Befriending the Field: culture and friendships in development worlds
2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 33; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/01436597.2012.698108
ISSN1360-2241
Autores Tópico(s)Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture
ResumoAbstract This paper explores some of the cross-cultural friendships of Western NGO workers with Indonesians, before and after the 2006 earthquake in Yogyakarta. These kinds of friendships enabled aid workers to transcend a private–professional divide which is often taken for granted. The paper draws attention to different cultural ideals of friendship and argues that cross-cultural friendships present a central instrument for establishing emotional belonging and for crafting identities. The social competences gained frequently moved beyond the individual private sphere and were turned into meaningful resources and professional qualifications relevant in development work. I argue that friendships act as mediators allowing aid workers to oscillate between different spheres of social engagement. This intermediate potential renders friendships highly relevant to more in-depth anthropological enquiry into development workers' everyday lives and their cultural positioning in foreign environments. Notes 1 See http://www.jrs.or.id for more details. 2 This change of the ethnographer's position is important for several reasons: it functions as a vivid example of how ethnographic fieldwork is shaped by external factors impossible to influence; and the action anthropology approach I adopted as a coping strategy contributed to gaining preliminary insights into the social relationships of ssaws. 3 I am grateful to the language school Wisma Bahasa for providing an important space for its students, helping them to cope with their experiences. The unbureaucratic help they provided was a powerful example of practised solidarity. 4 I employ the term ‘cross-cultural’ to refer to friendships characterised by socio-cultural diversity and that are constructed among actors of different national backgrounds. While being aware that within national borders a multiplicity of cultures usually exists, the analytical discrimination can be made in this case as Indonesian and Western actors do refer to distinct cultured notions of ‘good behaviour’ that they see as constituent of their friendship bonds. 5 The term is 1) a translation of the Indonesian term ‘orang barat’ used frequently by Indonesians; and 2) used as an analytical concept to refer to people of European, Australian and American background. By some accounts Western identity is constructed primarily in such situations of exile and displacement Having Australian, New Zealand, US, European, etc. citizenship, actors tend to ‘forget' their national identities and momentarily become one in the category of ‘Western'. 6 R Paine, ‘In search of friendship: an exploratory analysis in “middle-class” culture’, Man, 4(4), 1969, p 515. 7 See A Smart, ‘Expression of interest: friendship and guanxi in Chinese societies’, in S Bell & S Coleman (eds), The Anthropology of Friendship, Oxford: Berg, 1999, pp 119–136, and his discussion of guanxi in Chinese societies, which refers to similar business practices and the instrumental friendships that evolve around such interests of utility. 8 T Yarrow, ‘Maintaining independence: the moral ambiguities of personal relations among Ghanaian development workers’, in A-M Fechter & H Hindman (eds), Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers: The Challenges and Future of Aidland, Sterling, CO: Kumarian Press, 2011, p 45. 9 Under King Hayam Wurk (1350–89), with the infamous Gadjah Mada as prime minister (who remains until today a symbol of power and virtuous victory), the empire united most of the territory of what would become known as the Republic of Indonesia after 1949. A Yumara, Unity in Diversity: A Philosophical and Ethical Study of the Javanese Concept of Keselarasan, Rome: Editrice Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, 1996, p 18; and V Fic, From Majapahit to Sukarnoputri: Community and Change in Pluralism of Religion, Culture, and Politics of Indonesia from the XV to the XXI Century, New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 2003, p 85. 10 For background on the mystical interpretation on the area's social landscape, see N Mulder, Mysticismin Java: Ideology in Indonesia, Yogyakarta: Kanisius, 2005; and YA Twikromo, Ratu Kidul, Yogyakarta: Yayasan Bentang Budaya, 2000. 11 For a description of civil society organisations in Indonesia, see I Hadiprayitno, Hazard or Right? The Dialectics of Development Practice and the Internationally Declared Right to Development, with Special Reference to Indonesia, Antwerp: Intersentia, 2009, pp 160–163. 12 The word is Javanese for an open space often found in villages. Today people meet in the evening hours to spend time together. See Kunci Cultural Studies Center Yogyakarta for more details, at http://space.kunci.or.id. 13 P Bourdieu, ‘Social space and symbolic power’, Sociological Theory, 7(1), 1989, pp 22–23. 14 As some of the few examples, see A-M Fechter & H Hindman (eds), Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers: The Challenges and Futures of Aidland, West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 2011; and A Coles & A-M Fechter (eds), Gender and Family among Transnational Professionals, New York: Routledge, 2007. 15 Within anthropology a body of literature has emerged arguing for the appreciation and thorough analysis of the socio-cultural context in which friendships unfold. See B Beer, ‘Freundschaft als Thema der Ethnologie’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 123, 1998, p 140; Bell & Coleman, The Anthropology of Friendship; A Desai & E Killick (eds), The Ways of Friendship. Anthropological Perspectives, Oxford: Berghahn, 2010; EA Heuser, ‘Freundschaft als soziale Praxis: interkulturelle Freundschaft auf Java—theoretische Implikationen, historische Dimensionen und soziale Handlungsräume’, in E Streifeneder & B Rickum (eds), Quo Vadis Indonesia? Neueste Beiträge des Doktoranden Netzwerk Indonesien, Humboldt University Southeast Asia Working Papers 35, Berlin, 2009, pp 93–107; and EA Heuser & A Brand, ‘Friendship and socio-cultural context: experiences from New Zealand and Indonesia’, in B Descharmes, EA Heuser, T Loy & C Krüger (eds), Varieties of Friendship: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Social Relationships, Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2011, pp 145–174. 16 EA Heuser, ‘Friendship in Java: culture, social context and relatedness’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Freiburg, 2010. 17 WK Rawlins, Friendship Matters, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006. 18 For the double agency of friendship, see WK Rawlins, ‘Cultural double agency and the pursuit of friendship’, Cultural Dynamics, 2(28), 1999, pp 28–40. 19 S Bell & S Coleman, ‘The anthropology of friendships: enduring themes and future possibilities’, in Bell & Coleman, The Anthropology of Friendship, p 2. 20 Smart, ‘Expression of interest’. 21 See M McPherson, L Smith-Lovin & JM Cook, ‘Birds of a feather: homophily in social networks’, Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 2001, pp 415–444. Homophily is the tendency by which people tend to associate with their own kind. In other words, similarity breeds similarity; people's personal networks tend to be homogenous rather than heterogeneous with regard to socio- demographic, behavioural and interpersonal characteristics. 22 FH Tenbruck, ‘Freundschaft: ein Beitrag zu einer Soziologie der persönlichen Beziehungen’, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 16, 1964, pp 431–456. For one of the earlier sociological works on friendship, see G Allan, A Sociology of Friendship and Kinship, London, Boston, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1979. 23 This apparent non-existence of ‘real’ friendship in Indonesia was mentioned by numerous Westerners I worked with during fieldwork. Such narratives of ‘real’ friendship hint at the socio-cultural and historical discourses in which friendship is situated and they reveal how local contexts endow social relationships with a particular set of practices. 24 See also Paine, ‘In search of friendship’, p 513. 25 J Carrier, ‘People who can be friends’, in Bell & Coleman, The Anthropology of Friendship, pp 27–33. 26 Aristotle, The Nicomechean Ethics, Oxford: Dover Publishing, 1998. 27 These ideas have an echo in Western notions of friendship that reverberate in academic discourse and thus help to maintain (and reproduce) hegemonic positions and ‘good behaviour’. Especially in academia we need a ‘decolonisation’ of friendship in order to deconstruct this cultured discourse. 28 See Smart, ‘Expression of interest’ for a discussion on the tension of ideal friendship and social practice. 29 Paine, ‘In search of friendship’, pp 29–34. 30 D Hollan, ‘Cross-cultural differences in the self’, Journal of Anthropological Research, 48(4), 1992, p 285. 31 ‘Bule’ means ‘albino’, literally translated and is used colloquially to refer to Caucasians. 32 See also Mulder, Mysticism in Java, p 68. 33 See D Mosse & D Lewis, ‘Theoretical approaches to brokerage and translation in development’, in Mosse & Lewis (eds), Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies, Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2006, pp 1–26. 34 In Bahasa Indonesia there exists a friendship category that is built upon the exchange of favours embedded in a discourse of generalised reciprocity. The teman kerja (work friend, friend from work, colleague) is a common category in which colleagues and neighbours from smaller neighbourhood units are summarised. See Heuser, ‘Friendship in Java’. 35 The term is taken from R Apthorpe, ‘Coda: with Alice in Aid Land—a seriously satirical allegory’, in D Mosse (ed), Adventures in Aid Land: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development, Oxford: Berghahn, 2011, pp 199–220.
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