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Abstract

The concept of ‘convivality’ has come to dominate studies of
everyday life in diverse places. This article starts from an
understanding that our concepts inescapably direct our empirical
gaze in particular ways. Surveying a diverse literature, I look at
the different ways in which convivality has been conceptualised,
and trace tensions between these different approaches. I show
how this diversity of approaches and these tensions direct
attention in particular ways and so lead to a number of lingering
questions or empirical blind spots in the existing literature.
Drawing on my own ethnography, in the London neighbourhood
of Kilburn, I illustrate some of these challenges and outline
methodological approaches which might help overcome them. In
particular I unpack approaches which might support a deeper
engagement with questions of structure and social change, care
and incommensurability, and categorisation, cognition and
context, which have received insufficient attention in the
literature on everyday diversity, to date. Rather than making a
case for or against the utility of the concept of ‘convivality’, I
argue that the necessary first step is to extend our empirical
understanding to better cover these blind spots, and then to
weigh our conceptual apparatus up accordingly.