Friendship and partner choice in rural Colombia

Abstract

Friendship is a recurring feature of human sociality. Extant evidence has highlighted several axes upon which the formation and maintenance of friendships rest, and has emphasised the importance of market-like mechanisms and preferential assortment in such dynamics. Such evidence has emerged from qualitative ethnographic descriptions, and observational or experimental case studies in relatively homogeneous samples from Western and industrialised settings. Here, we provide one of the first empirical evaluations of the structure of friendship networks in a rural subsistence setting. We collected individual-level friendship network data, and detailed economic and demographic information from individuals four communities in rural Colombia (𝑁 = 470). We analyse these data using a combined social relations and stochastic block model. Our results highlight the importance of preferential assortment on the basis of several socio-demographic traits in all study communities. The extent to which friendship and social support networks overlap appears to vary considerably across communities, with greater overlap being observed in more impoverished areas. Similarly, the extent of wealth homophily was greater in more impoverished areas. Such findings suggest that variation in the axes upon which friendship rests may be affected by community-level variation in economic and demographic composition.

The interdependence of relational and material wealth inequality in Pemba, Zanzibar

“…Observable differences in material wealth may have positive, negative, or no clear association with relational wealth, and the materially wealthy may or may not chose to preferentially associate. In communities where there is increasing focus on defending private resources, and consequently less reliance on social support, wealthier individuals may be particularly selective about engaging in certain types of relationships [22]. They may do this not only to protect their material wealth, but also to benefit from ties with others in possession of similarly important material, informational or social resources [20].…”

“…In some contexts, wealthier individuals may be motivated to form asymmetrical patron-client relationships [22,[64][65][66], or be well-positioned to broker relationships between other group members [67][68][69][70]. This is because they are either in a position to extract resources from others, and/or have disproportionate control over resources that other group members lack.…”

“…Different types of relational wealth may have different associations with material wealth. For instance, individuals may preferentially form certain types of relationships with those similar to themselves in material wealth (i.e., wealth homophily), as such relationships would be considered mutually benefi-cial (e.g., with higher chances of reciprocity), and this assortment by material wealth could increase material wealth inequality [19][20][21][22]. Antithetically, other types of relationships could preferentially form between individuals without considerations of material wealth-or between individuals of different wealth-and could act to reduce differences in wealth [20,23,24].…”