Friendship as Moral Experience

Ethnographic dimensions and ethical reflections

Authors

• C. Jason Throop University of California, Los Angeles https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2631-5460

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.124709

Abstract

Building upon some early observations regarding the place of friendship in fieldwork in the writings of George Devereux and Clifford Geertz, the limits and possibilities of a friendship-based approach to ethnography are critically investigated by means of a phenomenology of moral experience. Such an effort brings to light the various ways that friendship may potentiate an ethical orientation to the concrete complex existence of others that resists reductive forms of closure and typification.

Keywords: friendship, morality, experience, phenomenology