The social relationships studied in this book are what has been called “amiable relations,” defined by “the moral obligation to feel – or at least to feign – sentiments which commit the individual to actions of altruism.” These relations of amity fall into two broad categories, kinship and friendship. While they may shade into each other (say, in cases of ritual kinship or ritualized friendship), these two major modes of attachment to groups not only are mostly practically discernible and supported by different institutions but also are often defined in relation to and even in contrast to each other in political thought and in anthropological models. Most commonly, friendship is viewed as an “achieved” relationship that is independent of the “ascribed” ties of kinship, and as such, constitutes an alternative and transcendent realm of human solidarity.

The perceived autonomous and achieved character of friendship-based bonds vis-à-vis the prescribed and “natural” connections of kinship is of great significance in the evolutionist model of the social theories that dominated in the nineteenth century and that still enjoy far-reaching influence in contemporary academic and popular circles. In this model, the emergence of civil society, which is comprised of individuals severed from the family and bound together by mutual obligations and by loyalty to their commonwealth, marks a break with the premodern social order in that it witnesses a progress from status to contract.