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In a world where difference is often seen as a threat or challenge, Comparing Conviviality explores how people actually live in diverse societies. Based on a long-term ethnography of West Africans in both Senegal and Spain, this book proposes that conviviality is a commitment to difference, across ethnicities, languages, religions, and practices.
Heil brings together longstanding histories, political projects, and everyday practices of living with difference. With a focus on neighbourhood life in Casamance, Senegal, and Catalonia, Spain - two equally complex regions - Comparing Conviviality depicts how Senegalese people skillfully negotiate and translate the intricacies of difference and power. In these lived African and European worlds, conviviality is ever temporary and changing.
This book offers a textured, realist, yet hopeful understanding of difference, social change, power, and respect. It will be invaluable to students and scholars of African, migration, and diversity studies across anthropology, sociology, geography, political sciences, and law.
List of contents
Part 1. Setting the Stage.- Chapter 1. Living with Difference Otherwise.- Chapter 2. Configurations, Representations and Migrations. - Part 2. Observing Conviviality.- Chapter 3. Everyday Neighbourhood Encounters. - Chapter 4. Staged and Sensuous. - Part 3. Challenging Conviviality.- Chapter 5. Aspiring to be Modern.- Chapter 6. Power Dynamics in Migration. - Part 4. Revisiting Conviviality.- Chapter 7. Basic Practices of Conviviality.- Epilogue.
About the author
Tilmann Heil is FWO [PEGASUS]² Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at KU Leuven, Belgium,and is also affiliated to the National Museum (PPGAS) of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
