Comparing convivialities: Dreams and realities of living-with-difference

Convivial collectivities

One of the earliest social scientific proposals surrounding conviviality, and one of the most influential, is Ivan Illich’s (1973) ‘Tools for Conviviality’. For him, social tools, such as social institutions, could be fashioned in a way to help people live compatibly in complex social systems. The ‘convivial society’ of Illich is such a political arrangement which guarantees the protection of survival, justice and self-defined work. Illich’s vision is rooted in his experience as a priest with a strong critique of the principle of maximal rationality. In an industrial society, Illich saw maximal rationality as a source of frustration and emotional instability for people. A convivial order is thus for him a post-industrial one, the model for a future that all societies could implement in their own, localized way.

Although the key element of Illich’s proposal is the notion of ‘tools’, he failed to specify its meaning clearly. Ideas, institutions and machines are equally tools for him. Convivial tools, according to Illich (1973: 27), promote learning, sociality, community and autonomous and creative intercourse among persons. He gives the example of a telephone, which makes communication between people possible while each individual can maintain control over it. More broadly, Illich saw the potential for modern tools of communication, if applied critically, to radically restructure societies. He foresaw the great role new media technologies may take in the process of democratization of societies, and this made his work attractive to a wide variety of followers. Much attention was dedicated, for example, to ‘convivial tools’ in the alternative technology movement (Hollick, 1982; Mitcham, 1991) which extended the notion of tools to include food self-sufficiency, earth-friendly home construction or new energy resources (Borremans, 1978; cf. Hoinacki and Mitcham, 2002). The authors concerned with media ecology, participatory media or complex systems of modern communication technologies often relate to Illich when considering the workings of such systems on human interactions, structures of collectivity or the rise of civil society (see Ameripour et al., 2010; Ells, 2009; Gauntlett, 2009; Martin, 1998); others consider the possibilities new media offer towards education for conviviality (Kahn and Kellner, 2007). Here, conviviality emerges as a practice of learning from learners, as opposed to being prescribed by the teacher, constituting a democratic, interdependent community of learners (Sipitakiat, 2001). This usage relates to Polanyi’s (1958) understanding of community as sharing of passion and experience of knowledge (also see Nagy, 1992; Norton, 1975).

Illich’s work on conviviality has been receipted punctually, often in combination with his proposals for new education (Illich, 1971). The largely unused potential of his work pertains to the holistic approach to human existence in complex systems that include other humans as well as natural and artificial environments; here, some objects and technologies serve as intermediaries that change the quality of human relations and possibilities for sociality and collectivity (Boisvert, 2010). Without reference to Illich, the concern with material settings for more conviviality is reflected in the works of urban planners and human geographers, discussed below. Illich’s ideas were picked up by anthropologists Overing and Passes (2000) who translated his notion of ‘convivial society’ into the context of Amazonia. Their collection of articles is linked through the notion of convivial social tools such as beliefs, concepts and behaviours governing Amazonian society. Overing and Passes (2000) show that the convivial collectivity is an achievement; it requires constant effort. At the same time, however, they suggest that conviviality is a guiding principle, an intrinsic ethical and aesthetic value, for Amazonian people.

Recently, authors concerned with convivial social settings draw more frequently from Paul Gilroy’s (2004) critique of multicultural Britain. Central to Gilroy is the concern to elevate ‘conviviality’, which in popular discourse means merely ‘living together’, into a theoretical concept that can be regarded as an alternative to multiculturalism. For him, the latter notion has broken down politically as it arrives from a ‘world of racial hierarchy’ in which being human is not enough to qualify for recognition (Gilroy, 2006) He distinguishes between multiculturalism and ‘multiculture’, the process of cohabitation and interaction as an ordinary feature of social life. Multiculture is characterized by a convivial mode of interaction in which differences have to be negotiated in real time. ‘Conviviality’, writes Gilroy (2006),

is a social pattern in which different metropolitan groups dwell in close proximity but where their racial, linguistic and religious particularities do not – as the logic of ethnic absolutism suggests they must – add up to discontinuities of experience or insuperable problems of communication. (p. 27)

For Gilroy (2004), convivial culture renders racial and ethnic differences unremarkable: they become ordinary. Instead, people ‘discover that the things which really divide them are much more profound: taste, lifestyles, leisure preferences’ (pp. 39–40).

At various points in his work, Gilroy chooses to speak of ‘conviviality’ instead of ‘cosmopolitanism’ (for the discussion of the differences between the two terms, see also Morawska and Freitag, this volume). Cosmopolitanism, according to Gilroy (2004: 4), retains imperialist traces; it was entangled with the expansion of Europeans into new territories and comprised ‘by consolidation and management of the resulting imperial orders’ (for further discussion along these lines, see Van der Veer, 2002; Bhambra, 2011; Mignolo, 2011; for a similar critique of racism in Kant’s cosmopolitanism, see Muthu, 2003; Kleingeld, 2007). Gilroy thus problematizes the existence of intercultural relationships and expresses the preference for the more dynamic notion of identification which highlights mobility and contingency rather than categorical fixity. However, he remains inconsistent in both the usages of the term he criticizes, as well in the argument for rejecting the term (Knowles, 2007). Confusingly, Gilroy depicts convivial carnival gatherings on the streets as ‘cosmopolis’ (Gilroy, 2006: 28) and, even more bewilderingly, introduces the notion of ‘convivial cosmopolitanism’ (Gilroy, 2004).

Gilroy’s preference for ‘conviviality’ in the light of his (and others’) critique of ‘cosmopolitanism’ seems justified, but it needs further elaboration. There is, of course, a tremendous variety of approaches, understandings and interpretations of the notion of ‘cosmopolitanism’ (see, for instance, Brown and Held, 2010; Delanty, 2012; Rovisco and Nowicka, 2011; Vertovec and Cohen, 2002). Common to many views on cosmopolitanism is an intrinsic ‘political’ dimension. This does not necessarily entail politics as an institutional order but rather ‘small “p” politics’, or orientations, attitudes and actions aimed at establishing a more just, equal condition for all regardless of differences. Whether based on the ancient Cynic or Stoic commitment to helping human beings as such (beyond the loyalties of the polis), the Kantian view of cosmopolitan rights, or contemporary philosophical reflections concerning foreign others, cosmopolitanism is concerned with regulating relations between subjects that occupy fixed and unequal positions. Cosmopolitan moral politics can be articulated in institutional settings but also in ordinary ways of thinking and acting (Rovisco and Nowicka, 2011: 3). The key concern for cosmopolitan thinking is thus a normative question of how to appropriately frame relations between humans and arrive at a set of rules – surrounding tolerance, recognition, respect or openness – which allow collectives to operate in a way enabling most happiness, satisfaction and peace to all its members. These questions are not free from the problem of structure of power of those engaging, voluntarily or not, in such relations. As a number of commentators have critiqued, in many senses cosmopolitanism arrives from a situation of unequal positions – citizens and not-citizens, conquerors and conquered, fellow nationals and foreigners, majority and minority (Bhambra, 2010).

This is echoed in Gilroy’s (2004) statement that the ‘meaning and ambition of the term “cosmopolitanism” has been hijacked’ with the onset of the new (European) imperialism (p. 59). While Gilroy does not reject the cosmopolitan ideal, he criticizes versions of it which construct human togetherness without abandoning the categories which fix people to particular, hierarchically located groups. For Gilroy, racial or ethnic difference in a convivial setting is mundane. Conviviality is thus fundamental, even if not a dominant, and not-necessarily political feature of urban life. Conviviality is important beyond the way it emphasized the ‘with’ dimension of existence; it might become a new paradigm for it carries the deep sense of rooted interweaving and pervasive ‘with-ness’ at the root of things in the sense of dependency and interdependency (Boisvert, 2010: 60).

To suggest conviviality might not be ‘political’, in the same sense as cosmopolitanism, does not mean it is not normative. Conviviality does indeed carry a normative connotation by conveying an optimal social setting. Gilroy’s, as well as Illich’s, interest is clear in defining the convivial settings, and this interest is shared by various authors. The concern with optimal settings for conviviality is thereby tied to the condition of ethnic plurality. Arizpe’s (1998) postulate for more ‘experiencing life together’ instead of living side by side in a plural society, for example, is grounded in the notion of convivència as a mode of peaceful coexistence that mythically typified Christians, Jews and Muslims in medieval Spain. Arizpe’s convivial kind of ‘compatible living’ of all humans with nature is a call for inter-generational and inter-ethnic solidarity.

Similarly, Erickson (2011) is interested in ‘convivència’ as a discourse shaping host-immigrant relationships in contemporary multiethnic Catalonia (see also Heil, this volume). Unlike authors (Glick, 1992; Suarez-Navaz, 2004) who see the continuity of reference to the historical coexistence of Christians, Muslims and Jews in medieval Iberia in discourses on mutual interpenetration and creative influence (but also rivalry and conflict), Erickson shows that in everyday settings, people tend to understand conviviality as mutually respectful relationships to neighbours in common spaces. Erickson’s empirical research proves how ‘old’ public discourses now interpenetrate everyday practices at the micro-level, constituting an alternative to multicultural policies. His research reveals the tension between the political framings of intercultural difference and the mundane social interaction under conditions when cultural difference is present but has a secondary meaning. Importantly, Erickson reminds us that ‘convivència’ is a normative and often idealistic aspiration which does not exist in a vacuum. Once more, conviviality is offered as an alternative to multicultural politics. Or better, the two projects or aspirations – conviviality and multiculturalism – can co-exist, but neither necessarily derives from the other.

A somewhat different approach is proposed by Laurier and Philo (2006), who attempt to understand the normative underlying the convivial. They differentiate between ‘convivial’ as a practice of participants of particular settings and ‘convivial’ as a quality of places and shared imaginaries of ‘normal’ human togetherness that underpin the ‘gestures of conviviality’. For Laurier and Philo, conviviality is particular and contextual and not universal, and it is possible only in relation to social norms defining what is ‘normal’ and ‘appropriate’. But while Laurier and Philo (2006) suggest that there is no tension between the normative framework and practices of conviviality, Erickson (2011) points to a possibility of tension between the convivial aspiration and practice and multicultural or universalistic discourses.

Conviviality and conflict lie close to each other, as Karner and Parker (2011) show for highly ethnically and religiously differentiated neighbourhoods (see also Vigneswaran, this volume). Examining perceptions of locality among residents and entrepreneurs in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham, United Kingdom, they show that the ‘everyday conviviality of boundary-crossing and inter-ethnic solidarities’ is accompanied by local conflicts, ethnic exclusion and boundary maintenance. At the local level, thus, community life is highly ambivalent. Conviviality is established in different routine practices of giving and taking, talking and sharing, exchanging news and goods and so on (cf. Hickman et al., 2012). These banal interactions across social and ethnic boundaries give a sense of togetherness. But at the same time, business and religion are also contexts that accommodate conflict situations of boundary marking. Through the notion of conviviality, according to Karner and Parker (2011), the clear-cut divisions between solidarity and conflict, inclusion and exclusion, can be contested.

A more radical proposal for ‘conflicting conviviality’ as an analytical tool has been made by Mattioli (2012). His case study is located in Skopje, Macedonia, which is characterized by the complex relations of ethnicity. Mattioli tries to demonstrate how subordinate groups resist the hegemonic discourses; their integration as a group is achieved through a number of convivial interactions and general references to conviviality. At the same time, however, these groups reproduce the hegemonic discourses through involving the notion of ‘conflict’. The interesting moment is the switch between self-understandings as an interacting individual and member of a group in a conflict situation.

Conviviality as a mode of interaction in ethnically diversified communities is, according to Hattam and Zembylas (2010), a possibility for relating to each other beyond ‘claims and denials’ (Gilroy, 2004; also see Blommaert, this volume). Picking up on Gilroy, Hattam and Zembylas understand conviviality as a mode of consciousness that is principally against fixed and reified categorizations. Furthermore, for Hattam and Zembylas, conviviality has an ethnical dimension since it can help to deal with anger, indignation and denials of the past to create a better present and future.

Conviviality emerges in the debate as an alternative to multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. For many authors, it offers a new vocabulary to speak of a collective without referring to fixed categories of ethnicity. However, insofar the conviviality narrative puts the vision of a peaceful present and a sustainable future, it has a normative dimension.

Convivial spaces

During the most recent dOCUMENTA (13) event, one of the world’s largest and most influential modern and contemporary art exhibitions that took place in Kassel, Germany, in 2012, there was a series of lectures and discussions devoted to the concept of conviviality. The exhibition notes described the need to address ‘the notion of equality through the point of view of social interaction [ … alongside] modes of dissent and engagement, and the understanding of political and public forms of distribution’. In discussion with the Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the artist and cultural critic Suely Rolnik, defined ‘conviviality’ as the human capacity to relate to the world. With the term ‘worldling’, the two interlocutors put in focus the question of how we relate to each other and to our environment. Rolnik stressed a topic common to many social scientific considerations as well: namely, that conviviality is not about collaboration between people but about their capacity to be affected by the world which precedes them acting to transform what she terms ‘cartography of togetherness’. For her, the dOCUMENTA (13) exhibition is equal to ‘conviviality’ in the sense it invites all kinds of people to take time, get affected by the environment and co-create the space and situation for togetherness to happen. Christov-Bakargiev complemented her in stressing that conviviality is about potentiality and location: about creating local spaces which offer a possibility for something to come to exist while remembering that the expected might not occur. For Rolnik, conviviality is meaningful as it reminds us that it is not possible to prescribe ways of experiencing; Christov-Bakargiev, then, added that we ought not to forget that we may design spaces and expect particular effects, but we cannot control how togetherness happens.

The discussion between Rolnik and Christov-Bakargiev reflects the issues which have been present in the scientific discourse of the last decade: the concern with how people relate to each other and how are societies and spaces organized to create optimal conditions for more meaningful living together. It is particularly urban spaces which have been at the fore of interest among many contemporary commentators on conviviality.

For instance, Nigel Thrift (2008) points towards an urban politics that ‘assemble intimacy, kindness and compassion’ which he calls ‘social and aesthetic technologies of being’. When Thrift speaks of conviviality, he is interested in everyday, banal, affective and relational aspects of city life (see also Wise and Velayutham and Blommaert, both this volume). He stresses the fleeting nature of urban conviviality emerging in encounters which are pre-cognitive, affective and emotional. In the similar vein, Hinchliffe and Whatmore (2006) choose to speak of politics of conviviality as a project with is more broadly concerned with accommodation of difference in urban spaces. However, they go away from investigating how people recognize those who are culturally or ethnically different; their focus is on the ecologies of urban spaces; thus, their way of understanding conviviality includes humans, material settings and patterns and rhythms of people in the city.

The concerns of many contemporary urbanists clearly diverge from works concerned predominantly with ethnic, racial and cultural difference. For example, Fincher (2003) asks how urban planners can enable convivial encounters. He sees a growing diversity of people in urban settings as a challenge for city life. Normatively, Fincher underlines the need for ‘easy familiarity’ between strangers in daily life and small-scale interactions in urban spaces. In this way, Fincher draws on Peattie (1998) who introduced the idea of conviviality into the area of urban planning. Peattie stressed the difference between ‘community planning’ and ‘spatial planning’, aiming at establishing long-term relationships and connections to a particular place. Importantly, he noticed, there is ‘politics of place’ involved in convivial settings, underlying a tendency for boundary marking and exclusion of the unlike. Hence, planning practices need to recognize that it might not be sufficient to create spaces for convivial kinds of interaction through addressing material settings alone.

Understanding conviviality in relation to optimal spatial setting is also implicit in the work of Wood et al. (2010) who investigate how the sense of community is achieved through the exercise of walking in the neighbourhood. For Wood and his colleagues, convivial space is that which is vibrant and inclusive, pedestrian friendly and enabling social interaction. Using ethnomethodology, and with the help of similar ideological apparatus, Laurier and Philo (2006) understand cafes as places produced as convivial by particular kinds of human gestures and behaviours. Similarly, Simpson (2011) investigates how street performers contribute to everyday production of moments of conviviality in public space. He argues that the presence and encounters of performers on the streets, even if fleeting and ephemeral, effects how people relate to each other in a more positive way. This happens through the momentary sense of community among those who watch the performers, facilitating the transitory contact between strangers.

In the same vein, Koch and Latham (2011) consider how cities can be made into more inclusive and convivial spaces that are simply better for the people that inhabit them. Their interest is in how space can change from criminal to convivial, and more broadly, how convivial spaces are assembled. They draw on a number of previous works, including Fincher and Iveson’s (2008) and Peattie’s (1998), to understand conviviality as a concept that can help researchers make sense of qualities of collective life marked by openness and the accommodation of difference. While their focus on material–practical arrangements is inspired by Hinchliffe and Whatmore (2006), they also see conviviality as a way of nurturing the capacity of individuals to thrive in combination with others.

The last point derives particularly from Ash Amin’s (2008) understanding of conviviality as an element of civic formation in public space. Amin proposes that we should understand conviviality as a ‘form of solidarity with space’. His interest is prompted by a reading of public space as ‘situated multiplicity’, or what Massey (2005) calls ‘thrown togetherness’. Amin distances himself from thinking of conviviality wholly in terms of social inclusion and cultural recognition, but he also diverges from Gilroy’s understanding of conviviality as a virtue of everyday encounters with multicultural otherness. Moreover, Amin‘s interests are not related to political attempts to structure interpersonal interactions in public space by bringing people from different backgrounds together. Instead Amin (2008), sees conviviality as a ‘momentary contact’ with multiplicity of bodies, matter and technology that is experienced ‘as a promise of plenitude’ (p. 22). It is this kind of fleeting experience of space that can make one aware of belonging to a ‘larger fabric of urban life’, and at the same time giving a sense of participation, access and sustainability in, to and of a space. Empathy towards the stranger – the key interest for Gilroy and other scholars – is for Amin a by-product of the convivial experience of such situated multiplicity. For Amin, conviviality is thus closely linked to ‘civic ease’ in public space (also see Wessendorf, Blommaert and Wise and Velayutham, this volume).

Convivial everydayness

The context of the everyday life is where we ought to seek conviviality (Boisvert, 2010: 61). All the authors employing the term located their analysis in the realm of the mundane. Boisvert (2010) suggests that ‘convivialism’ should entail a perspective on the human that ‘starts and ends’ in the everyday. Furthermore, to focus on conviviality means to focus on continuity and thus to encompass simultaneously conflict and friendliness, and practices and situations of boundary markings and crossings.

There is so far no systematic reflection on the meaning of everydayness for conviviality together with the possible advantages of employing of the term ‘conviviality’ for our understanding of the human condition. Nevertheless, many authors examining the actual situations in which everyday routines and practices lead to conviviality point to a number of social processes which have been addressed through the conventional sociological notions. For example, Edensor and Millington (2009) analyse class conflict across popular practices of illumination for Christmas. By examining the motivations of Christmas light displayers, they show how the ideal of conviviality underlies this practice. They associate the ideal of festive pleasure and neighbourliness with the displayers, whom they contrast to ‘tastemakers’, and thus show how class specific the ideal of conviviality is. By focusing on the conflict of classes involved in the practice and discourse on Christmas illumination, Edensor and Millington conceive of ‘conviviality’ as an element of cultural capital. They, thus remind us that conviviality – as aspiration and as ideal – is socially located (see also Freitag, this volume).

The social situatedness of conviviality is also a concern for Dunlap (2009), who inquires into leisure activities, in particular communal meals, of individuals associated with one community. Dunlap is interested in the nature and function of conviviality within the context of community-making through the practice of family dinners. While Dunlap uses the notion of conviviality as proxy for leisure, he points towards an important aspect which is how conviviality is a part of localized, hegemonic discourses on a community’s purported culture. Similarly, Germov et al. (2011) investigate the representations of the slow food movement in the Australian print media. More akin to older, traditional denotations of the term, they define conviviality as ‘social pleasures of sharing good food’. The aim of the slow food movement is to promote conviviality in the form of feasts and festivities. The joyful aspects of spending time connecting with friends, family and community through the pleasure of sharing ‘good food’ is highlighted by the official discourses of the movement. Their research thus points to how official discourses intertwine with everyday practices; interestingly, they show the link between what Borremans (1978) suggested as a convivial tool – sustainable forms of food production – and consumption, the practice of sharing and celebrating together in a community. The structures of community feeling are the interest of Neal and Walters (2008). They study how belonging is produced, maintained and recreated in local rural environments, assigning conviviality a particularly strong role within rural social organizations. Conviviality is for them a missing link between ‘yearning for human togetherness’ and ‘tensions and conflict’ constituting community life. The experience of conviviality is central, according to them, to making community through a number of routine practices and performances. Neal and Walters often, however, tend to equate conviviality with sociability. However, by demonstrating how everyday practices of support and reciprocity, small-scale activities and narratives of friendship and kindness lead to fragile conviviality, they remind us that conviviality is not organically occurring but requires constant labour as well as technical and semi-formal organization.

Similarly Rabo (2011), drawing on Gilroy (2004) in preferring the notion of conviviality to cosmopolitanism and using it an analytical tool to capture the everyday ‘living together’, places conviviality within a complex history of religious, linguistic and ethnic heterogeneity in the town of Aleppo (cf. Freitag, this volume). Rabo diverges from Gilroy insofar she argues that conviviality in Aleppo is rooted in the particular social organization of religiously based ‘sects’ and intra-communal autonomy; thus, conviviality is for Aleppo a way of living with clearly delineated categories of difference.