Conference Overview

What does it mean to choose one another? In times of uncertainty and disconnection, friendship offers a vital yet underexplored domain for anthropological inquiry. This two-day conference invites anthropologists and allied scholars to explore friendship as a generative force—a voluntary bond that fosters belonging, sustains communities, and nurtures forms of care that enrich civic and educational life.

Friendship has long occupied an ambiguous place in anthropological thought, overshadowed by kinship, exchange, and formal political structures. Yet friendships create worlds. They anchor neighborhoods, enliven classrooms, bridge communities, and cultivate mutual understanding across differences. A humanistic approach invites us to attend to these relationships with curiosity and care, asking how friendship shapes who and how we become.

We view friendship as a nondelimited process, experience, and culturally distinctive form, replete with creativity. We approach friendship as it ricochets between other locally salient categories—kinship, neighbor, colleague, stranger, acquaintance—and as a phenomenon fundamentally inseparable from hierarchy, resistance, local ways of knowing, rebellion, and community (Pena 2022; Bell and Coleman 1999).

What can multimodal approaches—sound, image, poetry, performance, film, digital ethnography, and beyond—reveal about the textures and labors of these bonds that conventional academic prose cannot?

We invite you to join us this October.

Carroll Hall
2 Vandervoort Place
Brooklyn, New York 11237

Registration Fees

• AAA SHA Members: No Payment

• Non-Members of the AAA: 35 USD

• Non-Members of SHA: 35 USD

• AAA Student members (non SHA): $10

Program Schedule will be published early September.

Performances
Our call for the ethnographic performances, which will take place in the evening of Friday, October 2nd, will be published in late August. To see our photos from the Salon in New Orleans, please visit our Instagram account.

Direct questions to societyforhumanisticanthro@gmail.com