The cultural grounding of closeness and intimacy

The purpose of this chapter is to consider closeness and intimacy from a cultural perspective. Although popular understandings equate a cultural perspectivewith exploration of diversity, the goal of the chapter is not to describe how closeness and intimacy vary across cultures.1 Instead, the goal is to illuminate a more general process that is typically invisible in mainstream accounts: the extent to which observed patterns of closeness and intimacy are not “just natural”, but are instead grounded in particular cultural worlds.