Defining friendship: the processual approach

Human beings, as Aristotle famously defined them, are political (that is to say social) animals, and as such, practice some sort of friendship “in every community.” The ubiquity and varieties of friendship across time and across human populations perhaps explain the difficulty in defining precisely what the relationship is and entails. The following definition attempts to encompass the most commonly encountered descriptions of friendship in the relevant ancient and modern literature:

Although definitions have the virtue of providing analytical focus for the study of complex human phenomena and the evidence for it, they are far too general and static to capture accurately the variety and multipli-city of human experience; a dynamic, multilayered, and multidimensional description is needed. The “practical logic” approach of Pierre Bourdieu points in this direction: