Bushnell and Moody present a rich investigation into the navigation of friendships, adopting discursive and ethnographic perspectives to examine Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English interactional data.
Since the definition of friendship is hard to pin down, most sociocultural anthropologists have tended to focus on issues of kinship and descent, while leaving friendship as a residual or interstitial issue. However, this book puts friendship as the central focus and offers unique perspectives from the participants themselves. The interactional work implicated in the accomplishment of making and being friends, and the trials and tribulations of friendship, are both explored through the many detailed analyses showing how the participants navigate the calm and rough waters of friendship in and through their everyday interactions.
Researchers, undergraduates, and postgraduate students in the fields of conversation analysis, pragmatics, and other social sciences will benefit from the real-life examples in the book as well as the analysis.