ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author is concerned with friendship as a cultural and specific notion, within the geographical context of East Africa, and particularly within the cultural context of the pastoral societies. He focuses primarily on the ways that the people within pastoral societies construct and develop the social relations of the friendship. After exploring some culturally localized conceptions of friendship, the author explores the expansion of the pastoralist world into other landscapes, such as urban and educational centres, and the symbolic and classificatory systems of other globalized traditions. Symbolic classificatory systems provided emic explanations for such social systems, and became part of studies of pastoralism. Relations of friendship were therefore secondary to the primary affiliations provided by kinship and the ritual obligations that brought the clans or age-sets together in order to secure the continuity of the pastoralist way of life.
