When She Arrives: On friendship, singular encounters, and being a researcher like a friend

In this talk, we move from making friends on a quiet street in Denmark to friendships in Jordan and finally to friendship and the possibility of transformative solidarity in the research process. When invisible, affective gestures are captured ethnographically in all their singularity, can we be a researcher like a friend? One primary ethical demand in friendship is that you do not tell your friends’ secrets, no matter what. When this demand is translated into being a researcher like a friend, it often leads to seemingly endless discussions about how to tell the story of what emerges in-between—how to make that story both an expression of a relationship and a more general view of the world, without becoming a tell-tale, and how to best honor your friend’s desires against powers that may seek to eradicate those desires altogether.

Through the lens of anthropology, this talk examines how friendships—often full of personal secrets and intimacies—inform and complicate our positionalities and the purpose of the work we do. As illuminated by Leela Gandhi’s work on radical possibility and the politics of friendship (2006), the talk considers the productive and at times frustrating tension between relational ethics of trust and intimacy, professional responsibility, and the potential for a radical politics of friendship that resists colonial narratives and embraces unfinished relations and transformative solidarity.