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= Conviviality =
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Introduction
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The English word "conviviality" means "the enjoyment of festive
society, festivity", or, as applied to people, "convivial spirit or
disposition".
French root ({{lang|fr|convivialité}})
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One root of conviviality originated in 19th‐century France. is very
common in contemporary French and has also established itself in
English as a loanword, as well as more recently as a term in
discussions about cohabitation in immigrant societies. Its coinage can
be traced back to Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and his book
'Physiologie du goût' from 1825. The gastrophilosopher understood
conviviality as the situation, common at the table, when different
people come together over a good long meal, and time passes swiftly in
excited conversations.
Spanish root ({{lang|es|convivencia}})
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In Spanish, has long been interpreted literally as “living in the
company of others” but in 1948 Américo Castro introduced to mean the
peaceful coexistence between different religious groups in Spain
between the eighth and fifteenth centuries.
Conviviality in left-wing politics
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Conviviality, or Convivialism, is the ability of individuals to
interact creatively and autonomously with others and their environment
to satisfy their own needs. This interpretation is related to, but
distinct from, several synonyms and cognates, including in French the
enjoyment of the social company of others (), and Catalan popular
discourse, informal neighborhood level politics, and social cohesion
policy () that views conflict in shared public space as inevitable and
ultimately productive and preferable to order imposed by authorities.
This interpretation was introduced by Ivan Illich as a direct contrast
to industrial productivity that produces consumers that are alienated
from the way that things are produced. Its focus on joyful simple
living, the localisation of production systems, links to Marxist
economics, and Illich’s simultaneous criticism of overconsumption have
resulted in conviviality being taken up by a range of academic and
social movements, including as a pillar of degrowth theory and
practice.
Ivan Illich
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As described here, this new usage for the term conviviality was
introduced by Ivan Illich in his 1973 book, 'Tools for Conviviality'.
Illich recognised that the term in English was more likely to be
associated with “tipsy jolliness” but derived his definition from the
French and Spanish cognates, resulting in an interpretation that he
felt was closer to a modern version of . Illich introduced the term as
the opposite of industrial productivity, with conviviality indicating
a society where individual autonomy and creativity dominated. He
contrasted this with industrialised societies where individuals are
reduced to “mere consumers”, unable to choose what is produced or how
things are made in a world governed by a “radical monopoly” that
divided the population into experts that could use the tools and
laypeople that could not.
As the title of the book suggests, the initial focus for Illich was
how industrial tools and the expertise required to operate them
constrained individuals’ autonomy. He also argued that these tools
alienated individuals from the production processes of goods and
services that shape our daily lives and led to the distortion of use
values into exchange values.
Illich broadly interpreted tools as rationally designed devices. These
include hardware used to produce goods and services that ranged from
small scale items like drills to “large machines like cars and power
stations”, but also productive institutions (like factories) and also
productive systems that created what he called “intangible
commodities… [like] education, health, knowledge or decisions”.
Examples of non-convivial tools that Illich was railing against
included open-pit mines, road networks and schools, this last example
linking to his previous work critiquing mass education systems,
'Deschooling Society'. By contrast, convivial tools were those that
promoted and extended autonomy, including most hand tools, bicycles,
and telephones. Convivial tools share many similarities with the
intermediate technology or ‘technology with a human face’ described in
'Small is Beautiful' by Illich’s contemporary E. F. Schumacher. In his
2012 book 'La sociedad de la abundancia frugal' Serge Latouche also
highlights the “human scale” of convivial tools.
In the 1978 collection of essays published as 'Towards a History of
Needs' Illich moved away from a focus on the tools of conviviality to
explore the politics of conviviality which he defined as “the struggle
for an equitable distribution of the liberty to generate use-values”
that prioritised the liberty of those “least advantaged”. Herein, he
focused on socially critical that delimited whether conviviality was
possible and argued that such thresholds should be translated into
society-wide limits.
Contemporary uses in academia
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In the early 21st Century, the term conviviality has been used in a
variety of contexts and with a variety of interpretations. However,
there is a common understanding which is dominant in the definitions
and interpretations of the term: the idea of living together with
difference. This concept is employed to analyse the everyday
experiences, social encounters, interdependencies and community
integration of people living in diverse communities or urban settings.
This understanding of conviviality is used in the open access book
'Conviviality at the Crossroads: The Poetics and Politics of Everyday
Encounters', which was published in 2020 and focuses on how people
live with and are at ease with each other’s differences in diverse
societies. It claims there is an urgent need to bring the three
concepts of conviviality, cosmopolitanism, and creolisation back into
focus and into dialogue with each other. Anthropologist Brad Erickson
places Catalan bottom-up convivència in contrast to civility imposed
from above and explores the tension between them as shaping basic
social categories and governmental projects.
Recent understandings of conviviality also often include analyses of
racial difference, structural inequality, and divergent histories
within a multicultural or multi-racial community or urban space, and
how these factors impact conviviality and community cohesion in both
positive and negative ways. Scholars also analyse the use of public
space and architecture in terms of its impact on conviviality in such
diverse communities. The focus on these issues has been referred to as
the “convivial turn” in academia.
Conviviality has also been applied to online contexts, in analyses of
the ways in which people relate to each other and build communities
online.
Anti-Utilitarian Movement and Convivialism
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Alain Caillé, a French sociologist and founding member of the
Anti-Utilitarian Movement in Social Sciences (MAUSS), defines
convivialism as a broad-based humanist, civic, and political
philosophy that spells out the normative principles that sustain the
art of living together at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
The “ism” in “convivialism” makes clear that, , the systematization of
social and political-theoretical perspectives must . The focus is
consequently a dual one: convivialism can be seen as a social
scientific or political idea, while conviviality can be seen as a
lived praxis. Alain Caillé published in 2020 'The Second Convivialist
Manifesto: Towards a Post-Neoliberal World', signed by three hundred
intellectuals from thirty-three countries.
Degrowth
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Conviviality is one of the core concepts of the Degrowth movement,
appearing in representative texts such as 'Degrowth: A Vocabulary for
a New Era'. The understanding of conviviality within degrowth is
strongly influenced by the work of Ivan Illich (discussed above),
namely his critique of development and overconsumption and his
promotion of a society that values “joyful sobriety and liberating
austerity”, creating and using “responsibly limited” convivial tools.
Illich’s understanding of convivial tools as emancipatory, democratic,
and responsive to direct human needs contrasts with society’s current
dependence on , experts, and the growth-based capitalist model of
production for its tools and technologies. These ideas, and
particularly this conceptualisation of conviviality, are a central
part of Degrowth theory: as such, Illich’s work is considered one of
the early “intellectual roots of Degrowth”.
Most texts that discuss conviviality in the recent Degrowth literature
are focused on technologies (including digital technologies), as an
expansion or adaptation of Illich’s focus on convivial tools. It is
generally accepted within this literature that any technologies
suitable for a degrowth society must be convivial. To this end, Andrea
Vetter has developed the Matrix for Convivial Technology (MCT) as a
Degrowth-oriented (convivial) tool for assessment of tools and
technologies, political education, and research.
Conviviality is also employed in the Degrowth literature to describe
things such as public spaces, goods, conservation movements, and even
humans. For example, Giorgos Kallis, a prominent Degrowth scholar,
refers to “...convivial goods, such as new public squares, open
spaces, community gardens, etc.” and the “convivial yet simple and
content, enlightened human” as the ideal “Degrowth human”. Although
less common than Degrowth literature that explores conviviality in
terms of tools and technologies, there are various examples of
conviviality being used as a characteristic of many aspects of a
Degrowth society, including society itself. Indeed, some scholars
describe the transition to a convivial society as one of the three
core objectives of Degrowth.
Appropriate Technology Movement
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Based on the “intermediate technology” by the economist E. F.
Schumacher in his work 'Small is beautiful', the Appropriate
Technology movement encompasses convivial technological choice, to
promote characteristics such as autonomy, energy efficiency,
decentralization, local production, and sustainable development.
Incompleteness
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Francis Nyamnjoh uses the concept of conviviality in his essay on
incompleteness. For Nyamnjoh incompleteness is "the normal order of
things", and that “things, words, deeds, and beings are always
incomplete, not because of absences but because of their
possibilities”. It is because of these possibilities that we are
driven us towards collaboration, interconnectedness, and
interdependency as we try supplement our own desire to fulfill our
endless possibilities through conviviality. Erickson similarly
predicates convivència's capacity to facilitate change and liberation
on Bakhtin's unfinished grotesque body and Paolo Freire's conception
of human beings as unfinished, aware of their incomplete condition,
and thus engaged in social problem solving.
Conviviality in art and design
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The various interpretations of conviviality also attracted the
attention of artists and designers across the world. Recent
exhibitions and collaborations centred on one or more interpretations
of conviviality include:
* 2009: 'The way of tea: an art of conviviality' at Kube in Poole,
U.K.
* 2012: 'Tools for Conviviality' at The Power Plant in Toronto, Canada
* 2013: 'Gordian Conviviality' at Import Projects, Berlin, Germany
* 2017-2021 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and
Culture. An international collaboration between artists and academics
* 2018: ‘Convivial Tools’ at The Design Museum, in London, U.K.
* 2018: ‘Community, Care and Conviviality: Freemasonry in Lithgow’ at
Eskbank House Museum, in Lithgow, Australia
* 2020: Anna Ehrenstein - Tools for Conviviality at C/O Berlin in
Berlin, Germany
* 2024: 'Tools for Change' at HEK (Haus der Elektronischen Künste) in
Basel, Switzerland
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Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviviality
