Navigating cultural intimacies: Long-lasting friendships in the Scottish South Asian diasporas

Abstract

In research on the UK’s South Asian communities, the family has generally been taken to be a ‘self-fulfilling’ unit and the existence of friendships within and across these communities remains empirically unexplored and conceptually under-theorised. This is even more so the case for friendships among older South Asians. This article therefore explores the workings of decades-long friendships of the Scottish South Asian diasporas, particularly those that are formed outside these communities, to ask: how and why do friendships last across sometimes deep cultural differences? Taking inspiration from Lynn Jamieson’s theorisation of ‘practices of intimacy’, yet in a relative departure, this article positions intimate relationships as socially situated, wherein cultural and racial difference is embodied by the individuals in these friendships, even as the friendships are themselves also embedded within wider racial and socio-cultural hierarchies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 40 male and female participants (50+ years) from the Indian Sikh and Pakistani Muslim communities, I offer three main arguments that: cultural or racial difference is not contingent to these friendships but inherently constitutive of the relationships; deep ‘value-navigations’ which cut across differences can both cultivate and sustain long-lasting friendships; and what I term practices of cultural intimacy are at the core of how and why these friendships last.

. . . everybody needs friends. It doesn’t matter who it is, what community, religion. Without friendship, life’s lonely. (Baljeet, mid-70s)

I have many [White] Scottish friends, lot of Indians, not just Punjabis but also Gujarati, Bengali, many Pakistani friends. Even though we’re Sikh, I mix with everybody. . . . Some of them are close, some of them are just friends. (Jaspreet, late 60s)

I open this article with words from Baljeet because he speaks of the significance of friendship in his life, especially in relieving his loneliness. Yet, Baljeet belongs to a community about which research on friendship has been minimal. Within South Asian diasporic communities, the family is assumed to be a ‘self-fulfilling’ unit (Purewal & Jasani, 2017, p. 112) and relationships outside the family, including friendships, remain largely unexplored. This is even more so the case in relation to ageing (Mand, 2006) and is part of a wider scholarly neglect of older Black and minority communities more generally (Hayanga et al., 2021). The friendships of racially minoritised older adults warrant attention not only because caring personal relationships are protective of mental health and well-being in later life (Milne, 2020) but as the writing within cultural/critical gerontology reminds us, ageing is also socially located (Holstein & Meredith Minkler, 2007) and historically rooted power (colonial) hierarchies continue to impact the ageing experience (Chaouni et al., 2021).

I follow Baljeet with Jaspreet because her account challenges a second assumption in the literature. Studies suggest that friendships are unlikely to cross cultural boundaries because friendships tend to exhibit patterns of homophily – ‘similarity breeds connection’ – such that people who interact socially are likely to be similar along status dimensions of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age and also values, attitudes and beliefs (McPherson et al., 2001, pp. 415–416). As individuals tend to form close relationships with those who are socially similar, they essentially ‘confirm and reproduce the social order’ (Bottero, 2005, p. 159). In this way, friendships can serve as lenses with which to understand both wider inequalities and possibilities of social change, not least if friendships across differences can also ‘challenge social norms and create alliances’ (Muraco, 2012, p. 5). Moreover, Jaspreet’s comment above highlights that diversity (regional/geographical, religious) also exists within South Asian diasporas, and so some friendships between South Asians must also negotiate cultural differences. ¹

In fact, writing about the American context, McCullough (1998) argued that assumptions about homophily might explain the lack of scholarly engagement with friendships that cross ‘socially marked boundaries’ (p. 10), particularly racial boundaries, and this despite research indicating that such relationships do in fact ‘flourish’ (p. 13). Half of my South Asian heritage participants had a White friend or had had one at an earlier life stage. Some of these friendships were also cross-gender (Chaudhry, 2022) but cross-class friendships were exceptional. Crucially, several of these cross-cultural friendships were many decades long and it is these friendships on which I focus in this article.

Long-lasting cross-cultural friendships merit consideration for two reasons. First, older adults from long-settled migrant communities have been overlooked in the literatures on inter-ethnic interactions/alliances and friendships. That such friendships exist suggest that socio-cultural boundaries have been looser or less demarcated than discourses of ‘parallel lives’ and lack of ‘meaningful exchanges’ claim (see Finney & Simpson, 2009, pp. 91–104). Second, if sustained friendships are ‘ongoing mutual achievements’ requiring commitment, intention and tolerance (Rawlins, 2004, p. 275; Smart et al., 2012; Spencer & Pahl, 2006), I move beyond a simplistic focus on homophily, to the ‘doing’ of intimacy (Jamieson, 2011) to attend to the various negotiations that sustain friendships across cultural differences and over time. By doing so, I contribute to work on personal relationships and friendships more broadly, and specifically to the growing literature on cross-category friendships.

There has been a notable interest in friendships across boundaries of class (Hollingworth, 2020; Pellandini-Simányi, 2017), gender and sexuality (Chaudhry, 2022; Muraco, 2012), religion (Leszczensky & Pink, 2017) and ethnicity. In studies of ethnicity and friendship, there has been a particular growth in research relating to the friendships of children and young adults (Back, 1996; Harris, 2016; Reynolds, 2007; Ryan, 2015; Vincent et al., 2018). An important argument in this literature is that while friendships across social differences exist, they are ‘mundanely – but profoundly – impacted by structural factors’ (Vincent et al., 2018, p. 9), with some studies suggesting that friendships marked by great social differences generate challenges related to managing status inequalities between friends that become harder to sustain over time (Hollingworth, 2020; Pellandini-Simányi, 2017; Reynolds, 2007). Here, my interest lies not only in exploring how structural factors impact friendships, but I propose that these factors should serve to deepen our understanding of how social differences come into play in the workings of cross-cultural friendships. Through this, I aim to make evident the constitutive nature of difference. I ask: how and why do friendships last across cultural differences?

To address this, I employ a ‘practices of intimacy’ framework (Jamieson, 2011) as it allows an understanding of the quality of relationships and the routine practices through which people ‘create and sustain a sense of togetherness and significant personal relationships in everyday life’ (p. 9). An intimacy lens can provide a glimpse into forms of sociality, care and affect that may be less visible through other theoretical lenses, for instance, those of conviviality, that is more generally interrogated ‘as a kind of broader public affect’ (Harris, 2016, p. 513; Neal et al., 2013; Wise & Noble, 2016).

This article first outlines the conceptual frameworks on which I build. Second, I detail methods. The three empirical sections then discuss: the values that cultivate long-lasting friendships; how trust works within the South Asian diasporic communities; and what some of the difficult navigations involved in sustaining friendships across cultural/racial boundaries look like. This article’s particular contribution lies in its theoretical expansion of Jamieson’s practices of intimacy framework to propose a new framework – practices of cultural intimacy – with the intention of deepening our understanding of personal relationships involving cultural differences.

Practices of intimacy and practices of cultural intimacy

Lynn Jamieson (2011) defines intimacy as ‘the quality of close connection between people and the process of building this quality’ (p. 1). She argues that personal relationships can be more or less intimate with a constellation of practices making for varying degrees of intimacy. She conceptualises practices of intimacy as those ‘practices which cumulatively and in combination enable, create and sustain a sense of a close and special quality of a relationship between people’ (p. 3). For definitional purposes, I take practices of friendship to be a subset of practices of intimacy. Jamieson (1998, 2011) outlines the practices that build intimacy and sees them as multidimensional (2011, p. 3):

Intimacy . . . relates to a wider repertoire of practices. The component practices – giving to, sharing with, spending time with, knowing, practically caring for, feeling attachment to, expressing affection for – are not exclusively about intimacy. That is, each practice tends to produce intimacy but is not a sufficient condition.

An important contribution of Jamieson’s framework is that it allows a move away from ethnocentrism – breaking down the process of creating intimacy into practices allows us to distinguish the culturally and historically variable practices that people use to ‘do’ intimacy (p. 4). She stresses that an approach to the analysis of personal relationships that emphasises ‘doing’ intimacy must not overlook the sources of inequalities and structural constraints that can limit the freedom enjoyed by individuals (Jamieson et al., 2006, p. 5). Her work suggests that practices that create intimacy can occur in hierarchical relationships but social boundaries/hierarchies are inimical to the type of mutually self-disclosing intimacy particularly valorised in Euro-American culture. She writes: ‘Intimacy across genders, generations, classes and races can only take on . . . [a mutually shared] character if the participants can remove social barriers and transcend structural inequalities’ (Jamieson, 1998, p. 1).

While taking inspiration from Jamieson’s analytical framework, my own point of relative departure instead begins with the empirical observation that friendships are inherently and constitutively socially situated. I take this social situatedness to mean (1) that race/ethnicity/culture – including Whiteness – are not categories out there, but rather that they are lived, experienced and embodied by the individuals in these (cross-cultural) friendships; and (2) that these friendships are themselves also embedded within wider racial and socio-cultural hierarchies. I take from conceptualisations of racial embodiment the idea that: ‘the body [is] the site of racial experience’ (Fassin, 2011, p. 420); race exists as an effect of the ways in which ‘we think, know and inhabit the world’; and ‘bodies inhabit the world differently’ (Ahmed, 2002, pp. 47, 61; 2007; Fanon, 1952/2021). Intimacies in cross-cultural friendships, as I will argue, are not built and sustained by removing or ignoring socio-cultural boundaries, or by transcending structural inequalities. Quite the contrary, the embodied and embedded dimensions of their social situatedness means that these boundaries and inequalities are not contingent, but in fact constitutive to and inherent in the very workings of these intimate relationships. Long-lasting, cross-cultural friendships are fundamentally constituted by continual commitment to recognising, making sense of and navigating these.

My article, then, brings the idea of an embodied cultural self (racial/ethnic/religious) into Jamieson’s practices of intimacy framework. I draw on Herzfeld’s (2018) theorisation of cultural intimacy – an intimate connection based on shared cultural knowledge and understanding, values and experiences, and in particular that shared knowledge and experiences that might be withheld from those outside the cultural community (p. 108). While Herzfeld focuses solely on intra-community relationships, I extend his framework to include cross-cultural relationships and a focus on practices. My data indicate that participants made sense of their cross-cultural friendships in relation to their within-community ² friendships and this in turn, shaped their practices of intimacy across their different friendships. Therefore, I take practices of cultural intimacy to mean not merely practices that sustain intimacy amongst cultural ‘insiders’ but those subtle and complex navigations that are involved when cultural difference forms part of wider practices of (friendship) intimacies – and it is these that are the subject of this article.

I also take from the sociological literature on ‘boundary work’ the idea that people relationally produce sameness and differences between themselves and others (cf. Franklin, 2022; Lamont, 2000; Lamont & Molnár, 2002; Wimmer, 2008). More specifically, the distinction between social and symbolic boundaries informs my theorisation of how people navigate cultural boundaries in intimate relationships. Symbolic boundaries are those ‘conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space’, whereas social boundaries are ‘objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to and unequal distribution of resources . . . and social opportunities’ (Lamont & Molnár, 2002, p. 168). I use the concept of symbolic boundaries as a heuristic device for better understanding those interpretative strategies or navigations that are involved in (re)defining those social imaginaries that shape or underpin structural differences. In other words, I understand practices of cultural intimacy as those practices which relationally negotiate the cultural differences that are (1) inherently and constitutively embodied in the friends, and (2) those wider cultural and racial hierarchies and social structures in which the friendships are embedded.

The study and methods

This article draws on my larger study with South Asian heritage older adults in Scotland that aimed to theorise about relationality, family life and ageing within wider contexts of social change and cultural diversity. It critically interrogated long-standing assumptions in Britain that Asians ‘care for their own’ (Purewal & Jasani, 2017). I carried out semi-structured interviews with 40 participants (11 Indian Sikh and 11 Pakistani Muslim women and 8 Indian Sikh and 10 Pakistani Muslim men) from Edinburgh and Glasgow between December 2020 and September 2021. Participants were aged between their 50s and 80s. Twenty-eight were currently married (of whom four had previously divorced), seven widowed and five divorced. Migration trajectories varied with participants having arrived as post-war labour migrants (in the 1950s and 60s) or wives of this pioneer generation of migrants (from the 1960s to 1980s). Others had arrived in subsequent waves as educational or marriage migrants (including men), as ‘twice’ migrants from East Africa (in the early 1970s) or following multiple moves (in the 2000s). Of 40 participants, 10 were UK/Europe-born and nine had arrived as minors as part of family reunification. With two exceptions, all interviewees had either migrated from or had a family history of migration from Indian/Pakistani Punjab. Diversity in class status and living arrangements (e.g. multi-generational household, couple household, living alone) also guided informant selection. All participants identified as heterosexual.

I recruited through multiple channels, including charities and faith-based groups, personal contacts and snowballing. Due to Covid-19 restrictions on face-to-face contact, interviews were conducted by telephone or on Zoom. While I am neither Sikh nor Muslim, I did share with my participants a wider Punjabi and South Asian identity and linguistic commonality and thus, I was able to carry out interviews in Urdu, Punjabi and English. Interviews with 11 participants were one-off and the remainder took two or more conversations all recorded using a digital recorder and transcribed verbatim. The data were thematically analysed following the approach outlined in Spencer et al. (2014). All participants are anonymised through culturally appropriate pseudonyms and the omission of identifying details. Whilst cognisant of the contentions around the ethics of naming and the potential for silencing, erasing or otherwise making more invisible those already marginalised (Moore, 2012), I anonymise my participants because of the close-knit nature of diasporic communities and concerns around reputational harm and damage.

In this article, I use the terms cultural communities (and this includes White) and cross-cultural friendships (to describe South Asian–White friendships). Mindful of the heterogeneity within South Asian communities, for friendships across them, I draw on my participants’ understandings: I will specify when they refer to friends of South Asian heritage in homogenising terms (as ‘Asian’) and when they make a distinction between themselves and those outwith their own community, however defined (Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Indian, Pakistani, Punjabi, etc.).

For my wider research, I asked participants, ‘What do you consider to be your most important relationships?’ (cf. Spencer & Pahl, 2006) and several mentioned friends. I then asked what kinds of friends they had in their ‘friendship repertoire’ (p. 54). The focus on cross-cultural friendships emerged inductively from the empirical material. Treating what friendship means to people as an empirical question, I explored how participants used the term friend, for friend is ‘a relational term which signifies something about the quality and character of the relationship involved’ (Allan, 1989, p. 16). As this article draws on larger research not focused on friendship, I did not interview the White friends of my South Asian participants, so my data cannot speak to how the other friend in these cross-cultural relationships understood or navigated their Whiteness. This is a limitation of this article.

Cultural intimacies: Values, memories and exclusions

‘Not even one’, Hanif, told me, when I asked him if he had any White friends. He had friendships with some Pakistani men he had known since he first arrived in the UK (in the 1990s). Sunni Muslims, he added, not Shia like him. It is with them that he engaged in ‘mazhabii baat’ (religious talk). ‘Debate happens with them, and my dosti [friendship] too’, he said. White people, he elaborated, are ‘good people, and in fact . . . more helpful than our own people but I have never given much thought to making friends with them’. So, while Hanif acknowledged that even with his Pakistani friends there were (sectarian) differences, it was important to him that they shared the same Islamic moral values. Likewise, Ranbir (Sikh) did not have any White friends. He said:

I think friendship is a good thing when you grow old, because when you grow old, you always talk about the past. . . . With people who came from India, Pakistan. . . . You can talk about back home and when somebody is talking about their childhood, you can relate. . . . Your memories will be the same, but with White people . . . I don’t mind listening to their stories, but they will be different.

Speaking of his three-decades long friendships with two Sikh men, Ranbir said: ‘Good friends are like-minded people.’ He conveyed a need for intimacy with others who shared his migration experience and had linguistic commonality and with whom he could reminisce, recall and retell collective memories of a shared homeland. There is a bonding here, and a cultural reinscription. Most especially in later life, when memories can often become more vivid and need to be shared, and when there is perhaps less looking forward, a shared past can be a rich landscape for cultural intimacy, for comfort, connection and belonging.

Neelam (Sikh), unlike Hanif and Ranbir, had White friends she met through work. Yet in her account, there is a suggestion that cultural intimacy made for qualitative differences between ‘Indian’ and White friends:

I fit in better with South Asians . . . you tend to be watching the same television programmes, same festivals, same food. . . . Despite being here for 40 years . . . I would love to be discussing something I can connect with, whether that is Indian songs or television . . . because the general effortless stuff that keeps the conversation going are common things like that.

As workplaces are important sites not only for the development of women’s friendships (Wilkinson, 2019) but also forging inter-ethnic social networks (Charsley et al., 2020, p. 176), like Neelam, Scottish-born Nisma (Muslim) too had friendships she established with White women at work, yet she described her White friends as ‘not that close’ and she consciously avoided engaging in ‘deep conversations’ with them:

Our Asian women, they know what our family dynamics are like. But these friends, they will ask you, ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? This is not right, this is wrong.’ So, because they’re gori [White] they don’t understand, so that’s the only difference between us and them, our culture. So, I’ve tried to be more limited with these friends.

Nisma’s experience suggests that cultural intimacy is not just about cultural familiarity but, as Herzfeld (2018) theorised, ‘that area of covert mutual recognition, and of self-recognition, that constitutes “what we all know” but would never admit to an outsider’ (p. 108). This is because, as Nisma indicates, her White friends are unlikely to understand. For it relates to those aspects of one’s culture known to insiders but if seen by cultural outsiders could cause shame and embarrassment and become a source of racism and stigma – or indeed reinscribe existing racial and cultural stigmas. Shame and embarrassment, too, are at play at the cultural boundaries of intimacy. Likewise, Tavleen (Sikh) alluded to the absence of cultural intimacy with her ‘best’ friend:

Obviously, there are things that Asian women talk about . . . she would find it different . . . like the kind of jokes or the kinds of things that happen daily within the community . . . so there is that element . . . where I would think, well there’s no point talking to her about that . . .

Tavleen admitted that, gradually, she had learnt to compartmentalise what she shared while stressing that this had never been an issue in their almost five-decades long friendship: ‘or that she’s an anti-royalist and I love the royal family. Friendship is about respecting each other’s views.’ Yet respecting views and accepting different ideas is not the same as the bonding that at once creates and is constitutive of cultural intimacies. Yet something else was also involved here: it was important to Tavleen that the friends had a shared moral orientation. Their crucial values were not only those related to cultural experiences, but also concerned certain conservative values (e.g. a disapproval of sexual promiscuity) and a respect for tradition, not least since they were both born in Scotland in the 1950s. Sohail arrived in Scotland in the 1990s and his friendship was also similarly underpinned. He met his much older friend John in a professional context, at a ‘tumultuous period in his life’ and John had supported him. His over two-decade long intergenerational friendship was sustained despite age and religious differences because they shared a ‘moral compass’:

Being Muslim . . . there’s three or four things which are kind of socially inhibiting sometimes. So, we gel well because he’s the same . . . so for me, not drinking or extra-marital sexual relationships, or diet of pork and stuff.

These kinds of long-lasting friendships become value-sustaining. Seraj’s (Muslim) example highlights something different from the others discussed so far: that shared class experiences with all the values and interests they contain can also create deep and meaningful relational bonds. Seraj described (childhood) Asian friends, with whom he now felt he had little in common, as ‘not close’ and it was unlikely that he would share personal matters with them. His childhood friends were Asian ‘because of racism’. This changed at university where he had mostly White friends and ‘no experience of racism’. He lost touch with friends when family responsibilities and work commitments arrived, but reconnected as his children grew to adulthood. Still, he felt that his friendships with his White friends had ‘endured’ over those with Asian friends. Like him, his White friends were middle-class professionals, while his Asian friends had followed different paths (going into their parents’ businesses, having arranged marriages at young ages, etc.):

. . . whereas my mindset has moved on, theirs hasn’t . . . I have fond memories obviously of our childhood days. . . . I think it was that I got more into education and obviously education opens up the mind . . . unfortunately, a lot of my friends didn’t really progress into tertiary education. . . . So, their real life and context is developed from that, right, and is quite different from mine now. So, although we were friends . . . they’re fixed in their way of life in terms of what this society is . . . how discrimination works. . . . They have quite strong views on certain things, which I don’t necessarily share.

Seraj had experienced social mobility and his middle-class experiences were now different from his immigrant working-class life in childhood. With a change in class experiences, his friendships too changed. A shared worldview and crucially the relative absence of experienced racism were more defining than shared cultural background. If shared experience of racism amongst first-generation Asian children in Scottish schools had created and deepened certain intimacies, its subsequent absence could also be similarly defining. Seraj spoke of being subjected to racism throughout his life, yet at university experiences of racism had abated and he developed an openness to alternative experiences with White friends. With them there was belonging and he was no longer the excluded ‘other’.

Thus, shared values sustain and deepen friendships. At times these values may be specific to cultural communities and their moral frameworks but at others, values that cut across communities can also create binding attachments between friends. Cross-cultural intimacies, then, can be anchored by deeply held moral orientations that are not culturally specific.

Navigating trust

For many of my participants, male and female alike, a close friend was someone they could confide in. Confiding entailed sharing ‘the ups and downs of life’, being able to talk about ‘everything and anything’; ‘pouring your heart out’ and unburdening by talking about problems. Confiding as a friendship practice enabled understanding developed through ‘really knowing’ each other (Jamieson, 1998), receiving emotional support, advice and at times practical help. Confiding friendships are long-term friendships sustained by trust. As Jamieson (1998, p. 9) explains:

‘Really knowing’ is privileged knowledge to an inner self only permitted to those who are loved and trusted. Trust, faith that confidences will not be betrayed and privileged knowledge will not be used against the self, is . . . a. . . fundamental dimension of intimacy.

As revealing personal information makes visible a personal vulnerability, all intimate relationships involve negotiations of trust. Trust emerged as central not only in defining the practices of close friendship, but it signalled the degrees of intimacy in friendship and family relationships. For Rukaya (Muslim), a ‘best friend’ was someone who could be trusted to keep a secret. Rukaya had been handing money over to a friend as a way of saving up for her unmarried daughter and felt assured that if something was to happen to her, her friend would give her daughter the money: ‘I have not told my husband this, if I tell him, he will take it from me’, she said. Here, there is a comment on Rukaya’s conjugal relationship: that she could trust her friend with something that was life-defining more than her husband.

For others, a betrayal of trust sharpened the boundary between friends and family. Khalida (Muslim) shared how a close friend had ‘talked behind her back’ with other women from the community while she was in Pakistan. She retorted, ‘Ultimately, it is only your family that’s your own, they will come to your aid when you need them, while friends are just friends after all.’ This was a view shared by many participants that certain practices of intimacy, such as confiding, are appropriate only for family relationships. An often-repeated statement I heard was, ‘I have to make sure that it’s not going to go elsewhere’. Trust became especially crucial because the close-knit nature of diasporic communities amplified fears around personal information being divulged and, sometimes, this prevented the development of close within-community friendships, as in Gurkiran’s case. For Gurkiran (Sikh), language barriers had limited her friendships to those within her community. Her friendships with other women revolved around meeting for yoga classes run by a charity. Yet she made a conscious effort to not allow friendships to become intimate:

We talk, but we don’t do deep talk. . . . We do not speak about our families. . . . Neither do they do this, nor do I. It is just a simple friendship. Even my daughters are like that. . . . They understand their mother does not have a loose tongue. . . . There are many things about one’s family that one must keep secret. Right? Or else it can spread. Then even the reputation of the family suffers.

Gurkiran’s case highlights the darker side of cultural intimacy – how the family and community can be a source of comfort but also a social cage, with trust being the key vector here. These friendships are embedded within wider social structures but also within and across communities that have their own relational and moral frameworks. Practices of intimacy may, thus, conflict with community cohesion practices. Gurkiran experiences a burden as it is women who bear the responsibility for upholding their family’s status within the community; gender, thus, shaped her friendship practices. In fact, another Sikh participant told me that what initially drew her to a friendship with her White Scottish friend was ease around trust:

I could talk about everything and know that it was never going to come filtering back. Because with women in the community, there’s still that element of not wanting to open up. . . . It was about her not being related to anyone in the community.

Trust, in this friendship, was built on cultural difference because the community was experienced as caging. The friendship then became ‘multistranded’ (Spencer & Pahl, 2006, p. 69) over time: ‘Earlier on, it was more me talking about my things and she was the listening ear and giving me advice . . . but over the years, it has become more of a two-way thing.’ She valued reciprocity and constancy – that her friend had ‘always been there’ for her. A handful of male participants too felt constrained with regard to what they could share with those within their community. ‘No, nobody that I can trust’, a Scottish-born participant told me when I asked him if he has any Sikh friends. He added: ‘My friends are mostly White. Because in our community, when we have got friends, most of us are related in one way or another.’ He draws attention to the closely interlinked nature of diasporic communities where gossip may travel fast. For him, vulnerability and therefore trust could be allowed only with cultural outsiders.

Trust was not limited to a fear of betrayal of secrets, however. A different depth of trust is suggested by Zoya (Muslim), who met her two closest friends at an Eid gathering when she first arrived in Scotland over two decades ago. Between them, she felt she could be ‘really open’ with only one friend. About her, Zoya said: ‘I know how people are connected with their families. If a person can tell you the flaws of their children, then they are being honest with you and they deserve honesty too.’ This friend could be trusted because she was open to feeling and sharing her shame by criticising those most dear to her with her friend. Showing vulnerability was both a path to and a stabilising practice of intimacy. Similarly, Sohail (Muslim) told me: ‘a friend-friend, who you share your soul with, is not something that you do with hundreds of people’. That is, with trust comes emotional security and the assurance that even the weakest parts of your innermost self will be safe with a friend.

For others, another even deeper level of trust meant showing vulnerability occasioned by ill-health and allowing friends to provide practical care. Sukhman (Sikh) dropped food off for her friends during episodes of illness. While, in the following examples, care was provided by and to cross-cultural friends. Friends became an important source of practical support, especially for the unpartnered. A divorced male Sikh participant received care from a female White friend following hospitalisation. Similarly, Nimrat (Sikh), also divorced, shared her experience of being supported by her White friends following a surgery:

You have to wear these tights in the morning and you can’t get them on yourself, so if my son and my daughter couldn’t help, then my friends used to come around and do it. Cleaning, make tea for you, make food at home and then bring it . . . just sitting with me. . . . Your friendship grows closer if you let your friends help you.

Amanat (Sikh) had been providing longer-term support to a White friend she met through a disability organisation: ‘She’s been in the same boat as me, so she can relate.’ Their shared vulnerability had nurtured a deep intimacy. She added:

. . . she’s on her own, totally on her own, she has no family and she’s in a wheelchair . . . no ability for any grips of her hands. . . . So, what I did is, whatever food we make, we take it to her. So, she wouldn’t have just ready-made meals, that’s all she used to have . . . and drop shopping off . . . just small things that could change things for her.

Caduff (2019) writes: ‘To bring comfort into something that’s uncomfortable, to make bearable what’s unbearable, is the aim of care . . . but care is not always warm. . . . In fact, care is often difficult’ for those who require, receive and provide it (p. 789). To allow oneself to be cared for is to acknowledge that our ability to care for ourselves is compromised. It is to become more aware of our vulnerabilities and to admit dependency. Asking for and accepting care, then, requires a deep trust: that expectation and asymmetrical reliance – the receiving but not giving of care – will not undermine the friendship, with reciprocity being a key dimension of friendship (Rawlins, 2004). Intimacy, thus, both allows for and is the product of making open deep fragilities.

In inviting a friend into the home – an intimate space – we see a different dimension of trust that implies a different depth of friendship. As food is highly significant both in daily life and discourse in South Asia (Appadurai, 1981) and in diasporic contexts acquires particular significance as a marker of ethnic identity and cultural continuity (Bradby, 2002), sharing food in the home came up in multiple accounts as an important practice of friendship. Speaking of her four-decades long friendship with her Muslim friend, Jaspreet (Sikh) said:

Earlier on, she used to come to the house and whatever she wanted to eat, I used to make it for her. She used to bring food too. Now we will go in each other’s kitchen and pick up the food and just eat . . .

Ordinarily, food etiquette would require food to be served to a friend, yet, here, friends have the freedom to enter different spaces of each other’s homes and serve themselves, just like family. Moreover, in this Sikh–Muslim friendship, because of religious differences some of the food shared would be different (halal/non-halal) and arrangements would have to be made to accommodate this. Here, access to each other’s kitchen despite differences in rules governing what can be shared illustrates the navigation of a religious boundary where embodied difference is seen, respected and accommodated.

For others, trust was built on cultural sameness with the home being a site for nuanced boundary navigations. As the home becomes ‘a window into the “private” self’ (Bowlby, 2011, pp. 616–617), intimacy is deepened by inviting a friend in but it is also a prerequisite for the invitation. For Nisma, who is Muslim, drinking was a barrier in her attending social gatherings at her White friends’ homes, yet neither did she invite them into her home. Her ‘very best friends’ were other Pakistani women with whom she felt ‘emotionally close’:

. . . because we go to each other’s houses. We go out, we do. . . . I like doing long drives, so I take them out. . . . You can talk, you can share . . . but with the goriya [White women] we don’t do that much. It’s just at work.

Like Nisma, Sukhman (Sikh) also had White friends through her work, yet even though her interactions with these friends extended beyond the workplace and she intended to maintain these relationships post-retirement, the home, as a boundary of the intimate, was a threshold that was never crossed:

I would meet them outside . . . it’s not the same as the other [Asian] friends, if you see what I mean . . . although they never came to my house, they were very good friends all day, you see. So, we would go out at least once a week either for a coffee or lunch and have a chat and if there was a reason I was upset, they were very supportive. . . . and sometimes all you need is to talk to somebody and they were there.

For Sukhman, too, the home was a space of friendship for ‘very close friends’, only those on one side of the cultural boundary – Sikh women she had known since she first moved to Scotland. These were longstanding friendships forged through her husband’s family friends. They had ‘sort of grown together’; those she could call anytime if she needed help or to talk. With them, there was deep knowing and acceptance of each other’s idiosyncrasies. Thus, for Nisma and Sukhman alike, the home was a trust threshold crossed only by the most intimate, here, within-community friends.

Trust, then, is more profound than a fear of betrayal of confidences. Trust meant being able to share one’s deepest shame; to feel emotionally safe in one’s weakest moments; to be able to be fragile in one’s failings and in sickness and to allow oneself to be cared for. Vulnerability in these forms built and deepened intimacy and was the basis of trust in within-community and cross-cultural friendships alike. I now move on to discuss some of the difficult navigations involved in sustaining cross-cultural friendships.

Navigating racialisation and exclusion

Some, like Humera (Muslim), mentioned tensions surfacing in their friendships over events in South Asia. She talked about how the growing incidents of violence against Muslims in contemporary India since the Hindu nationalist party came to be power (in 2014) had led to some uneasy conversations with a friend:

I’ve got a Hindu friend who is always going on about how good the BJP [the ruling party] is and doesn’t acknowledge what has happened to Muslims in India. I find myself getting irritated but because I have known this friend for decades, I try to maintain that relationship.

Humera needed (religious) difference to be seen and acknowledged. She said that at an earlier life-stage such friends would have been ‘dumped’, but she found this difficult as she aged. Carol Smart et al. (2012) argue that enduring friendships can be personally troubling and individuals are faced with practical and moral dilemmas when they consider ending a friendship. Dropping ‘difficult friendships’, notwithstanding ‘irritations, disappointments, boredom and even some antagonisms’, is not easy because friendships are crucial to self-identity and provide ontological security (pp. 92, 95). Humera had continued to spend time with, offer practical help, etc. to her friend. This experience had not altered their routine practices of intimacy. For her, a longstanding friendship justified tolerance because the friendship had deepened over time and was more valuable than a falling out over an argument. Humera navigated competing values as the friendship felt more precious as she aged, given the solitude and loneliness that accompanies old age and its concomitant frailties. Her example highlights the importance of recognising that the life-course changes constraints and opportunities for friendship and also modifies agency. This Hindu–Muslim friendship had developed from a shared interest in race relations in Britain. While the social/religious boundary had always been constitutive to the workings of this friendship, it now needed a different and more reflexive kind of navigation as the wider social imaginaries between Hindus and Muslims became more geopolitically salient.

For Zainab (Muslim), by contrast, we see not just tolerance but an attempt at rationalising her friends’ prejudices:

It’s just happened that all my friends are White. At first, some of them were like, ‘we don’t like Asians, but you’re alright’. And I’m like, what do you mean by you don’t like Asians, I’m Asian. Well maybe it starts off as racist . . . because in the media it’s all culture . . . religion, it’s got a bad name so when I share it with them, they’re like, ‘that’s alright’. . . . Oh yes, definitely [they have changed their opinions about Asians], but you’ve got to remember that people are dressed in Asian clothing and they see me in western all the time . . . that will be totally different. They’re not going to engage with them. . . . It’s a fear rather than racism. . . . And what about racism in the Asian community? My mum was anti-Sikh, anti-Hindu, anti-Jewish . . .

Zainab initially challenges her friends’ racism and then engages in the work of explaining and defending her religion. As Redclift et al. (2022) note, narratives of post-racial harmony and conviviality obscure the labour required in everyday interactions of those racialised vis-a-vis white normativity. As they navigate othering, they shoulder an uneven burden to ‘educate, understand and put at ease those not racialised as “different”’ (p. 1160). Here we see how dress, as a visible marker of cultural difference, is taken as evidence of a refusal by minority communities to ‘blend in’ and thereby justify othering. Zainab employs the trope of fear that underpins much racism. She makes a moral equivalence between the prejudice expressed by her White friends and that expressed by a family member – both are racialising by assigning negative meanings to religious or cultural differences. Zainab described herself as a ‘black sheep’ in the Pakistani community as she had not conformed to its gendered expectations. Dominant in her account were feelings of acceptance by her White friends, unlike the challenges she experienced in her family and community. ‘In friendship, it doesn’t really matter where anybody comes from, what matters is kindness’, she said. This was value-clarifying for her.

Unlike Zainab, Aziza (Muslim) illustrates that navigating differences might involve holding back and remaining silent:

When I was younger, I wanted to make friends with people that were White because you would feel that you were accepted in this society. Now I just make friends with people that are nice, I have something in common with. The issue of them being White doesn’t really come up, unless they’ve said something or made a comment.

Aziza narrated a conversation with her White middle-class friend about racism:

I didn’t [respond]. I mean, she’s not going to get it. . . . That relationship, she’s very keen to have me as a friend because it looks good for her. That she’s very eclectic with her friends. . . . [Her other friends are] all Hippie type White people. . . . I have been to parties at her house and I am the only Brown person there. She’s been very keen to have me at the party but then spends most of her time talking to everybody else. When it’s just me and her it’s fine. . . . I don’t feel good about it but that’s only one side of it. She is a lovely person, she’s well-educated and we have good conversations . . . I’ve learnt a lot from her. . . . She initiated the friendship and has kept it going.

In her youth, Aziza was driven by a desire to belong; a desire that emerged from an understanding of her place within a racialised social order. But at this life-stage, we see a change in her values and hence her friendships. Aziza felt that she could not say to her friend that she was failing to interrogate her White privilege. As they had been friends for over two decades, she judged that this required careful navigation. Writing in the American context, Elijah Anderson (2022) conceptualises ‘White space’ as ‘a perceptual category that assumes a particular space to be predominantly White’ (p. 14). ‘White space’ is ‘where many social rewards originate’, including the promise of acceptance (p. 19). Aziza sees herself as being the token person of colour in her friend’s home – a ‘White space’ wherein ‘small behaviours’ work to subtly remind her that she does not really belong (p. 196). Yet, what we also see here is the insinuation that for her White friend, their friendship served to validate a cosmopolitan middle-class self-identity. Importantly, it gestures at the ways in which Whiteness too is embodied and experienced (cf. Ahmed, 2007; Nayak, 2007). It also illustrates how Whiteness plays out in different forms of emotional work: we might ask if Aziza’s White friend is aware of and reflexive about how Aziza, as the only person of colour, might experience a kind of ‘double-consciousness’ (Du Bois, 1903/2007) – that is, how her own racial embodiment felt (cf. Fanon, 1952/2021). It is also evidence of the power imbalances in her cross-cultural friendship and its practices of cultural intimacy. Du Bois viewed this as a ‘purposeful ignorance’ of White people and their inability to see the social world in its entirety (Itzigsohn & Brown, 2020, p. 46). Consequently, Aziza feels herself alone in carrying the burden of navigating this racial boundary in their friendship. She felt pessimistic about change: ‘I think it’s just individuals having these [cross-cultural] relationships and even there, the media can change your perspective so quickly.’

Like Zainab, Aziza draws attention to how Islamophobic media reporting influences and perpetuates racism towards Muslims (see Hopkins, 2021, pp. 38–40). Here we see how wider racial hierarchies come to shape this friendship: she hints that an event (e.g. a terrorist attack) could mean that her friend may come to assign significance to her Muslim identity, with the boundaries of the friendship becoming sensitive and needing to be renegotiated. Aziza also pointed out that a cross-cultural friendship does not diminish the possibility of racism from others; and for a White person having a non-White friend does not equate with a wider acceptance of all others from racialised communities, as is evident in Zainab’s example (see also Back, 1996, pp. 53, 96). Aziza suggested that it takes self-reflexive awareness of racism for the White person in a cross-cultural relationship to effect change.

For Charandeep (Sikh), sustaining some friendships was not possible. He described an incident involving a Sikh friend he had known for over three decades. The friends fell out. ‘He called me a wee midget black bastard to a common friend. This is an apna [one’s own – someone of the same community (emphasis his)] calling me this’, he added. This harmful relational practice was experienced as degrading and undermined the friendship. By contrast, for Charandeep his White friend Paul was the most trustworthy friend and he valued Paul’s openness and loyalty, describing him as ‘a brother from another mother’. The friends met as teenagers. Paul came from ‘a rough part of X’ (indicating a working-class area of the city with a reputation for crime), Charandeep told me:

I was not being disparaging or disrespectful. We weren’t posh or anything . . . we had a rough side to us as well. . . . At that age, we were naughty boys. We would be out doing things, stealing, you know . . . getting up to all sorts . . . we both thought the same, done the kind of same things . . . we just kind of fell into . . . a friendship that’s grown from there.

As Pattillo-McCoy (1999) notes, ‘Adolescence is colour-blind in its demand for excitement and its propensities to test boundaries’ (p. 206). Such boundary testing had then generated bonding and feelings of togetherness but what made their friendship last was that Charandeep’s friend had always been there for him, especially during critical life-changes such as the estrangement of siblings, divorce, and relationships with other friends souring. Paul had provided ‘continuity’, acting as a ‘biographical anchor’ (Spencer & Pahl, 2006, p. 56). There had also been important similarities in their life-experiences. Paul had embraced difference by adopting elements of Sikh identity and had Charandeep’s name tattooed on his arm. Charandeep added:

. . . a couple of years ago Paul says to me, ‘What have you thought about your ashes?’ . . . and then he said, ‘Well why don’t we . . . whoever goes first, the other one keeps the ashes and when the second one goes, we mix the ashes together.’ And I said, we’ll put half at Anandpur Sahib [a sacred place for Sikhs in Punjab, India] and half somewhere in Scotland.

In his work in London, Les Back (2013) analyses how the body becomes ‘a medium and a fleshy canvas through and on which belonging and structures of feeling are expressed’ (p. 75). He notes that a particularity of White working-class tattooing is that names of family members and lovers are written on the skin. These names are often ‘the embodiment of filial love and kinship’ (p. 82). In Paul’s tattoo, we see trust inscribed on the skin. His tattoo is a public statement of the permanence and depth of the bond between friends and their commitment to nurturing a shared life despite racial boundaries. In Charandeep’s case, embodied (racial) difference is seen and becomes meaningful in this friendship, but for the others included above, their navigations of racialisation and exclusion are at times challenging and illustrate the darker aspects of these cross-cultural friendships.

Conclusion

An empirical focus on friendships – particularly those that endure and cross cultural communities – illustrates the importance of these friendships for older South Asian communities, which remain under-researched and under-theorised. My data suggest that cultural or racial difference is not contingent to these friendships but rather inherently constitutive of relationships. Given this, deep value-navigations cultivate and sustain these long-term friendships. Deeply shared values in a friendship could stem from and reinscribe the moral frameworks of a cultural community; but these deeper values could also cut across cultural differences and sometimes allow an escape from challenges within communities. Within these diasporic communities, trust could be built upon and invoke shared cultural intimacy (e.g. sharing only with those from the community because sharing with cultural outsiders could become a source of shame and stigma); but it could also be constituted around cultural differences (e.g. confiding in cultural outsiders because of fear of gossip or moral caging from within the community). Spaces (such as the home) could serve as a trust threshold around which the boundaries of intimacy and cultural boundaries could be simultaneously negotiated.

Trust is a key dimension of intimacy (Jamieson, 1998). Additionally, my data suggest that what matters, too, is the depth of trust. Trust was not only built on the assurance that confidences or secrets would not be betrayed. In fact, deeper dimensions of trust also emerged: in some of these long-term friendships, trust and vulnerability went hand in hand, and a willingness to open one’s most profound fragilities and vulnerabilities to a friend both reflected and deepened the depth of intimacy in the friendship. This, too, cut across communities. Moreover, in those friendships that crossed community boundaries, difference was clearly seen, valued and embraced. It was folded into their practices of intimacy. Still, I have also attended to the darker side of these cross-cultural friendships: the wider realities of racism and sectarianism, both in Scotland and abroad, had to be navigated, and sometimes barely perceptible experiences of racialisation were similarly negotiated within the friendships. Despite these harmful relational practices, my participants routinely did the hard work of (up)keeping these friendships. The duration and history of the relationship, as well as the lived realities of an older age/life-course stage, made the friendships more valuable and resonant, and the commitments to keeping them deeper. That these cross-cultural friendships are durable perhaps offers hope in relation to possibilities for wider social change if friendships can act as a ‘social glue’ (Spencer & Pahl, 2006).

On the basis of these empirical findings, then, I offer a preliminary framework for thinking about friendships that involve cultural differences. The point of first departure must be that these friendships are always socially situated, meaning that cultural differences are both individually embodied and socially embedded. While existing work attends to how friendship relations are shaped by social and ethnic differences, and to how these are managed within friendships (Pellandini-Simányi, 2017; Vincent et al., 2018), we might attend more carefully to the complex ways in which these friendships are constituted around and through cultural differences.

For Jamieson, intimacy is built through an assemblage of practices but that the substance of these must be derived from empirical research on how people conduct themselves within intimate relationships (Jamieson, 2011, p. 3). My work speaks to Jamieson’s call by retrieving some of the inner workings of cross-cultural relationships, and I suggest that the deep value-navigations that sustain these friendships essentially extend the repertoire of practices outlined in Jamieson’s framework (e.g. spending time with, practically caring for, feeling attachment to).

My data affirm that friendships that cross cultural boundaries, and those that do not, are relationally navigated and so are their practices of intimacy. Cultural/racial difference is not transcended but embodied (by the friends), with the friendships themselves being embedded within wider racial and socio-cultural hierarchies. Extending Jamieson’s framework, I argue that practices of intimacy are always enacted by embodied cultural selves. While this applies to all friendships, its significance is amplified in cross-cultural friendships that require distinctive negotiations. If this extension of Jamieson’s work better allows us to see the ways in which people ‘do’ intimacy, then the practices of cultural intimacy that sustain decades-long friendships involve subtle, complex and difficult navigations of even more complex cultural, religious and racial boundaries.