Introduction to Theme Issue Dignity, Conviviality, and Moral Contests of Belonging

This special issue comes to publication at an opportune moment for reflecting on Dignity, Conviviality, and Moral Contests of Belonging. If Paul Gilroy’s (2004) seminal After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? registered critical hope for multiculturalism amidst the war on terror, then the studies gathered here explore difference in a post-multicultural time, attendant to how material and political polarization forces questions of identity onto moral ground. This is to say that we also write about conviviality in the wake of Steven Vertovec’s (2007) influential formulation of “super-diversity,” finding in that well-merited complexification an opportunity to understand diversity as both proliferating (exceeding categories of race, ethnicity, or gender) and interwoven with deliberations about good or right action. We examine sites of ideological and not merely demographic flux, drawing out participants’ own negotiations of the—variably salient—contours of value-laden everyday life. By placing dignity and belonging alongside conviviality at the center of inquiry, this special theme fleshes out underspecified terms in contexts of shifting evaluations of difference. The following questions have inspired our work: When getting along means dealing with colliding scales of social value and worth, what does dignity look or sound like? How do dignity-claiming repertoires intersect with performances of identity, subjectivity, or citizenship and belonging? How do everyday practices related to conviviality subsume or elevate dignity threats or belonging claims? How might dignity claims signal morally adaptive strategies when formal rights or institutional recognitions shut down? Analyses in response to these questions press urgently at the present moment, when retrenchment of ideological antagonism so often turns others into enemies. In what Fukuyama (2018) has called a “politics of resentment,” competition for moral legitimacy overshadows deliberations over systemic inequality. With moral judgments about self and other at the forefront of contemporary life, face-to-face encounters and iterative enactments of living in the company of others become opportunities for defending, challenging, or advancing claims about how the world should be. The shoulds that motivate discourse and interaction among experientially diverse players highlight, in turn, the linguistic and embodied dimensions of dignity claims as part of negotiations over social connection and acceptance. These deontic struggles highlight the importance of participants’ interactional stances (Kockelman 2004; Ochs and Schieffelin 1989); affective strategies and emotional investments (Ahmed 2015); and gendered, racialized, or religiously imbued positions within communities where de facto and imagined boundaries are changing. “To live with/together,” as conviviality’s Latin roots (com + vivere) suggest, entails modes of relating that may invoke but not satisfy ideals of interpersonal equality and respect (Radice 2016). In the expanding literature pursuing this line of reasoning, conviviality has provided an alluring analytic, typically used to trace the interpersonal and spatial dynamics of copresence among clearly defined groups of city denizens. However, Joanna Overing and Alan Passes’ (2000) paradigmatic examination of Amazonian conviviality, The Anthropology of Love and Anger, makes clear that conviviality need not be circumscribed to urban multicultural settings. Conviviality is not a strict corollary of super-diversity but can illuminate more amply dynamics in which humans define lines of familiarity and strangerhood to constitute knowing and being (together) in a complex world. A number of related touchstones—civility, cosmopolitanism, community, and commensality (Bowman 2012; Bryant 2016; Radice 2019)—speak also to the moral substrate of conviviality. At root, conviviality raises questions about what constitutes a “good” society when that society is diverse: one in which people actively pursue friendship, or one in which they merely tolerate each other as strangers? What of spaces actively construed, but not quite realized, as shared (Amin 2012, Erickson 2011)? Such queries have motivated research exploring the intricate ordinariness of convivial culture via …