Content area
Full Text
J. BARRY GURDIN, Amitid/Friendship: An Investigation into CrossCultural Styles in Canada and the United States. Bethesda, Md.: Austin & Winfield, 1995, 551 p., $59.95 cloth/$39.95 paper.
This book is a landmark, contemporary, comparative study of friendship. It is certainly the most outstanding work on this social form for our generation. It is a must-read for scholars of friendship and social networks. It is a very important and highly readable presentation for any social scientist or interested general reader.
Drawing on surveys, participant observation, small groups, and secondary artifacts, J. Barry Gurdin examines how ethnicity, gender, class, marital status, and age construct configurations of friendship in contemporary societies. He compares his findings, particularly from Quebec, to his own and others' research from the United States and France. Influenced by Jean Maisonneuve's work in France, Gurdin's phenomenological investigation stands out first among the many methods he used for understanding friendship, while his clinical sociological bent instructs readers about the possibilities for acting as an agent of change for this human relationship.
As an American who lived for almost a decade in Canada, as a graduate of UCLA and the universities of Toronto and Montreal, and as an active participant in the University of California, Berkeley's Canadian Studies Program, the author has a wealth of personal cross-cultural experience that shines on the pages of this work. Gurdin utilizes this lifeworld to triangulate secondary artifacts from plays, movies, newspaper clippings, student essays, field observations, and books, to shed higherorder symbolic meaning on the harder data of his interviews and questionnaire results.
First he describes Montreal's own cognitive field of friendship in a particular historical period. He traces this field through the definitions of friendship found in his interviews and bibliographic references.
Then he introduces the notion of "styles of friendship,"...