Towards Friendship-Shaped Communities: A Practical Theology of Friendship

2 Coexisting Friendship Worlds

This chapter explores the existence of varying and co-existing friendship worlds within one colonized country, namely Aotearoa New Zealand, and the potential to move between such worlds within which the inherent rules and obligations of friendship may vary. Māori relational understandings are holistic and multidimensional, recognizing the intertwined relationality of Atua, tāngata, and whenua (God, people, and land). The Māori idea of friendship is intertwined with that of whanaungatanga (kinship). While the interrelationship of private and public friendships contributed to the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the settler community inherited a poor understanding of the covenantal nature of treaty. Its subsequent neglect contributed to injustice and constrained friendship possibilities. Non-violent resistance to oppression, as expressed by the Parihaka community, is examined as an expression of friendship. Examples of commitment to co-existing friendship worlds include Suzanne Aubert and her Sisters of Compassion and recent restructuring of the Anglican Church.

Friendship is a flexible social relationship that occurs in “variable localized forms.”¹ Multiple conceptions of relatedness may be employed simultaneously, sometimes in incoherent ways.² Thus, anthropologist Agnes Brandt speaks of varying friendship worlds, within which the rules and obligations of friendship may vary, contributing to diverse ways of being in relationship.³ In Western-colonized ...