On Friendship’s Mystic Affordances (Also, On Universalism, Particularism, and the Generic)

Four recent monographs have inspired me to reflect on studying friendship across contexts and disciplines. I write from the perspective of an anthropologist, however, whose discipline has long had trouble being truly interested in friendship. Part of the problem comes from relative perceptions of friendship’s universality: friendship has been seen as either not universal, too universal, or not universal(ly important) enough to merit much sustained attention. The works under consideration here show that even beyond anthropology, scholarship on friendship and other topics is always affected by questions of universalism. Specifically, these works indicate that relatively unreflective positions on universalist modes of description (including the reaction to them, what it means to seek particulars) can curtail understandings. This is not a blanket rejection of universalizing orientations. Rather, I argue that, instead of ignoring the problem of the universal—simply assuming that universalizing is not what particularists do—we need to understand how universalism appears in our scholarship, which means understanding what the limits of particularism are, too. Ultimately, if we can admit that elements of universalism always shadow how scholars think, we can then also concede that what some scholars have called generics can sometimes help us to be better, more measured particularists. To this end, I offer the generic of friendship’s mystic affordances, to improve our empirical studies of friendship and even our coming politics. And with regard to our politics, I note in conclusion that we might also consider embracing “a” (though not “the”) mystic of friendship.