Symbolic Life Pledges and Intimate Communication. Towards a Generalized Sociology of Friendship

Friendship is an uncommonly diverse and fluid form of social interaction. The practices and ideals of friendship vary greatly in intercultural and historical comparison—so much so, in fact, that one might see in them entirely different phenomena, linked only by vague similarities in form. The idea of the life-token, I suggest, offers a way to bridge these apparent differences. The concept, which has received scant attention in sociology despite its relative prominence in Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, refers to a symbolic artefact that stands for the life of a person and remains inseparably tied to it. Historical forms of friendship such as the blood brotherhood can be decoded as a ritual exchange of symbolic life-tokens. Viewed at a sufficiently general level, this exchange describes the common denominator underlying all forms of friendship. One possible candidate for a modern-day life-token is the intimate secret.