Introduction: Friendship, morality, and experience

Over the last decade, anthropologists have paid increasing attention to the phenomenon of friendship, a topic that had been relatively neglected throughout the history of the discipline. As Robert Paine put it in the first systematic anthropological reflection on this form of sociality: ‘Although social anthropologists themselves live lives in which friendship is probably just as important as kinship, and a good deal more problematic to handle, in our professional writings we dwell at length upon kinship and have much less to say about friendship’ (1969: 505). Despite Paine’s efforts to encourage anthropologists to focus more explicitly upon friendship, it took thirty years before the first volume entirely devoted to the topic appeared with the publication of Bell and Coleman’s The Anthropology of Friendship (1999). What could account for this longstanding disciplinary neglect