Convivialities

Possibility and Ambivalence in Urban Multicultures

Amanda Wise, Greg Noble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138503991
• eBook ISBN: 9781351381871
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

We live in a time of rising anti-immigrant fervour and attacks on multiculturalism. As Stuart Hall argued over twenty years ago, the capacity to live with difference is the pressing issue of our time. This is true perhaps now more than ever.

This collection takes a critical look at the 'conviviality turn' in our understanding of coexistence and urban multiculture. Drawing on case studies out of the UK, Europe, Australia and Canada, contributors to this collection explore the practices and dispositions of everyday people who negotiate a 'shared life' in their culturally diverse neighbourhoods and communities, and the complexities and ambivalences that make up 'living together'. Chapters focus on spaces of encounter, navigations of friendship and humour across difference, and the networks of hope and care that exist alongside experiences of racism. A theme of the book is that we live neither in a world where convivial multiculture has been accomplished nor one where it has been lost: it is, as it must be, a work in progress.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

Unpacking Intercultural Conviviality in Multiethnic Commercial Streets

Martha Radice

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.

Conviviality has been taken up in the last decade as a new way of talking about living together with difference in multiethnic cities. Proposed by Gilroy as a hopeful alternative to the besieged idea of multiculturalism in the UK, conviviality captures ‘the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in … urban areas’ (2004, p. xi). From the Latin com + vivere, ‘to live together’, by way of convivium, ‘feast’, conviviality emphasises relationality as opposed to autonomy (Nowicka and Vertovec 2014). It is pragmatic (Noble 2013), formed through everyday processes of habituation to and interaction with others (Wise and Velayutham 2014), rather than top-down policies – although since it is connoted as desirable, it does have normative undertones (Nowicka and Vertovec 2014). As an everyday achievement, sustained through unassuming yet assiduous work (Noble 2013), conviviality is negotiated, fragile (Heil 2014, 2015) and vulnerable to tensions or ruptures. As well as being emergent, conviviality is situated, shaped by particular configurations of social and physical space. Conviviality is thus a compelling concept that helps us think through how humans relate to each other under conditions of cultural diversity.

Joining these theoretical and empirical projects to conceptualise conviviality, this article draws on anthropological fieldwork conducted in multiethnic streets in Montréal, Quebec, to make two main claims: first, that conviviality is a form of sociability that can be attributed to places as well as social relations; and second, that conviviality is not a priori intercultural, but can usefully intersect with related concepts that do refer to cultural diversity, notably everyday cosmopolitanism. I begin by unpacking situated conviviality into four constituent layers, covering practical and discursive dimensions of emplaced social relations. Second, I discuss the ‘cultural content’ of conviviality, arguing that the concepts of conviviality and cosmopolitanism intersect productively. Third, I present the ethnographic study of everyday multiculture in Montréal that inspired this article. Fourth, I show how the components of conviviality combine in each fieldsite to produce a distinct kind of everyday cosmopolitanism. I conclude by reflecting on how situated conviviality contributes to analyses of contemporary urban diversity. I focus on ethnic diversity, which is the main way that cultural diversity has been framed in policy and popular discourse on Montréal. ‘Culture’ and ‘ethnicity’ are partially overlapping terms. While ‘culture’ is not always constructed through ethnicity (for example, class-based cultures), assertions of ethnic belonging usually invoke shared cultural forms like cuisine, dress, arts or ideal kinship patterns, as well as language, religion, geographical or cosmological origins, collective memory or imagined futures, which can also be understood as components of ‘culture’, and, to varying degrees, phenotype. Such ethnic symbols are used by insiders or outsiders to mark intergroup boundaries, which are more salient in some situations than in others. Partly because it can include reference to language and religion, ethnicity has been especially significant in discussions of the social and cultural make-up of Montréal.

Can a place be convivial? A four-layer model

Conviviality is one of the possible kinds of social relations that people can forge when they inhabit the same locale; specifically, it captures ‘affectively at ease relations of coexistence and accommodation’ (Wise and Velayutham 2014: 407). Most scholars investigating the ‘texture, consistency and content’ (Wise and Velayutham 2014: 408) of conviviality take situated social interactions as their object of study. They identify conviviality in the ways people talk with and about neighbours, acquaintances and strangers in broadly defined meso-level settings such as urban neighbourhoods or rural communities. For instance, Wise and Velayutham (2014) and Heil (2014) pick out components of conviviality in multiethnic neighbourhoods in Singapore and Sydney, and Catalonia and Casamance respectively, seeing it as construed by acts of neighbourliness (modest gift exchanges or help with chores), translation and linguistic agility, negotiation or bridging work, and the kind of ‘intercultural habitus’ (Wise and Velayutham 2014) that means people are used to dealing with any arising cultural conflicts.

I propose a model for thinking about conviviality that shifts the object – or rather scale – of study from neighbourhoods to more tightly delimited places. Conceptually, a ‘place’ is a physical location that is made meaningful by people’s actions, ideas and values, which give it roughly agreed-upon boundaries and a certain power of agency (Gieryn 2000). As such, a place can be of any scale – from living-room to nation and beyond – but here I concentrate on the pedestrian scale (Friedmann 2010), specifically, publicly accessible places that can be thoroughly explored on foot within an hour or so, like streets, parks or plazas. This scale is important because, while neighbourhoods are usually experienced through ‘parochial’ social ties threaded through with notions of shared interest, urban public places are arguably where city-dwellers encounter their co-inhabitants in all their diversity, as strangers as well as familiars (Lofland 1998). The question is, can a place be convivial? In common-sense terms, people often describe places as convivial even if they frequent them alone. But I suggest we can think through conviviality more systematically by attending to four ‘layers’ that constitute a place: its microplaces, prevailing norms of sociability, perceptions of local intergroup relations, and its reputation or ‘critical infrastructure’ (Zukin 1991). Exploring the qualities of each layer in a place helps shed light on whether and in what ways it is convivial. This model emerged inductively from the research on multiethnic streets in Montréal that I describe later, but it should also apply to other kinds of places.

The first layer of the model consists of the microplaces that a place encompasses. While spatial configurations cannot preordain conviviality, they can support it, as urban planning research shows (Whyte 1980, Franck and Stevens 2007). The shared corridors and common spaces of high-rise, high-density housing in Singapore facilitate convivial interactions such as greeting neighbours and sharing chores (Wise and Velayutham 2014: 410–15). I suggest that microplaces offer resources for convivial social relations when they are accessible, heterogeneous and flexible. This means that different kinds of people can use the place in different ways, enabling social interactions of variable purpose, intensity and duration. Particular stores or services can become hubs for social activity. Street furniture like benches or bus shelters can be appropriated by groups at different times for socialising and people-watching (Simon 1997). Patios or balconies create mini-incursions of protected semipublic space into the public sidewalk, allowing contact between sitting and circulating people. Façades and signage affect the atmosphere, being slick or vernacular, inviting or off-putting. Ethnic and linguistic marking of the landscape can foster or hinder conviviality (Blommaert 2014). Who does the place ‘talk’ to, include or exclude?

The second layer of conviviality, closely bound up with the first, depends on the implicit codes of sociability that regulate the place as a whole. What are the norms for how people interact, verbally and non-verbally? Do they meet a gaze or avert their own? Which individuals or groups are present and to what extent do they overlap, segregate or interact in their use of space? As Goffman’s (1971) and Lofland’s (1998) observations show, not all instances of sociability in public are convivial: they can be courteous, indifferent or even rebarbative. I argue that conviviality connotes a certain warmth and welcome, exclusive enough to indicate that the social tie being created is special in some way, yet inclusive enough that strangers can be brought in. This contrasts with Heil’s (2015) conceptualisation of conviviality as ‘minimal consensus’, which seems distant and akin to mere coexistence; it resonates instead with Wise and Velayutham’s (2014) idea of the convivial as affective and embodied. Convivial sociability can consist simply of verbal or non-verbal greetings exchanged in passing, but when it is sustained, it often takes place on the register of what I call ‘inconsequential intimacy’: a conversation that jumps from one topic or anecdote to another, mixing serious subjects like ill health or family troubles with platitudes, conducted in a familiar tone but not requiring familiar ties, so it can involve people who are friends, strangers, or familiar strangers on an equal footing. Inconsequential intimacy implies no commitment beyond that time and place (de La Pradelle 2001) – usually a microplace already designated for sociability permanently (café, barbershop) or at certain times (public benches, some small bookshops or clothes-shops). Its patterns recall Simmel’s insight that sociability works best when good form and tact trump identity differences and the pursuit of personal interest (1950: 49); it serves largely to create social ties and social comfort, however fleeting. In multiethnic places, skills in translation or non-verbal communication, or simply a willingness to engage in unfamiliar patterns of communication, are crucial for this component of conviviality.

Conviviality is constructed through talk in other ways, being ‘part of localized, hegemonic discourses on a community’s purported culture’ (Nowicka and Vertovec 2014: 349). The other layers in the model emerge from discourse rather than spatialised practice (although discourse is a form of practice, too). The third component consists of the intergroup relations at work in a place as perceived by its users: which social groups are (in)visible, whether they are represented positively or negatively, and how they are seen as getting on with each other. These perceptions are important for conviviality because they shape users’ experiences of places, and therefore the kinds of sociability in which they are willing to engage. Although Gilroy (2004) introduced the concept of conviviality deliberately to step back from matters of identity, convivial practices are still framed by relations beyond the micro scale (Wise and Velayutham 2014: 423). As individuals engage interpersonally, they are perceived and received in terms of social categories – ethnic, racialised, classed, and so on – so the picture of relations between those categories is significant. For instance, the perception in Hackney that ‘everyone comes from everywhere’ is critical in fostering intercultural civility (Wessendorf 2014). In contrast, if one ethnic group rapidly achieves a critical mass in a place, then tensions may arise (Preston 2008). As well as cultural identity, collective trajectories of social mobility or times of settlement also shape intergroup relations.

The fourth layer of conviviality is what Zukin calls the ‘critical infrastructure’: the apparatus that identifies and evaluates cultural products on offer (1991: 201), from tangible things like restaurant meals to intangible ambiances like heritage, through print and online lifestyle journalism, and, increasingly, online social media. Critical infrastructure projects an image of a place – celebration or stigma – beyond its boundaries, potentially opening it up to new users, who might be different from existing ones, while feeding back an image of the place to its regular users, who might embrace or reject this image. Critical infrastructure concerns the generalised image of the place itself rather than the perceptions and interrelations of groups who use it; it affects how a place is experienced in a more mediated way than perceived intergroup relations. Media ‘buzz’ does not necessarily enhance conviviality; for instance, ‘ethnic place marketing’ can eventually undermine the perceived authenticity of social relations in a place (Hackworth and Rekers 2005).Critical infrastructure feeds into the reputation and readability of a place’s conviviality, complementing the other layers of perceived intergroup relations, codes of sociability and microplaces.

On conviviality and cosmopolitanism

Before using this four-fold model to explore conviviality in places in Montréal, I develop this article’s second claim: that the concept of conviviality intersects productively with that of everyday cosmopolitanism. Notwithstanding recent usag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Convivialities: An Orientation
• 1. Unpacking Intercultural Conviviality in Multiethnic Commercial Streets
• 2. Settling in a Super-Diverse Context: Recent Migrants’ Experiences of Conviviality
• 3. Extended Encounters in Primary School Worlds: Shared Social Resource, Connective Spaces and Sustained Conviviality in Socially and Ethnically Complex Urban Geographies
• 4. Convivial Labour and the ‘Joking Relationship’: Humour and Everyday Multiculturalism at Work
• 5. Rethinking Youth Conviviality: The Possibilities of Intercultural Friendship Beyond Contact and Encounter
• 6. Multicultural Conviviality in the Midst of Racism’s Ruins
• Index