Are neighbours alike? Practices of conviviality in Catalonia and Casamance

Abstract

Living together in neighbourhoods characterised by various aspects of diversity is central to the everyday life of Casamançais in both Catalonia, Spain, and Casamance, Senegal. Discursively, Casamançais speak about it similarly in both localities, construing co-residence on the neighbourhood scale as a sociality that builds on similar moral values such as relative equality, respect and consideration. At the same time, this sociality also implies negotiation, interaction and translation as central everyday practices. Investigating these practices reveals how they facilitate locally specific forms of neighbourliness. These practices are central to the suggested conceptualisation of conviviality as a process in which a fragile balance is maintained over the course of both cooperative and conflictual situations.

Convivialities: An Orientation

“…Along with others, we find productive the notion of convivencia as shared life discussed briefly by Gilroy in his discussion of conviviality and recently expanded upon by scholars such as Nowicka and Vertovec (2014), Heil (2014), and in historical terms, Ray (2005) and Freitag (2014). However, we would like to pin it down a little and give it an epistemological inflection.…”

Ethnic minorities' reactions to newcomers in East London: Symbolic boundaries and convivial labor

“…Such areas are frequently used as “arrival zones” where newcomers find their feet (Pemberton & Phillimore, ; Phillimore, Humphris, & Khan, ). While in much public and policy discourse the assumption prevails that it is white majority residents who have to contend with the changes which immigration can bring to an area, an emerging body of research in the UK and beyond has looked at the local experiences, perceptions, and attitudes towards newcomers among long‐established ethnic minorities in areas which they have made their home, and where they predominate not just in numbers but also by way of shops, religious sites, school population, and so on (Albeda, Tersteeg, Oosterlynck, & Verschraegen, ; Erel, ; Hall, ; Heil, ; Hickman, Mai, & Crowley, ; Phillips, Athwal, Robinson, & Harrison, ).…”

Bourdieu, Habitus and Social Research

“…Our strategy is thus twofold: to pre-identify possible fields for research, and deduct the relevant fields from the respondents' narrations. For example, the literature suggests that neighbourhoods are sites where migrants transform their habitus (e.g., Heil, 2014;Noble and Tabar, in press;Wise and Velayutham, 2014). We thus included in the guide a few questions on social relations and rules of behaviour in public spaces in neighbourhoods.…”