Editor's Preface

Over the past year, I noticed a renewed and entirely independent interest in the anthropology of friendship among manuscripts submitted to the JRAI.Although based in different regions of the world and conceived without coordination, several articles explored friendship as a central ethnographic and analytical concern.This convergence prompted the decision to publish four of these contributions together in a special section.To frame the collection, I invited Simon Coleman, whose work has helped shape the anthropology of friendship over several decades, to write an introduction.His article provides a rich comparative and historical overview of the subfield, situating contemporary debates within a longer intellectual trajectory, while resisting a linear narrative of disciplinary progress.Instead, it reveals recurring questions, shifting emphases, and successive reformulations that continue to animate anthropological engagement with friendship.In doing so, it offers both an authoritative guide for readers entering the subfield and an inspiration for its further development.The four contributions approach friendship from markedly different ethnographic and conceptual perspectives.Susan MacDougall examines women's friendships in Jordan through the productive role of disappointment, showing how moments of tension and admonishment become integral to the ongoing maintenance of intimate relationships.Katherine Smith turns to the ending of a friendship forged during fieldwork in northern England, demonstrating how rupture and 'reckoning' expose the ethical, methodological, and relational foundations of ethnographic friendship itself.Sahana Ghosh extends the concept beyond interpersonal relations, by exploring the political aesthetics of 'friendship' in the India-Bangladesh borderlands, showing how geopolitical friendship is continually staged, contested, and reimagined in everyday life.Ghazal Asif Farrukhi examines the fragile possibilities of friendship between Hindu and Muslim young women in Pakistan, revealing how ritual tensions and Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) , -

Friendship · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Cross-Cultural and Social Analysis · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics