Variations in social relations

¶ … Social Relations

While every individual has a role in a social network that involves power dynamics and hierarchical relations, the characters of friendship and kinship are more opaque. Social scientists past and present have searched for meaning in the structure of greater society, groups of individuals, and family orientations to find meaning in the relationships that color a person's life. While many disagree on the intricacies of "friendship," it is by necessity a relationship between two equals in society. As the confines of a social network collapse to the nuclear level, the definition of equal becomes microscopic in the analysis of a natural family, where an intrinsic institutional hierarchy preempts natural relations of strict friendship among individuals equal outside domestic structure. In relationships of kinship, a power struggle between authority and subordinate creates an important variation on the key equality of friends. Power creates a chasm between kin in terms of friendship, but supports the development of friendship between individuals similarly caught between a greater power that is overbearing and the exertion of a different power on an individual of a different status. Creating, developing, and sustaining friendships and kinship become a function of defining ones self in collaboration with and in contrast to the greater society.

Bell and Coleman assert a view of friendship in which the foundation of the relationship is both voluntary and private. They argue that "friendship becomes a special relationship between two equal individuals involved in a uniquely constituted dyad." Because they view friendship as the voluntary establishment of a relationship between two autonomous individuals, why those specific individuals chose to form a friendship is important. Walking into any classroom, it is clear to an outsider that students have grouped themselves throughout the room in a particular fashion, a result of their social circles. On what basis were these relationships formed? Is their a reason, besides visual proximity to the board, that the students at the front of the class do not sit with the students in the back of the room? Is there a greater social process at play in this small environment?

The example of an unassigned seating classroom is ideal to analyze the definition and foundation of the concept of "friendship" and its actuality. Throughout their book, Bell and Coleman assert that friendships exist as a result of social patterning. While the nine articles each provide a unique treatment of friendship, they all affirm the relationship as one based on solidarities between different individuals and the desire of each individual to employ their shared characteristics, interests, or qualities together. Friendship is inherently based on a commonality, perhaps an interest, personal history, morality, or shared disdain. Applying this understanding of friendship to a collegiate classroom, all of the students in the room share a common bond: they all attend college, and for one reason or another, all chose to attend the same college. As such, a basic commonality is established between all the students in the room, providing what would conceptually seem the basis for a friendship between all the students in the room.

In their introduction to their book, Bell and Coleman elaborate on the necessities of a friendship as a relationship construct. It is not merely the amity of two individuals, but a larger set of interactions and histories that combine to create the possibility for friendship. They preface their definition of friendship by looking at the relationships cultivated by those same social scientists who attempt to define friendship itself.

At work in the field, anthropologists rely greatly on help from particular men and women. As their intimacy grows with what has been called their chief or key informants, in day-by-day talk and sharing of experiences, a sympathy and understanding can develop with a certain individual as a mentor and confidant, so that a definite personal relation is formed and acknowledged by both. Often such friendships have a special vernacular name, equivalent to friendship."

This special relationship is one of clear reciprocity, they say, supporting Casagranade's 1960s thesis. He called it a unique form of human association, but their elaboration makes clear that there are concrete factors that either make these associations possible or inhibit them.

Because Bell and Coleman find the idea of friendship across most all cultures, its universality indicates that the foundational pillars of friendship are not held by merely one society but rather are obvious in many. Its institutional character focuses on personal correlations, but limitations are placed on the free-formation of friendships as a result of capital, group organization, and physical characteristics. Gender, age, and ethnicity play an important role in the attainability and viability of friendships, as the East Harlem community shows clearly in Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Likewise, capital, be it educational, financial, or social, is a creator of commonality and also the source of differences that might prevent friendship. At the same time, memberships in other groups are important in the construct of friendship.

In Bourgois's experience, these differences can be integral to the formation of friendship. To gather the material for his book, he became the observer, a seemingly unbiased removed participator, of the Puerto Rican community of crack dealers in Manhattan's East Harlem. While he left a friend of many of the individuals he studied, he entered three and a half years earlier with many differences that marginalized him from the group and competed with his need to cultivate a relationship to, as Coleman and Bell argued, properly gain access to the sort of friendship that allows for earnest social science research to be conducted on a marginalized social group. Bourgois was not from the Puerto Rican neighborhood, nor any other similar community. In fact, he was from twenty blocks to the south, where average single-person incomes of the Yorkville elite more than dwarfed the average family income of their Harlem neighbors. Bourgois called the area the "Achilles' heel of the richest industrialized nation in the world," but it was not the hell he represented when he approached the community, but rather the richest industrialized nation.

Their divergent beginnings were representative of the greater feelings of the community from El Barrio in relation to the rest of the city. Their existence of alienation, exclusion, and social marginalization stood in contrast to the work of friendship, inclusionary social practices, and tightly-knit relationships Bourgios studied and inevitably bloomed inside the community. Bourgois was able to create a quasi-intimate relationship with one member of the group more than others, Primo. His relationship with Primo is not without difficulty, but their foundation of what is honestly called friendship is the result of the cultural production that Bourgois and Primo mutually and exclusively encountered in El Barrio. When the police shouted to Bourgois, "You're dity white scum! Go buy your drugs in a white neighborhood!" there was a degree of mutuality and solidarity formed between the academic and the drug dealers. While one was socially, educationally, geographically, financially, and racially isolated from the other, there was an important correlation to their place in society: each had a distinct place and their position outside of it, or one divergent with the norms of standard society, was disallowed.

The relationships Bourgois investigated were in the complex "street culture" he set out to debunk. The Puerto Ricans of El Barrio were caught between a culture of expectations that existed in their Puerto Rican history but not in their United States existence, and an American society that created and supported a power structure in which they were not included. Bourgios examined the social ostricization they faced as a result of this power structure, focusing on:

the interface between structural oppression and individual action. Building on the analytic framework of cultural production and drawing from feminism, I hope to restore the agency of culture, the autonomy of individuals, the centrality of gender and the domestic sphere to a political-economic understanding of... persistent poverty and social marginalization in the urban United States."

As Bell and Coleman explained, the agency of culture, the autonomy of individuals, role of gender, and the political-economic hierarchy of a society are integral factors of the friendship relationship. Because these factors prevented the young adults of El Barrio from socializing outside of their social enclave, their friendships were based on the establishment of equality between themselves. This was made even more complex by the Puerto Rican cultural hierarchy in which authority and subordination are important and particularly relevant in the structure of the illicit drug market economy. Their friendships stood on tenuous grounds and were always at the mercy of degree.

The quotidian definition of friendship focuses on degree; best friend, good friend, just a friend. These degrees are further complicated through the progression of a life, as new relationships are generated within power structures that call for the hierarchy Primo witnessed, was supported and held-down by. Inside the Game Store, Primo fell into a very specific social structure, but outside of it, there existed no difference between the people of El Barrio in the greater social consciousness. This break-down of local hierarchies is first witnessed in the nuclear home, where friendship and kinship are forced to commingle and self-distinguish.

Because friendship is tied to relationship building learned in the home, the relationship of family members is inevitably tied to the degrees of intimacy, compatibility, and power hierarchy at play at home. While most studies of kinship are an examination of the family in the great social sense, Carsten understands that the modern-day ideas of kinship put previously held principals on their heads. The tenants of blood and bonds in kinship are undeniable, but not mandatory. In El Barrio, kinship was created through unrelated individuals because of the fulfillment of shared needs, responsibilities, and contextualization on the margin of society. Additional problems of families spread across the globe, evidenced in the Puerto Rican - Manhattan splits that many of the families in East Harlem had, kinship can be created on a local scale and without the necessary bonds of blood and surname.