It might come as a bit of a surprise that there is so much
in the book about friendship. Perhaps because I know so little, I find some of
the literature on early modern England fascinating in this regard. Perhaps what
will pique the reader’s interest is to see the way in which friendship segues
into kinship. I have surprised myself, at any rate, on this score.
Historians have long been alive to the temptation to think
one knows what friendship is. Intriguing for example are present-day
misunderstandings of companionate relations as flourished across pre-modern
Europe. So what else do we need to be alert to? As it turns out, the attributes
of friends and relatives have over time diverged and converged in quite
specific ways.
At any rate all this made me think afresh about twentieth
century anthropological accounts of kinship and friendship, and I found myself
speculating on an old controversy: the glaringly diminished place of family and
kin in modernity. Of course the controversy hardly belongs to anthropology
alone. Political writers pondering long ago on an emergent sense of society and
state began a conversation that has lasted three centuries. I join the
conversation with some thoughts of my own about how English speakers link up
different aspects of their social lives.
Take seventeenth- and eighteenth-century usages of ‘society’
and ‘association.’ These seemingly reflect back something of the positive tenor
there is to making relations that has already been mentioned. At one place the
book touches on David Hume’s eighteenth-century ruminations on human nature. He
showed himself as enamored of the associational facility of linking thoughts as
he was of the convivial nature of being in company. Indeed he connected them:
resemblances between people are like connections between ideas. Incidentally,
Hume was thinking of social circles in general, not of kin relations at this
point—it is as though the latter had already been pushed to one side. Of course
as with any literary piece one has to consider metaphor, and I could not resist
a glance at some of the arguments of the time about decorating speech. An
interesting juncture is when ‘family’ loses its power as a metaphor for
‘state’.
The cover that Duke University Press designed for the book
is taken from a painting frequently reproduced to evoke the Enlightenment,
Wright’s An experiment on a bird in an air
pump. The scientific revolution domesticated: at a private house an
itinerant lecturer is demonstrating the effects of air by withdrawing it from a
bell jar in which a bird flutters. Several people gathered to watch are held by
the painter in various relations of power (the observer with his hand on a
watch), concentration (on learning what will happen next), comfort (embracing
the youngest watchers there), and indifference (between two who have eyes only
for themselves). There have been many attempts at identifying the personages. Generically,
we would recognize a circle of friends and relations.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
A close-up
It might come as a bit of a surprise that there is so much in the book about friendship. Perhaps because I know so little, I find some of the literature on early modern England fascinating in this regard. Perhaps what will pique the reader’s interest is to see the way in which friendship segues into kinship. I have surprised myself, at any rate, on this score.
Historians have long been alive to the temptation to think one knows what friendship is. Intriguing for example are present-day misunderstandings of companionate relations as flourished across pre-modern Europe. So what else do we need to be alert to? As it turns out, the attributes of friends and relatives have over time diverged and converged in quite specific ways.
At any rate all this made me think afresh about twentieth century anthropological accounts of kinship and friendship, and I found myself speculating on an old controversy: the glaringly diminished place of family and kin in modernity. Of course the controversy hardly belongs to anthropology alone. Political writers pondering long ago on an emergent sense of society and state began a conversation that has lasted three centuries. I join the conversation with some thoughts of my own about how English speakers link up different aspects of their social lives.
Take seventeenth- and eighteenth-century usages of ‘society’ and ‘association.’ These seemingly reflect back something of the positive tenor there is to making relations that has already been mentioned. At one place the book touches on David Hume’s eighteenth-century ruminations on human nature. He showed himself as enamored of the associational facility of linking thoughts as he was of the convivial nature of being in company. Indeed he connected them: resemblances between people are like connections between ideas. Incidentally, Hume was thinking of social circles in general, not of kin relations at this point—it is as though the latter had already been pushed to one side. Of course as with any literary piece one has to consider metaphor, and I could not resist a glance at some of the arguments of the time about decorating speech. An interesting juncture is when ‘family’ loses its power as a metaphor for ‘state’.
The cover that Duke University Press designed for the book is taken from a painting frequently reproduced to evoke the Enlightenment, Wright’s An experiment on a bird in an air pump. The scientific revolution domesticated: at a private house an itinerant lecturer is demonstrating the effects of air by withdrawing it from a bell jar in which a bird flutters. Several people gathered to watch are held by the painter in various relations of power (the observer with his hand on a watch), concentration (on learning what will happen next), comfort (embracing the youngest watchers there), and indifference (between two who have eyes only for themselves). There have been many attempts at identifying the personages. Generically, we would recognize a circle of friends and relations.