Caring with and ‘real’ friendship among Zambia’s mineworkers

This commentary first considers how Chan and Ho’s call for an analysis of friendship and for the productive nature of ‘caring with’ would have enhanced my previous work with Zambian mining unionists. It reflects on times when, without a literature on friendship, I possibly over-attributed unionists’ amity and their ‘caring with’ to their tactical self-interest. After this, I use the experiences of these unionists to tease out the relationship between ‘friendship’ and ‘caring with’. I argue that across many cultures, and certainly among Zambian miners, there exists a difference between the pleasure of spending time with others, and a deeper set of obligations, entitlements and resource sharing, with the latter constituting a ‘deep friendship’.