Friendship in the workplace is alternately approached as a resource to be leveraged or a liability to be managed. In leadership development, where practitioners carefully cultivate their subjectivities, appearing adequately self-aware and open-minded is valued highly. How do leadership development practitioners’ use of complaints in their workplace, in ways both formal and informal, serve as an affordance for friendship? Considering this example raises questions about what it means to make friendship useful at work and in other contexts, and it suggests that separating the “goods” of friendship from the “bads” is a misleading and problematic endeavor.

Chronological age is a common feature in the organization of North American society. From institutional to everyday spaces and our cultural practices of association within these spaces, age segregation is the norm. Yet, intergenerationality persists in its various forms. One such space in which intergenerationality occurs is the skatepark, and one such form is that of organic intergenerational friendships forged between youth and adults. In this study, the phenomenon is explored through data gathered from eighteen semi-structured, on-site interviews with twenty participants at a skatepark in a mid-sized city in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Through these interviews, three main themes are identified: (1) making intergenerational friends at the skatepark, (2) practices of youth-adult intergenerational friendship, and (3) perceptions of youth-adult intergenerational friendship. These three themes contribute to the overall argument of the chapter that youth-adult intergenerational friendships simultaneously disrupt boundaries and patterns of age/generational differences in friendship while also reinforcing such differences in both subtle and explicit ways.

Even as friendship carries overwhelmingly positive connotations, the categories of “fair-weather friend” or “frenemy” indicate that less-than-ideal friendship is commonplace. What remains poorly understood is how people make sense of the persistence of their imperfect friendships. Drawing on studies of difficult friendships and friends who cohabitate, this chapter offers an interpretive perspective on how and why friendships that people characterize as difficult persist. Using the concept of the “good enough friend,” we unsettle ubiquitous yet simplistic directives of modern therapeutic culture to “cut off” difficult relationships. We argue that the potential for ease and difficulty are equally inherent to what friendship is, and that by attending to “difficult” ones and how people evaluate their worth, we can better understand how people navigate concord and conflict in personal life. We advance the intervention that a critical friendship must resist hierarchies of intimacy inherited from Western philosophical traditions that rank easy, pleasurable friendships as inherently “better” than ambivalent ones, which may also have core places in people’s lives.

The afterword synthesizes the chapters in this volume to draw out themes, lessons, and future directions and acknowledges the importance of the ethnographic approach of this work. We expand on the three themes of ideals in tension with practices, the shifting nature of acquaintanceship to friendship, and the enactment of public and private across space and place. We argue for three valuable insights gained from reading these chapters together. First, they point towards the importance of how people read our intentions, friendship performances, and relationships. Second, friendships impinge on our ontological security. Third, there are rhythms to connections across space. Interactions are temporally bound and accounting for the temporal is helpful in completing analyses of friendships. Ultimately, we show how these chapters sit at the intersection of critical theory and symbolic interaction. We also underscore that this volume marks not the end, but a beginning of a renewed research agenda on critical friendship, one that began with contributors who were mostly strangers but who are now mostly friends.

Friendship is largely perceived as a private and highly positive relationship. By interrogating friendship performances undertaken by girls at school and on social media, this chapter illuminates the public and critical aspects of friendship. I draw on performative theory and the sociology of personal life to analyze data from two ethnographic studies, one conducted with girls in an elementary school in Israel and the other conducted with girls in an antiracist youth work organization in Scotland. I analyze the aims, content, and outcomes of friendship performances as well as the contexts that shape them. I argue that successful friendship performances strengthen and validate these relationships, especially in socially intensive settings, while failed performances reflect and lead to friendship difficulties and breakdowns. Moreover, as friendship is relatively uninstitutionalized and its obligations unclear, publicly performing friendship enables individuals to elucidate their desired friendship characteristics and try to live up to their demands.

This contribution to understanding friendship as a distinct social relationship examines the distinction between friendship dyads and groups of friends by focusing on the communicative dynamics of intimacy and discretion. Drawing on the work of Simmel and Luhmann, I argue that dyadic friendship supports intimate communication characterized by immediacy, mutual disclosure, and the suspension of self-consciousness. The addition of a third party, however, shifts interaction into public mode, requiring increased discretion and greater communicative management. I offer a formal account of how the number of participants alters the quality of interaction and suggest that while intimacy is not a constant feature of friendship, it nevertheless remains a constitutive potential. To conclude, I argue that groups of friends can be intimate social formations only insofar as endogenous, “private” dyadic bonds are formed.

This chapter explores the friendship practices of midlife men and women in long-term couple relationships in the UK. Drawing on qualitative interviews with eighteen adults aged forty to fifty-nine, it examines how friendship is shaped by, and often subordinated to, the couple norm, an ideal that centers monogamous, cohabiting relationships. Although friendship is increasingly celebrated in cultural discourse, it remains routinely deprioritized in midlife. Friends offer emotional support, companionship, and moral guidance, yet their contributions are often undervalued or constrained by normative expectations. At times, emotionally significant friendships were perceived as disruptive to the primacy of the couple bond. The contemporary ideal of friendship as autonomous, equal, and elective, sits uneasily alongside the institutional authority of coupledom. This chapter argues that friendship and couple relationships are not discrete domains but are relationally entangled. By tracing how intimacy is organized through these entanglements, it calls for a critical rethinking of friendship’s role in contemporary personal life.

The chapter examines anthropology’s first explicit engagements with Wittgenstein through the rationality debates and British structuralism. It shows how these developments reflected aspects of Wittgenstein’s transitional thinking about context, particularly regarding questions of cultural translation and understanding. The chapter argues that these debates turned on problems of contextual form that continue to animate anthropological theory.

This chapter examines place-identity by finding it first in the pre-Christian schooling and educational practices from the Post-Classic Period (1400--1500 CE), demonstrating their complexity in the realm of the Triple Alliance. It focuses in on two of the most important altepemeh in the Valley of Mexico, Tetzcoco and Tenochtitlan. These and other fifteenth-century Nahua cities featured specialized schools, often if not exclusively run by priestly teachers, that were known as calmecac (‘house of the lineage’, schools for the sons of nobles with an emphasis on military training and religion), telpochcalli (‘youth house’, the schools for commoner boys), cuicacalli (‘song house’ in which ritual practices were emphasized for boys and girls), and ritual learning spaces such as plazas and courtyards associated with temples and other kinds of structures. Significant here are a number of rich studies of formal educational practices, above all as they were pursued in the famous calmecac.

Chapter 3 examines the blood libel invented by Hyppolitus Guarinoni in 1619, Tyrol, Austria. The fictional murder of the boy, Andreas of Rinn, would have taken place in July of 1462. The accepted explanation for this unusual blood libel is a response to Protestant incursions into the Tyrol area, where Rinn is located. The chapter provides a systemic account of the blood libel, which includes complex responses to drought, plague, famine, along with the continuing influence of pagan magic. These elements created an internal dissonance within the Catholic system that Guarinoni was trying to fortify.

This chapter analyses Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘form of life’ as his final model of context. It argues that the deliberate vagueness of this concept represents Wittgenstein’s attempt to avoid the metaphysical commitments involved in previous formal models while still providing tools for understanding context. This strategic formlessness contrasts with how the concept was later interpreted in anthropology.

Chapter 6 outlines three embodied systems – schema, image, and global – in order to explain the nature of systemic dissonance in the human body, along with the signal generated by this dissonance. The chapter discusses a number of religious cases of embodied dissonance, including spirit possession in India, body modification in the United States, the Hindu Kavadi practitioner in Southeast Asia, and the complicated bodily phenomena that characterize the life of the twelfth-century mystic, Bernard of Clairvaux. Systemic theory allows us to understand some embodied religious practices as complex responses to an internal body-self dissonance rather than the effect of a single cause.