Yoga between Friends: an Ethnographic Exploration of an Enduring, Flexible Friendship

This research project uses friendship ethnography interviews to show how yoga cements friendship within a single friendship pair. In exploring a practice that binds friendship, research was undertaken with participants with whom the primary researcher is already acquainted. Situating the research amongst friends, treating participants according to the ethics of friendship, draws us closer to an understanding of their bonds. The use of friendship ethnography enables the research to come closer to the non-verbal aspects of friendships that epitomize intimacy. The authors argue that friendships are practice-based, routinized and emplaced phenomena.


Varieties of friendship
Friends can be defined as somebody to talk to, to depend on and rely on for help, support, and caring, and to have fun and enjoy doing things with Rawlins [1]. A friendship is often based as much on something frequently done with another person [2,3], rather than on an emotionally binding strength of affect.
Indeed, a friendship may even depend on those practices that leads to its formation.
Friends come and stay together primarily through common interests, a sense of alliance and emotional affiliation [3]. Friends have been referred to as families we choose [4], or elective kin [5]. They can differ in type and vary in levels of intensity [5,6].
They may be simple friendships, being based on sharing a single activity, whose partners rarely meet outside of these contexts, leading to defining terms such as 'work-friend', 'church friend', 'drinking pal' or 'school friend'. Friendships can also bemultistranded affairs, based on soul-mate bonding as well as the sharing of a specific practice. Here, one respondent reflects on such a multi-stranded bond.
Friendship for me has several different levels. The best are 'close friends' -those people who, usually, I have known for a long time, and with whom I have a shared history. Heaphy & Davies [6] Multi-level friendships may be bound into a shared history, with friends who have had good and bad times together. In such relationships, interconnectedness can comprise experiences that include "support, reciprocity, commonality, a feeling of kinship and/or being family-like" [6]. This level of friendship goes beyond one defining practice or shared belief. Friendship bonds can also be part of broad webs, set within wider occupational, leisure, or neighbourhood groups. Such interconnections bring friendship bonds closer to family ties in resemblance.
These varieties of friendship highlight the rootedness of interpersonal bonds in shared experience, yielding relationships with kin-like obligation, care, longevity, and the interdependency of wider webs of relations. In some cases, these long-term friendships may engender greater longevity than often exists in families and sexual relations Unwilling to be perceived as social chameleons flitting from one job or partner to another, men and Journal of Yoga and Physiotherapy at different times. Globally, there are many areas and practices where pairs of individuals work together for many year, such as in business, and this can yield long-term friendships. Some bonds of friendship are particularly intense when they offer support at times of transition, like bereavement or birth [8].
Close friends are those who have shared my good and bad times, and I have theirs. Heaphy & Davies [6] yet friendships are still more binding when they incorporate present, mundane routines and broader webs of obligation, with regular opportunities to catch up and top up current friendship experiences. We share the same interests and sense of humor and we meet on a regular basis. These people I have known for over 20 years [6].
Let us end this introduction by considering a more characteristic of friendship which is especially concerning for ethnographic researchers; namely, its parallels with ethnographic fieldwork. Both practices involve gaining entry into another's space, negotiating roles, the incremental deepening of ties, and the learning of new interaction codes [3]. Friendship and fieldwork both bring dilemmas of 'getting out' [9] when the time has come to end the entanglement.
In view of these parallels, the research presented in this paper explores bonds that hold a particular friendship together using a fieldwork technique that acknowledges the family-like resemblances that exist between both friendship and research ties. Rather than studying individuals from afar [10], in a style that is often called participant observation, it makes sense here to set friendship and fieldwork side by side. Hence, the decision has been made interrupt the tendency to study friendship from a distance, and to study it amongst friends, according to the dialogical ethics of friendship [11]. With this in mind, the aim of this paper is to explore, using friendship ethnography, explore the nature of friendship bonds in one friendship pair. conversation, everyday involvement, compassion, generosity, and 'hanging out' [3]. Besides collecting data through interviews, the researcher engages in friendship practices with participants.

Friendship ethnography
Through this process, the relational dynamics of researcher, participant, and friend grows increasingly entangled. Tillman [3], in exploring an LGBT community, came to know her respondents interpersonally and culturally, achieving the opportunity to give compassion and devotion, to experience them emotionally and spiritually. The research involved simultaneously talking, sharing activities, exchanging material, writing and exchanging views. Thus, researcher-friendship roles wove together, each deepening the other. We argue that whilst all participants may not be considered as friends, we cannot afford to treat them as distant others either.
Friendship ethnography develops over months or years [8] and often rely on serendipity, rather than outright planning [12]; as friendships do. The method is less utilitarian than the researcher-participant relationship that prevails in traditional ethnographic work. Friendship ethnography is used to get to know others in meaningful, sustained ways [2,10,13]. It disrupts traditional unequal power relations between researchers and participants, reducing hierarchical separations.
Whilst ethical practices were adhered to for the present study, according to the ethical practices recommended by our university and our professional body, the nature of the friendship ethnography researcher-participant dynamic also draws on an ethics of care [14,15]. Participants who know that a researcher has an emotional link, are more likely to know that their confidences will not be breached, and that their interests

Journal of Yoga and Physiotherapy
report emergent themes which were derived from thematic analysis of interview transcripts [17]. illustrating the nature of the friendship bonds as they emerged from yoga practice.

Friendships as practice
Friendship ties are often predicated on practices that bring people together, rather than on mere affection or personal empathy [3]. We may like our friends, but liking alone may not be enough for friendship. Anne and Louise met through the yoga practice that prevails in the research; yoga Louise: We met through the yoga didn't we and we just  As well as being illustrated by participants' quotes, the practice-based nature of this friendship is evidenced through embodiment and the senses.

Friendships in improvised places
This friendship bond has been enacted in improvised spaces that were designed for other purposes. The pair is 'making do', transforming bedrooms and living rooms into meaningful friendship places. Here, Anne explains how she and Louise ritually turn their bedrooms into yoga spaces Anne: You need a reasonable amount of space, but it does mean preparing the space, which is fine. I quite enjoy preparing the room because it's all part of the ritual Friendship spaces are performed and transformed into being, becoming endowed with additional meaning through repetitive ritual [18]. Through regular practice, the pairs generate shared friendship narratives that are inseparable from the improvised spaces where they are played out. Louise reflects here on the longevity of her bond with Anne as a function of the time they have shared on the mat space Louise: I think we've been doing it seventeen-eighteen years.
So that's 700 weeks, two hours a week; 1400 hours.
That's a lot of time on the mat.
Narratives emerging from spaces that are shared, especially by female friends, have been referred to as containment stories [19]. These stories emphasise the role of shared proximity in the production of relational experience through shared bodily practice [20]. Hanson & Pratt [19] note the potential for female

Journal of Yoga and Physiotherapy
friendships for transforming spaces into sites of resistance and aspiration. Gendered identities, including aspirations and desires, are fully embedded in -and indeed inconceivable apart from -place [19].
Historically, women's spatial mobility has been limited, choices of living and working spaces curtailed [20]. The transformation of mundane or domestic space (bedrooms, living rooms, cars) into places of companionship, wellbeing, creativity and collaboration reveals an assertive place making that draws on routine practice. Central to this construction of emplaced meaning is the notion that shared spaces are safe places to talk [20].

Conclusion and Discussion
This project explores the nature of friendship using a method that incorporates the ethics of friendship [13]. This enabled the collection of rich, multisensory data that highlights three themes. It is argued here that the present research has shown friendship to be practice-based, routinized, and emplaced.
These themes resonate with the work of other researchers, yet they also raised further questions. Our first theme, emphasizing friendship as a practice based phenomenon, takes us beyond Rawlins [1] definition of friendship as primarily a means of support and care. Rather, like Tillman [3], the friendship explored here depended on routine activity [6,21]. It is acknowledged here that the explicit aims of Louise and Anne's meetings were not to practice friendship, but to practice yoga and enhance wellbeing from Ashtanga practice. Nevertheless, there is clear evidence from our interviews that sustained yoga practice has sustained practice based friendship along the way.
Likewise, Louise and Anne's regular meetings led to our finding about the routine, mundane nature of friendship bonds, and in turn to neglect another characteristic of friendship that has been noted elsewhere; namely, its sporadic, life-event based nature [8]. The next theme, concerning spaces of friendship, showed that our female friendship pair were left to transform

Conclusion
To conclude, we must consider the potential limitations and pitfalls facing the qualitative researcher in the form of the obligations of researcher and friend, and how these pitfalls were addressed.
Firstly, whilst striving to maintain existing friendship relationships there remains a professional obligation to offer a full account to participants. Such pitfalls are characteristic of the more equal power balance that exists in friendship ethnography, compared with more traditional fieldwork methods. The equity of power and heightened reciprocity of friendship ethnography are exemplified by an obligation to return outputs to the participants for critique. Tillman [3] took her writings back to her community of study for comment. Follow-up interviews were conducted, inviting reflections.
Second, we note the challenge of maintaining two modes of communication (researcher and friend). Negotiating boundaries is part of all human relations, including research related-baseed ones [22]. Keeping too much distance can compromise rapport.
Too much proximity can endanger the research by producing a merger with a participant. Tillman [3] articulates the dilemma.
Historically, researchers and participants in social science have been knottily entangled [10]. Indeed, the very claim of a researcher to investigate and write about an 'other' person is to deny, rather than engage with, hyphens of inter-subjectivity that bind us all together. We argue here that it is beneficial to acknowledge and work this hyphen by stepping across the line that divides us from our research participants. We concur with Fine [10], who argues that operating overtly across boundaries between researchers and participants yields rich data .