Befriending the Field: culture and friendships in development worlds
Abstract This paper explores some of the cross-cultural friendships of Western NGO workers with Indonesians, before and after the 2006 earthquake in Yogyakarta. These kinds of friendships enabled aid workers to transcend a private–professional divide which is often taken for granted. The paper draws attention to different cultural ideals of friendship and argues that cross-cultural friendships present a central instrument for establishing emotional belonging and for crafting identities. The social competences gained frequently moved beyond the individual private sphere and were turned into meaningful resources and professional qualifications relevant in development work. I argue that friendships act as mediators allowing aid workers to oscillate between different spheres of social engagement. This intermediate potential renders friendships highly relevant to more in-depth anthropological enquiry into development workers' everyday lives and their cultural positioning in foreign environments.