Unpacking Intercultural Conviviality in Multiethnic Commercial Streets

ABSTRACT

Conviviality has recently been taken up to capture everyday living-with-difference in multiethnic cities. Although it has usually been operationalised through an analysis of social interactions framed in neighbourhood or community settings, this article shifts the focus to more tightly delimited public places. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in four multiethnic neighbourhood commercial streets in Montréal, Quebec, it proposes a model that unpacks conviviality in place through four components: microplaces, codes of sociability, perceived intergroup relations, and place image (critical infrastructure). The article further argues that while conviviality not only pertains to relations across cultural difference, when it is intercultural, it overlaps conceptually with everyday cosmopolitanism – situated, emergent practices and discourses of openness to, and engagement with, cultural others. It uses the place-based model of conviviality to show how each of the commercial streets has its own distinct variety of everyday cosmopolitanism. Unpacking conviviality in place keeps us attuned to the many dimensions of social relations that make up contemporary cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Conviviality
• cosmopolitanism
• ethnic diversity
• urban anthropology
• neighbourhood streets
• Montréal

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Greg Noble, Amanda Wise, Annick Germain, Nathalie Boucher, Laura Eramian, Peter Mallory, Vered Amit, Kirstin Borgerson and Nicolas Payette for helping me think through these arguments.

Notes on contributor

Martha Radice is a social anthropologist who works on public space, public art, interethnic relations and neighbourhood change in cities. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

ORCiD

Martha Radice http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2847-0111

Notes

1. During my fieldwork, Quebec was not yet in the grips of its own multicultural backlash in the form of the provincial government's proposal for a so-called ‘Charter of Values’. A province-wide commission on ‘reasonable accommodation’ was under way, but had little resonance on the streets I studied, where interethnic relations remained ‘unpanicked’ (Noble 2009).

2. The ultra-Orthodox communities are not all Hasidic but are often mislabelled as such.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Centre des études ethniques des universités montréalaises and the Institut national de la rercherche scientifique – Urbanisation Culture Société.