Anthropology of friendship: A preliminary review

Abstract

This paper elaborates studies related to the anthropology of friendship and relates the findings to the locus of the intellectual community named INSISTS. Various anthropological studies of friendship can be categorized into studies of friendship construction, interaction between actors in friendship, interests between actors in friendship and exchange between actors in friendship. In these various studies, this paper shows that for the context of the study of religious intellectual communities, friendship studies do not only focus on shared beliefs, concerns, sentiments, and so on, but also need to elaborate on the interests of religious actors. So far, actor interests have only been defined in terms of emotional and instrumental interests. This paper adds another type of actor’s interest, namely intellectual interest, which is inherent in the interaction between actors. The intellectual interest is indeed based on the locus of the intellectual community, but it is possible that the ‘intellectual interest’ is also present in other communities in which there is an exchange of ideas between actors.