French root (convivialité)

One root of conviviality originated in 19th‐century France. Convivialité is very common in contemporary French and has also established itself in English as a loanword, as well as more recently^{[compared to?]} 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.^[2]

Spanish root (convivencia)

In Spanish, convivencia has long been interpreted literally as “living in the company of others” but in 1948 Américo Castro introduced la convivencia to mean the peaceful coexistence between different religious groups in Spain between the eighth and fifteenth centuries.^[3]

See also

• Agreeability – Personality trait
• Community
• Eutrapelia – The ability of a person to have pleasant conversation
• Playfulness – Voluntary, intrinsically motivated recreation
• Rapport – Close and harmonious relationship
• Social connection – Term in psychology referring to the experience of feeling close and connected to others
• Wit – Form of humour

Ivan Illich

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 eutrapelia. 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”^[4] that divided the population into experts that could use the tools and laypeople that could not.^[5]

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.^[6]

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”.^[4] 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.^[5]  

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”.^[7] Herein, he focused on socially critical thresholds^{[clarification needed]} that delimited whether conviviality was possible and argued that such thresholds should be translated^{[how?][by whom?]} into society-wide limits.

Contemporary uses in academia

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.^[8] 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^[9] 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.

Recent^{[compared to?]} 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.^[10][11] Scholars also analyse the use of public space and architecture in terms of its impact on conviviality in such diverse communities.^[11] The focus on these issues has been referred to as the “convivial turn” in academia.^[12]

Conviviality has also been applied to online contexts, in analyses of the ways in which people relate to each other and build communities online.^[13]

Contemporary movements

See also

• Alain Caillé – French sociologist and economist
• Criticism of technology
• Degrowth – Political, economic and social movement
• Lee Felsenstein – American computer engineer
• Gift economy – Mode of exchange where valuables are given without rewards
• Serge Latouche – French economist and philosopher (born 1940)
• Post-industrial society – Society whose service sector provides more economic value than manufacturing
• EF Schumacher – German-British statistician and economist (1911–1977)Pages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets