Friendship / Michael Jackson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jackson, Michael, 1940- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Friendship.

Interpersonal relations.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (224 p.)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2023]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Prologue

Part I. The Politics of Friendship

Chapter 1. Oases of Friendship

Chapter 2. A Society of Friends

Chapter 3. No Man Is an Island

Chapter 4. Friendships in the Field

Chapter 5. Man’s Best Friend

Part II. Personal Friendship

Chapter 6. Elective Affinities

Chapter 7. Where Is the Friend’s House?

Chapter 8. Childhood Friendships

Chapter 9. Imaginary Friends

Chapter 10. The Saronic Gulf

Chapter 11. A Soldier’s Story

Chapter 12. The Other in Oneself

Chapter 13. A Plaited Rope, Entire from Source to Mouth

Chapter 14. Friends and Familiars

Chapter 15. Objects in the Rearview Mirror (Are Closer Than They Appear)

Chapter 16. The Rock and Pillar Range

Chapter 17. Love and Friendship

Chapter 18. Fictive Friendship

Chapter 19. Reunion

Coda. All for One, and One for All

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Mai 2023)

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781512824292

1512824291

OCLC:

1354949425