Friendship, Descent, and Alliance in Africa

Friendship, descent and alliance are basic forms of relatedness that have received unequal attention in social anthropology. Offering new insights into the ways in which friendship is conceptualized and realized in various sub-Saharan African settings, the contributions to this volume depart from the recent tendency to study friendship in isolation from kinship. In drawing attention to the complexity of the interactions between these two kinds of social relationships, the book suggests that analyses of friendship in Western societies would also benefit from research that explores more systematically friendship in conjunction with kinship. Martine Guichard is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale. She has conducted research in Benin and Cameroon on local political cultures, ethnicity, friendship and kinship. Tilo Grätz is Vice-Director for Research at the Centre of Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin, and an Associate Professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Free University Berlin. He has conducted research in West Africa and Central Europe on topics ranging from migration, media, local level politics to informal economies and friendship relations. Youssouf Diallo is a Lecturer in Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Competencies at the German Armed Forces Command and Staff College in Hamburg. He is an Associate Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale. He has carried out research on pastoral migrations, ethnicity and joking relations in West Africa.