanced expression in western societies or in
the English-speaking world. Studies of ‘friendship’ in other regions of the world – inverted
commas here denote the fact that most people
in most regions of the world would not use the
English-language term – are not merely important in their own right but potentially inform
analyses in/of Anglophone contexts. While
adjectival differentiations such as ‘best friend’
or ‘true friend’ have been noted in English (Pahl,
2002), for example, other languages may have
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specific terms for forms of human relations
which are conventionally labelled generically
as ‘friendship’ in English. This is not the occasion for elaboration of such empirical variety,
but we note Korean as a language in which a
complex array of terms is used to express
hierarchies of interpersonal relationships.2 Our
concern in this section is with the fact that the
(English) terms ‘friendship’ or ‘friend’ rarely
appear even in Anglophone social science work
that deals with geographies of social relations.
We consider two differently spatialized conceptions of human interaction – localized community and social networks – which have largely
overlooked or even served to obscure friendship
dynamics.
1 Friendship in localized communities
The neglect of friendship as a specified area of
research, we argue, can be explained in part by
the way in which ‘community’ and ‘neighbourhood’ have been perceived in the social sciences.
There has been a tendency to view these spatial
entities through romantic, even nostalgic, lenses.
By virtue of the very fact that they are considered
to exist in the first place, communities and neighbourhoods have often been treated as harmoniously functioning units of human interaction.
As a result, the interpersonal dynamics of relations within localized communities and neighbourhoods remain by and large unpacked (with
important exceptions – see, for example, Atkinson et al., 2009). Community and neighbourhood studies tend to assume certain types of
local interrelations, cohesions and solidarities
from the spatial unit of analysis, rather than making the nature of the relations the focus of
empirical investigation.
Neighbourhoods are conventionally defined,
at least in part, according to their social aspects.
This is evident from Hallman’s (1984, in Galster,
2001: 2111) definition of ‘a limited territory
within a larger urban area where people inhabit
dwellings
and
interact
socially’,
or
‘Geographical units within which certain social
relations exist’ (Downs, 1981, in Galster, 2001:
2111). However, the precise nature of the social
relationships that ‘gel’ neighbourhoods together
is rarely the subject of serious examination,
despite the seeming consensus that sentimental
attachments between people in a local place are
central to the meaning and experience of a neighbourhood, or indeed a community. Much like the
recent work on social networks in economic geography which is discussed in more detail below,
those who do delve further into the relationships
that operate within neighbourhoods tend to focus
on various ‘neighbourhood effects’ or extant
outcomes of social cohesion and interpersonal
relations in local areas – for example, in voting
patterns (Johnston et al., 2005) or in the formation of social capital (Forrest and Kearns,
2001). Thus, while Kearns and Parkinson
(2001: 2013) have made a case for the ‘significance of neighbourhood’ in a globalized world,
a focus on friendships does not appear as a key
part of this renewed attention to the local in
urban or social geography. Among the few noted
exceptions in geography are Bridge’s (2002)
work which seeks to distinguish between ‘associations’ and ‘friendships’ at the neighbourhood
level, and Warren’s (1975) important early work
on the social interactions, sentimental attachments and allegiances in ‘black’ neighbourhoods in the urban US, including friendship
and kinship networks as well as interpersonal
and voluntary associations. Methodologically,
more recent research in the area seems to have
largely departed from the ethnographic and
participant observation style approaches that
produced Warren’s rich insights.
Outside western contexts, critiques of the
romanticization of community in development
studies have led to various efforts to explore community dynamics, including intra-community
conflict (as well as negotiations over its resolution), inequalities and competition, often expressed along gender, class or caste lines. Guijt and
Shah, for example, have noted the reification and
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simplification of community as a concept in sustainable development, arguing that the idea of
community can be misleading since it overlooks
‘[I]nequalities, oppressive social hierarchies and
discrimination … and instead enthusiasm is generated for the cooperative and harmonious ideal
promised by the imagery of the “community”’
(Guijt and Shah, 1998: 7–8). While this work has
not explicitly addressed friendship, in recognizing
the ‘myth of community’, analytic ground is
opened to begin engaging with the micro- and
everyday relations within these locally bounded
units, including those possibly premised on conflict, resistance and friendships that extend beyond
affective and kinship ties.
2 Friendship in networks
Social network studies have the potential to
overcome some of the conceptual and methodological blind spots of neighbourhood/localized
community analysis. Rather than assuming that
friendship and/or other kinds of social interactions can simply be read off from a priori spatial
units, social network studies take the relationships themselves as the starting point for and
focus of empirical analysis. Examples of this
kind of approach stretch back at least as far as the
1960s (e.g. Mitchell, 1969). As Mitchell elaborated in introducing an influential edited volume
on personal relationships in Central African
towns, the primary spur for social network
analyses was recognition of the inadequacy of
structural anthropological approaches to understanding spatially unbounded social groups.
Urban communities in India and Africa, for example, ‘lacked single pervasive structural characteristics in terms of which their morphologies could
be depicted’ (p. 9) and so demanded methodological innovation. With the rise of the ‘Manchester
School’ of urban anthropology in the 1960s (of
which Mitchell formed part) came attention to
friendship and acquaintances as part of social networks. Perhaps the key distinguishing feature of
the Manchester School as compared to other
forms of social network analysis is methodological. Today, strands of psychological and mathematical work on networks of connections or
communication tend to read or map ‘friendship’
from large quantitative data sets rather than
through examining the meanings of associated linkages for the actors concerned (e.g. Liben-Nowell
et al., 2005). This is in contrast with actor-centred
approaches, as pioneered by the Manchester
School, that avoid conflating high contact rates
with levels of intimacy, and attempt to understand
the depth and meaning of relations rather than
merely observing them.
More recent work on social and ethnic networks in social science shows further evidence
of some of the very problems to which social
network analysis originally sought to respond.
One such problem concerns the tendency to
assume and/or to fix in advance the ‘boundaries’
of a networked social group to be studied. Early
diagnosis of this tendency is evident in critiques
of work on gangs that presumed measurable and
definable numbers of people who formed part of
the group concerned (Ho, 1984: 8). There are, of
course, degrees of membership of gangs, the
degree or level of membership of any individual
may fluctuate over time, and membership may
not always mean friendship. The wider implication is that forms of human relations, including
friendship, cannot simply be assumed from
group membership but need to be investigated
using actor-centred methods. As Mitchell
(1969: 4) argues, the focus should not be ‘on the
attributes of the people in the network but rather
on the characteristics of the linkages in their relationship to one another’.
In work on transnational networks that has
proliferated over the past two decades, social
networks – whether in situ or cross-border –
often appear to be delimited by ethnicity. A particular ‘diaspora’ group or ‘transnational community’ is identified a priori for study and
‘their’ interrelations are reduced to a matter of
shared ethnicity (see Samers, 2003, on ethnic
essentialism in diaspora studies). One of the
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effects of this is to obscure friendship ties,
intra- as well as trans-ethnic. The point is not that
all networked social interaction needs to be
recentred around friendship, but that by reducing
human interactions to a matter of ‘ethnic networking’, a range of more specific human interrelations (including consanguinity, affinity,
home-tie obligations or even enmity as well as
friendships) are rendered invisible.3
While there is no shortage of geographical
and sociological research examining the economic potential of social and ethnic networks,
this varies in the degree to which friendship and
other forms of human relations are specified. In
the context of understanding the global(izing)
economy, economic geographers have engaged
with networks in order to explore subjects such
as job-seeking behaviour (Bian and Ang,
1997), and the general supply of information
or building of important relations in enhancing
and promoting competitive advantage. As in diaspora studies, however, the social and ethnic networks within this literature are often taken as
given rather than forming the subject of further
investigation. Networks are usually reduced to
the heuristic value of the relations that form them
in the sphere of the economy. Despite the fact
that trust, rapport and allegiances are all identified as central to the success of these networks
in economic development, none of these sentiments, all of which are integral aspects of friendships, is actively examined in this literature. It is
important to note, however, that there is a strand
of anthropological work on the spaces by/in
which social networks are made, performed and
strengthened, focusing on the karaoke bars,
hostess clubs and restaurants where they are
forged, or on the symbolic interactions such
as gift giving through which they are sustained
(Smart, 1999; Yang, 1994). With its emphasis
on ethnographic modes of observation and
interaction, this work offers the potential to take
friendship as the subject of analysis, spatialized
in specific sites as well as through extended
social networks.
To sum up this section, two key spatializations of human interaction – neighbourhood/
community and network – often tend to overlook
or obscure friendship. Actor-centred social network analysis associated with the Manchester
School in urban anthropology and more recent
ethnographic work on trust and gift relations are
exceptions. Even here, though, ‘friendship’ has
rarely featured as a central concept. A similar
story prevails over most areas of human geography research: friendship(s) are implied and
sometimes even mentioned, but friendship itself
is rarely conceptually or analytically central. In
the final section of the paper, we identify three
strands of human geography research published
in the English language which hold the potential
and may act as a starting point for friendship to
feature more prominently in the discipline in the
future.
IV Friendship in human geography:
three strands of possibility
1 Geographies of emotion and affect
Although the ‘emotional turn’ has gained significant purchase in geography (Anderson and
Smith, 2001), issues of human emotion and
affect have hardly been examined in relation to
friendship. Yet not only do the affective dimensions that can lead to the formation of friendships question the ontological nature of the
social, but relations of friendship may also be
playing an enhanced role in determining the
social realm. While emotions can be understood
as ways of knowing, being and doing, as bodily
experiences that can be expressed personally and
interpersonally, affect is what forms the messy,
precognitive and inexpressible ‘substratum’ that
circulates between and connects bodies (see Pile,
2010). Emotions then have been called ‘tangible
manifestations of affect’ (Dewsbury, 2009: 23)
and affect ‘a transpersonal capacity which a
body has to be affected (through an affection)
and to affect (as the result of modifications)’
(Anderson, 2006: 735, emphasis in the original).
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Affect then defines what a body can do (Pile,
2010: 11) and is thus fundamentally social; as
Woodward and Lea (2009: 157) state, affect is
‘a materialist account of bodily association’.
Friendship reminds us that affecting and being
affected is indeed emotional labour, requiring
the production and reproduction, for example,
of mutual trust, reciprocal care and fondness.
As such, affect is the ‘bedrock’ of the emotional
work of friendships.
Affect circulates between subjects resulting in
an increase or decrease of their potential to act
(Thrift, 2003: 104). It is this potentiality to act/
to not act, to do/to not do, that ‘greases the
wheels’ of subjects’ ability to solidify habitual
regimes of practice that are kept in place through
deeply routinized performances, yet that also
have the potential for alteration and the reinvention of the normative associations attached to
them. Friendships, both within and beyond
kinship, have yet to be seen, however, by geographers as significant performances that have
the potential to produce (or not) sociality and
sociability; it is partially through social geographies of embodied encounters between friends,
both human and non-human, that emotional
states such as love, joy, happiness, trust and
hope, but also despair, sadness, resentment, fear,
envy, guilt, shame, disgust, embarrassment and
so on, are materialized.
Geographical research on these encounters
has much to tell us about how the social yet
categorical based accounts of human identity –
of being racialized, classed, gendered and
sexualized – have largely failed to recognize
these performative aspects of friendships and
of the spaces through which they are played out.
However, as we suggested earlier, shifts have
occurred in everyday life, blurring the role of
both family members and friends and potentially
enhancing the role of friendship in the construction of the social realm through ‘the realms of
intimacy and collective experience associated
with modernization (Oliker 1998; Pahl 2000)’
(Bowlby, 2011: 606). In this sense, friendship
has been an absent presence in constructions of
the social in human geography. Moreover, the
relational ontologies of emotions (as interpersonal) and of affect (as transpersonal) support
an ontology of the social understood not in
fixed hierarchical and binary terms of structures but in terms of continuous fluidity,
mobility and circulations of bodily encounters
that understand relations in a context of
always being and becoming (see Woodward
and Lea, 2009), suggesting the theoretical
importance of affect to the (re)production of
everyday life.
Friendship is deeply situated within the
social, and taking such dimensions of friendship,
and their spatialities (such as holding hands,
talking on Skype, or Cyworld) seriously, by not
reducing their analytic to the personal or perceiving emotions as ephemera, but rather by pointing
to their importance as a form of ‘social glue’
(Spencer and Pahl, 2006: 1), makes possible not
only an analysis of friendship beyond the ‘dyadic level’ but also an identification of its broader
social significance to analyses of difference and
power (Adams and Allan, 1998). Women’s
friendships, for example, so often considered
of little relevance except to feminist scholars,
often cross private-public spheres, revealing
‘hidden solidarities’ (p. 1) and ‘personal communities’ (p. 2), raising issues such as conceptualizations of citizenship. Recent research by
Peake (2010) among queer communities in
Guyana highlights the importance, yet transience, of physical spaces and the tentative emergence of virtual spaces to the resilience of
networks of friendship. Queer networks of
friendship are not just about fun and pleasure;
they are also essential to physical and mental
well-being and long-term survival. Other work
on homosociality, particularly in the global
south, has drawn on examples of same-sex connection, reciprocity and friendship to think
through notions of solidarity and transnational
engagement (Dave, 2010; Sangtin Writers and
Nagar, 2006), exploring questions of desire,
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intimacy and the links between non-erotic
and erotic same-sex relationships (Gunkel,
2009). That these relationships and networks
are also largely invisible to those outside
their orbit (Valentine, 1993), reveals potential
heteronormative underlying assumptions about
the non-importance of friendship to knowledge
production.
Assessing intimate relations of friendships
can also reveal the differing capacities that individuals have for ‘affect and to be affective’ and
thus their ability to resist, or merely cope and
survive (Tolia-Kelly, 2006: 213). In the case of
Sri Lankan female migrants in Beirut, Smith
(2010) demonstrates that the focus on the emotional dimensions of women’s sexual ‘transgressions’ re-emphasizes the idea that actions are not
always forms of resistance but coping mechanisms or ways of reworking their situations in
spaces which offer few other possibilities of
response. Studies of intimacy beyond individual
‘private’ relationships also show that human
relatedness, understood through flows of affect,
and their manipulation, is a way to assess the
associations between, for example, self and
other, human and non-human, and nation and
national neighbour (see Povinelli, 2006). Some
further possibilities for elaborating the relevance
of friendship are outlined below by exploring
some of its emotive dimensions in children’s and
young people’s geographies and its role in reproducing social and cultural life.
2 Children’s and young people’s geographies
Friendship is experienced, articulated and presumed to be an extremely important element in
children’s and young people’s lives. Friendless
children are assumed to be lonely, socially inadequate and even dysfunctional. Friendships can
be empowering as children and young people
learn from each other, reinforce senses of selfesteem and have opportunities to broaden their
spatialities. However, child and youth friendships can have dark sides. Friendships can have
a negative effect on young people’s life chances,
self-esteem and willingness to engage with those
who are different from their main friendship
group. There are worries about children making
friends with the ‘wrong sort’ and being ‘led
astray’ from the values and expectations of their
families. Bullying and ‘ganging up against’ children is often carried out on a basis of friendship.
This produces spaces and practices of fear for the
targets but the reinforcement of loyalty and obedience for the bullies (Newman et al., 2006;
Winton, 2005). Despite such significance, there
is relatively little research that links young people’s geographies with friendship, particularly its
formation, significance and spatiality. What
exists in geography is substantive work about
the importance of play to children (Skelton,
2009; Woolley et al., 2006) but very little
research on whom this play might be with. In this
section we focus on children’s and young people’s friendships and their links with socialization, identity formation and spatialities. These
processes are central to young people’s and children’s friendship work. It is important to recognize that they, and their peers, are agents in their
own development and spatial experiences. Children and young people are not only socialized by
adults and institutions but also forge their own
identities and geographies that shape lives and
opportunities into adulthood.
Researching the impact of socio-economic
status on children’s identities, Sutton (2009)
shows that British children in low-income families are socially (and spatially) excluded at
school and in their wider communities. They
find it harder to make and sustain friendships and
hence their poverty is about social and cultural
disadvantage as much as material hardship. In
a comparison between children at different ends
of the poverty-wealth continuum, aged 8–13,
friends were consistently listed as extremely
important in their everyday lives. Consequently
children were at pains to fit within the desirable
norms and values of their peers. Friendships play
an important role in children’s socialization and
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social ordering. Sutton showed that the desire to
belong to a friendship group was powerful
enough to establish senses of intensely segregated, separate groups who felt they had nothing
in common with each other’s norms, values and
customs. Hence cultural and spatial practices
that may be detrimental to education, skill acquisition and ambition can be inculcated by friendship formation that enforces and reinforces
social and spatial segregation which continues
into adulthood.
Schools are important sites of socialization
and social reproduction. Within such spaces,
friendship formations and collapses are major
features of identity production. Pressure to conform to social ordering of gendered and sexual
identities is extremely strong within schools
(Epstein and Johnson, 1998). However, children
establish complex ways of resisting or reworking the normative practices of these social
expectations; through friendships, they have the
confidence to develop alternative identities and
the possibility of transformation. Morris-Roberts
(2004) examined friendships of school-based
British girls’,4 aged 14–15, and the ways in which
these were effective in the production and
contestation of femininity and compulsory
heterosexuality. The girls narrated and enacted
boundaries between different friendship groups
through the use of a range of identity markers
based on appearance and selected spaces to hang
out. Different groups of girls practised inclusionary and exclusionary tactics of friendship
through particular spatialities to enable identities to be articulated and performed. Through
their supportive friendships, the ‘alternative’
girls (who resisted heteronormative expectations) found spaces within or on the boundaries
of the school to escape the daily marginalization
of their resistive identities. For American teenage girls in a multiracial high school in Los
Angeles there is strikingly less flexibility in
friendship formation and apparently no possible
spaces for playing out racially resistive identities. Friendships were heavily marked by racial
reductionism and socialization; the spatialities
of their friendship groupings in the school campus were based on racial segregation (Thomas,
2009). Racially segregated friendships that are
‘forced’ into formation at school are not unravelled in public or home spaces. Hence the spatial and social formations and orderings of
racialized subjectivities in the school are translated into wider spaces and reinforced as the
girls grow up.
For young women the discovery of nonnormative spaces within sites of strong socialization and control of identity formation is an
important function of friendship; it allows individuality to thrive but can also reinforce social
ordering. In the South Wales Rhondda Valleys,
Skelton (2000) demonstrated that despite powerful discourses of a woman’s place being ‘in the
home’, teenage girls were able to resist
such sociocultural expectations through friendship. Resistive practices against normative
gender roles were a basis for the formation of
friendships and made possible because of the
support the friendships gave. Through gathering
together as friends the girls expanded their mobilities and experienced different spatialities. One
such gathering space was a community project
that was particularly valued because of the new
friendships formed there. These friendships
crossed boundaries of neighbourhood, school
and age and provided a sense of belonging to
place but also chances to safely expand active
geographies to other public spaces. Dyson’s
work on social reproduction and girls’ friendships in the mountainous area of Uttarakhand,
North India, provides an insight into the importance of friendship and alliances young girls
form while leaf collecting in the forest. Friends
cooperated in reciprocal ways to work efficiently
and meet adult expectations of leaf collection;
friends were those who were good and fair coworkers. However, friendships were volatile,
particularly if there were problems between the
girls’ kin groups. The girls articulated the need
to be flexible about friends because of family,
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village and seasonal elements that could end
some friendships. In North India, therefore, the
girls’ friendships were part of the work of social
identity conformity rather than resistance.
In sum, it is clear that friendship is extremely
important in children’s and young people’s lives.
It plays a range of possible roles in different
spatial, cultural and social contexts. It can reinforce difference between socio-economic groups
but provide the context for resistance and differentiation within gender groupings. It can create
new ways of doing identity and challenging
social expectations but be subsumed within kin
relations and normative gender and age roles.
Not only does this demand further academic
study in its own right but it also has resonances
for examining geographies of friendships
among adults; this remains a neglected area in
geography.
3 Geographies of mobility and
transnationalism
Friendship is arguably assuming greater social
significance in the context of increasing human
mobility and long-distance connections that
characterize lives in the 21st century. Existing
practices of connection, community and intimacy that have been sustained primarily through
geographies of (mostly) stasis, are thrown into
flux under contemporary conditions of globalization. While this has implications for a range
of intimate social relations, it is specifically
friendship that appears to be gaining prominence
in recent research. Walsh’s work on British
expatriates in Dubai, for example, begins by
examining transient heterosexual intimacy but
concludes by noting the prevalence of platonic
(friendship) ties; ‘the fun associated with performances of transient heterosexuality is not only in
sex itself, but also in the practices of drinking,
dancing and socializing that occur among
friends in this context’ (Walsh, 2007: 527).
These young men and women often found
(mainly same-sex) friendships to be more
meaningful and dependable forms of intimate
attachment than those with their sexual partners
(see also Thrift, 2005). Friendship may not be a
substitute for romantic love, but can be seen as
an ‘additional’ model of intimacy for highly
mobile, urban ways of life (Walsh, 2007).
Practices of friendships through/in mobile
social life offer further possibilities for those
interested in the everyday and microgeographies
of transnationality. Practices of friendship are
reconfigured through a range of transnational
mobilities, producing particular (re)configurations of social geographies in destinations,
places of transit and even in sites of origin. Yea’s
study of trafficked Filipinas and Russian women
in South Korea found that these women forged
new solidarities on returning ‘home’ (Yea, forthcoming). These solidarities crystallized into
strong bonds of friendship as women felt they
could only talk about their experiences to those
who had ‘been through it’ themselves. In addition, the stigma of being ‘sex trafficked’ or
‘failed heroines’ in migration meant that friendships formed previously in the Philippines and
Russia often dissolved as these returnees
become socially and geographically inscribed
as moral and economic outcasts. In contrast,
Conradson and Latham’s (2005) study of
young New Zealanders residing in London
showed the mobility of already existing friendship networks. Friendship networks formed in
New Zealand (in hometowns, at university and
so on) were reproduced within the transnational destination of London. Friendship networks embedded young New Zealanders in
London and New Zealand simultaneously as
they lived and socialized primarily with their
friends from New Zealand in London. Conradson and Latham note that their participants’
movement was ‘bound up with those of their
friends’ (p. 295). Such an emphasis is important in turning analytic attention to friendship,
unsettling the prevailing emphasis on kin and
neighbourhood in seeking to understand the
geographies of transnational social life.
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In a similar vein, Bunnell’s (2010) work
with Malay seafarers in Liverpool recognized
the limitations of a perspective on transnationalism based solely on a consideration of mobile
geographies of ethnic or kin-based networks,
even where these axes of identity inform part
of the potential ‘pool’ from which friends in the
city may be most readily drawn. Bunnell’s work
also addresses some important questions about
transnational local places for geographers interested in friendships and mobility: how – and
where – do places of friendship develop transnationally? How are friendships productive of new
spaces in/through which to enact these intimate
social relations? To date, work in migration geography has been more attuned to answering these
questions in terms of ethnicity/nationality and
neighbourhood rather than friendship. Yet the
significance of the Malay seafarers’ community
clubhouse was as a place where friends – not just
members of ethnic networks – came together to
chat, reminisce, share news and engage in the sorts
of ‘positive sociality’ that are the precious stuff of
close friendships (Bunnell, 2007).
Other important strands of work reveal much
less positive imbrications of friendship in contemporary transnational mobility projects. Yea’s
work speaks particularly strongly to the ways
(betrayals of) trust and trustworthiness by
supposed friends figure in mobility aspirations
of young women in the Philippines wishing to
migrate abroad for work. She found the informal
labour recruitment industry that forms part of a
broader well-established formal migration
industry in the Philippines rests in large part
on an appropriation – and misuse – of trust in
friendship. Interviewees who migrated to
Singapore for work opportunities as waitresses
or hostesses had often been deceived by trusted
friends about the nature and conditions of their
work, placing them in situations of debt bondage and inducing lack of choice in performing
sexual labour. When asked about her relationship to the person who recruited her, one participant stated that her recruiter had been one of
her best friends since elementary school.5 Such
findings dissemble the prevailing view that
good intentions and shared aspirations always
inform gendered migration networks, while
‘bad’ outcomes reside in the explanatory
domain of external actors within migrant routes
and destinations and structural inequalities
within the global economy.6
V Conclusion
Friendships, like other forms of social relations,
have important geographical dimensions. As we
have shown, friendships are forged, sustained
and dissolved in and through networks, while
also variously opening and foreclosing human
spatial possibilities. We have also sought to
demonstrate that the concept of friendship, in
turn, has much to contribute to progress in various strands of human geography. Rather than
attempting to provide directions in a large
range of subdisciplinary arenas where geographies of friendships may be significant, we
have focused on three strands that push the
boundaries of research in human geography:
(1) work on geographies of affect and emotion
where work on friendship speaks to geographers’ ongoing concern with the ontological
construction of the human and the social;
(2) work on children’s and young people’s
geographies in which friendship is not only
important at the level of personal development but also (re)produces wider processes
of social ordering and transformation; and
(3) work on geographies of mobility and
transnationalism in which friendship appears
to be important for understanding a world of
increased human spatial movement and social
relations at a distance. These three strands are
by no means exhaustive. Other possibilities
could include: spatial practices of friendship
and trust in economic geography; interstate relationships sustained through political meetings,
town twinning and even geopolitical infrastructural investments such as ‘friendship bridges’ in
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political geography; and the more-than-human
dimensions of friendships and other intimate relations in work on animal geographies. All of these
areas, and more, have the potential to demonstrate
not merely that friendships have geographical
dimensions but also that friendship as a concept
can help to nourish understanding of the complex
geographies of human lives.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge helpful comments
on earlier drafts of this article from five anonymous referees and two editors. Thanks in
particular to Vicky Lawson for editorial guidance through some detailed and demanding
suggestions for revision. Two earlier versions
of the paper also benefited from friendly critique dating back to April 2009 from members of the Social and Cultural Geography
Research Group in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore.
Yong-Sook Lee kindly provided assistance
with translation of Korean language terms.
All usual disclaimers apply.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from
any funding agency in the public, commercial,
or not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. Eve (2002) considers personalized, dyadic rela-
tions as ‘social-psychological’ rather than sociological. Work on friendship in social psychology and
its implications for human geography are beyond
the scope of the current paper but are clearly
worthy of further investigation.
2. In Korean, different terms are used for friend-like
personal relations according to the relative age of
the people concerned. 친구 (Chin-ku) is used only
for people who are of the same age. Another term,
벗 (Butt), is more inclusive, but still only tends to be
applied among individuals whose age difference is
five years or less. The key point here, of course, is
that both Chin-ku and Butt would conventionally
be translated into English simply as ‘friend’.
3. Notably, it is only communities of colour that are
deemed ‘ethnic’ so there is a racialized bias underlying these studies that excludes white people from
having their networks defined by ethnicity.
4. It is worth noting that geographers working on
friendships have largely focused on girls and
hence the selection of this material for this paper.
This echoes the trend of important sociological
and anthropological work on girls’ friendships
by Goodwin (2006), Griffiths (1995) and Hey
(1996). However, several essays in Jeffrey and
Dyson’s edited collection Telling Young Lives
(2008), notably those by Meth, Hopkins, Crotty
et al. and Horschelman, demonstrate the significance of friendship in young men’s lives.
5. The United Nations Protocol on Human Trafficking
(2000, Article 3, emphasis added) states that the
recruitment of a trafficked person can be achieved
‘by means of … deception, of the abuse of power or
of a position of vulnerability’. Deception is thus recognized in international conventions as a key means to
evoke the consent required to move a person into
situations of exploitation. Misuses of intimate relations are thereby recognized within International Law.
6. Human (particularly economic) geographers clearly
have an opportunity to extend understandings of the
kinds of trust that are important in friendships. Trust
has been largely the domain of economic geography
where it is perceived as a ‘critical tangible resource’
(Ettlinger, 2003: 145); it has been understood as
something worth studying because it can produce
positive economic benefits and help explain the
ways in which capitalisms differ between places.
Thus, while there has been an increasing interest
in work on the intersections between macro-level
forms of trust and processes of globalization, the
treatment of personal (or micro-level) trust in friendships has hardly yet engaged human geographers.
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