Introduction
Anthropologists have learned to be more sensitive to the formidable difficulties involved in making sense of cultural diversity without losing sight of shared humanity. (Stolcke 1995, p. 1)
More than two and a half decades ago, Stuart Hall (1993, p. 361) announced that â[t]he capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the coming question of the twenty-first centuryâ. The following comparative ethnography deals with the process of conviviality among people who share an everyday neighbourhood life while remaining culturally different. Their ethnic, national, regional, religious, linguistic, and other distinct identifications and practices stay relevant, which require negotiation and translation in interaction to achieve and maintain at least minimal consensus. Conviviality encompasses both cooperative and conflictual situations that keep it fragile and permanently in flux. In Casamance, Senegal, and Catalonia, Spain, living with difference was often phrased in terms of cohabitation in French and convivencia in Castilian. Both are discursive cornerstones of a process of conviviality. If this process materialises in a social space, I call it convivial since it is mutually constitutive with practices of conviviality.
In Casamance and Catalonia, cohabitation and convivencia were flexible notions, mirroring some of the contestations around living with difference. Both notions loosely referred to the ordinary and unspectacular everyday life interactions of local residents such as greeting, being co-present in open spaces,1 and sensing mutual consideration and respect. The nuances of peopleâs understandings of cohabitation and convivencia depended on the context, on the situation, and on the outcome of local negotiations and translations. Included in the context were official policies. The Catalan policy of convivència promoted mutual respect, civility, and the peaceful sharing of everyday life.2 Equally, Senegalese politics, accommodating religious and cultural diversity, aimed at mitigating difference. The focus of the ethnography at hand, however, is on the local everyday practices of living with difference in which both cohabitation and convivencia featured alongside other notions such as hospitality, neighbourliness, integration, consideration, and respect. These notions were inextricably intertwined with narratives of mutual avoidance , exclusion, discrimination, and conflict.
Yet this is not a dark account of conflict or social breakdown (Ortner 2016). Rather, I focus on the large proportion of peopleâs lives that seems banal and thus tends to be taken for granted by both researchers and their interlocutors. Of course the economic struggle of Casamançais migrants in Catalonia and people in Casamance and the burdens placed on them in the forms of the Casamançais conflict, migration control, irregularity , and the economic crisis of 2008âto name but a fewâwere very real everyday experiences as well. I engage with the impact of these influences whenever they interrelated with everyday living with difference as revealed through the accounts and practices of Casamançais local residents. Casamançais described locally defined, historically grown but changing, minimal consensuses which materialised in, and were formed through, their practices. As locally shared understandings, consensuses emerge from âa complex genealogy of tensionsâ (SarrĂł 2009, p. 16) which I conceive of as the processes of negotiation and translation. Arriving at shared, if changing, understandings can be understood as part of âthe shared humanityâ (Stolcke 1995, p. 1) among local residents, which enmeshes the cultural and social differences that characterise both sites of the comparison.
Crude proxies may suffice to illustrate the configurations of difference in Casamance and in Catalonia at this point. The population of Catalonia had diversified immensely within the three decades prior to my fieldwork. Among many factors, Spainâs economic growth and favourable conditions for irregular migrants, including several rounds of regularisation, have attracted migrants from around the globe ( Aja and Arango 2006; King 2000, 2001). In 2010, foreign-born residents from over 120 different countries composed 17.5 per cent of the total population in Catalonia, compared to 14 per cent in Spain overall (Instituto Nacional de EstadĂstica 2011). In Casamance, centuries of population movement have formed a complex configuration of national, ethnic, religious, and linguistic differences. No one group forms the majority, and over one in five residents is not Jola, Mandinka, or Fula, the regionâs main three ethnic groups. In specific subregions, each of these groups feels, and is regularly viewed as, dominant, such as the Jola in Lower Casamance and Mandinka in Middle Casamance. Despite this, each village, town, or neighbourhood has its own sedimented configuration of difference that becomes significant in situationally structuring everyday encounters. People from many of these places in Casamance have been arriving in Catalonia since the late 1960s, with an increase in the 2000s when Spainâs foreign-born population rose from less than a million t...
