Tracing Convivality: Identifying Questions, Tensions and Tools in the Study of Living with Difference

ABSTRACT

The concept of ‘convivality’ has come to dominate studies of everyday life in diverse places. This article starts from an understanding that our concepts inescapably direct our empirical gaze in particular ways. Surveying a diverse literature, I look at the different ways in which convivality has been conceptualised, and trace tensions between these different approaches. I show how this diversity of approaches and these tensions direct attention in particular ways and so lead to a number of lingering questions or empirical blind spots in the existing literature. Drawing on my own ethnography, in the London neighbourhood of Kilburn, I illustrate some of these challenges and outline methodological approaches which might help overcome them. In particular I unpack approaches which might support a deeper engagement with questions of structure and social change, care and incommensurability, and categorisation, cognition and context, which have received insufficient attention in the literature on everyday diversity, to date. Rather than making a case for or against the utility of the concept of ‘convivality’, I argue that the necessary first step is to extend our empirical understanding to better cover these blind spots, and then to weigh our conceptual apparatus up accordingly.

KEYWORDS:

• Convivality
• ethnogrpahy
• structure
• care
• London
• categorisation

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Specifically, Back and Sinha (2016: 521) ‘argue for “a way of seeing” that is attentive to forms of division and racism alongside and sometimes within multicultural convivialities’, placing them within both the first and third approaches here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Gates Cambridge Trust.

Notes on contributors

Farhan Samanani

Farhan Samanani is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. His work examines approaches to community building, collective social change and everyday togetherness within diverse areas, with a focus on contemporary London.