Afterword Dignity and indignities in the quest for conviviality

Anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers have been using ‘conviviality’ in the last decade or so as a concept to theorize living with/across difference in everyday life, usually in multiethnic urban contexts. They draw on Paul Gilroy’s hopeful use of conviviality to describe “the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life” (2004, xi)—a feature that slipped under the radar of the anxieties and debates associated with “panicked multiculturalism” (Noble 2013). By the mid-2010s, conviviality seemed to eclipse the qualified cosmopolitanisms (situated, vernacular, rooted, ordinary, visceral, banal, everyday…) that had previously been employed in empirical studies of how people lived with each other in plural societies. These terms had in their turn succeeded others, such as everyday multiculturalism (Wise and Velayutham 2009). Each new coinage or new use of an old word in our disciplines casts a different light on analyses of social life, illuminating some facets and obscuring others. By means of ethnographic research conducted in Brazil, Canada, Spain, Chile, and the USA, this thematic section of Anthropologica gives us excellent material to think through how conviviality, as a concept, can help or hamper our understandings of what it means to live together in the world. Importantly, it also flexes and stretches the concept in new ways by counterbalancing it with the concept of dignity. In this commentary, I want to ask first what we gain and then what we risk by embracing the idea of conviviality, as well as what contribution the combination with dignity makes. One strength of conviviality—especially for anthropologists—is that it is explicitly enmeshed in sociality. It makes no sense to imagine a person being convivial all by themselves; solitary conviviality is a contradiction in terms. (This contrasts with the idea of being cosmopolitan, for example, which is quite often ascribed to individuals.) Every article in this section shows that conviviality is social and relational, accomplished through interactions between people living in particular circumstances. Neighbours embedded in networks of reciprocity in the peripheral neighbourhood of Barra do Ceará, Brazil, use convivial collective memories to level differences of class or politics among them (Jerome). Older women from Guyana and Korea create hospitable conviviality among themselves and for others as they cook suppers for the local community at their Presbyterian church in Toronto (Davidson). Students and teachers strive to find ways of relating across differences of culture and class in schools in El Ejido, Spain (Taha) and along the US-Mexico border (O’Connor). Young US Muslims seek to build inclusive communities first within and then beyond the ummah (Welji). Black feminist activists deftly disarm the crude racist banter of a government minister in Brazil (da Silva). Chilean artists engage in visual and participatory call-and-response with their publics in order to articulate the crisis of inequality in their country (Ashley). Conviviality cannot be abstracted from everyday life. Even where convivencia is addressed in policy, like in the school in El Ejido, it is not an enduring ambience; rather, people make it and break it together, as they interact. Relatedly, it is striking how often conviviality is identified with fields of social reproduction—including, in this collection, the domestic spaces of a marginalized neighbourhood and the community spaces of a church and mosques, and schools, colleges, and student societies. These are all realms where forms of everyday sociability are fundamental to the processes of raising or caring for people or moulding them into members of society. Such spheres of activity are, moreover, highly gendered, and the key actors in most of the articles in this section are women and girls, whose social skills are especially …