Department seminar: Katherine Smith

Seminar paper

This paper examines what the breakdown and ending of a friendship looks like, and what other kinds of work it does for existing neighbourly networks of support in a small cul-de-sac on a social housing estate in Harpurhey, North Manchester, England. Considering friendship is culturally constructed and that “its manifestations are influenced by localised ways of being human and of being social” (Aguilar 1999: 170-71), this paper begins with a story of a long-standing friendship in Harpurhey and details, ethnographically, its eventual demise. Through this example, the paper examines how the ending of a friendship involves the explicit reckoning up and articulation of evaluations of forms of support provided between friends, including favours and the borrowing and lending of money, which often remain silenced in friendship (Carrier 1999: 21; cf. Keane 2008: 33). Once these exchanges are reckoned up and articulated in moments of conflict, they accrue a moral value as the friendship breaks down. The reckoning and articulation of once-silenced reciprocation creates transactions as debt in the moment, which can then be cancelled as the friendship is ended. The paper goes on to address the social significance of the visible and explicit ruins of a friendship. These are ruins that reaffirm and embolden the boundaries of neighbourly networks of support in an area that has long suffered with the effects of poverty, crime, welfare sanctions and other punitive state measures to deal with the ‘poor’ in England. 

About the lecturer

Dr Katherine Smith is Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Director for the BA Social Sciences Programme at the University of Manchester, UK. She has carried out long-term ethnographic research across the north of England, and her research centres on the themes of fairness and equality, the making of poverty, welfare, social class, Englishness, political correctness and participation in democracy in England. She is the author of Fairness, Class and Belonging in Contemporary England (Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of Extraordinary Encounters: Authenticity and the Interview (Berghahn Books). Her next monograph, Living with Poverty and Dependence in England (Anthem Publishers) will come out in late 2024.

References
Aguilar, M.I., 1999. Localized kin and globalized friends: religious modernity and the ‘educated self’’ in East Africa. In: Bell, S., Coleman, S. (Eds.), The Anthropology of Friendship. Berg, Oxford, pp. 169–184.
Carrier, J., 1999. People who can be friends: selves and social relationships. In: Bell, S., Coleman, S. (Eds.), The Anthropology of Friendship. Berg, Oxford, pp. 21–38.
Keane, W. 2008. ‘Market, materiality and moral metalanguage’, Anthropological Theory, 8/1: 27-42.