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

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.