ABSTRACT
Currently, anthropology is attempting to reappraise traditional ethnographic topics and methods, impelled partly by observing numerous challenges to older social bonds based on kinship or proximity. A consideration of the role of friendship in social life, not least as a means of producing an anthropology that understands kinship more explicitly in the context of other forms of social ties, is — the readers argue — long overdue. Voluntarism as a defining quality ol friendship is also challenged in a cross-cultural survey presented by Cohen. He shows that relationships are frequently prearranged in many contexts and, even where an element of choice exists, friends often cannot terminate their relationship without pain of serious social sanctions. Anthropologists are focusing the ethnographic gaze on Western societies more than ever before and are forced to confront contexts where unstable networks of intimacy, frequently unrelated to kinship ties, constitute key arenas of social interaction and identity formation.
