maria sibylla merian centre
conviviality-inequality in latin america
maria sibylla merian centre
conviviality-inequality in latin america
nº38 | Gloria Chicote
nº38 | Gloria Chicote
nº 37 (jun. 2021) | JULIANA M. STREVA
This working paper approaches the current global crisis as a potential territoriality for radicalizing concepts and for learning with ongoing fugitive routes. Through nonlinear paths, I aim to examine the contours of the quilombo not only as a slavery-past event but as a continuum of anti-colonial struggle that invokes other forms of re-existence and convivial coexistence in Brazil. In doing that, this research draws attention to an Améfrica Ladina epistemology and a decolonial methodology embodied by living archives and oral histories.
📓 Related post: “Quilombo as Metaphor and Strategy“
🎧 Podcast: “Aquilombar com o oceano“
nº 36 (mai. 2021) | JOÃO JOSÉ REIS
It was not uncommon in Brazil for slaves to own slaves. Slaves as masters of slaves existed in many slave societies and societies with slaves, but considering modern, chattel slavery in the Americas, Brazil seems to have been a special case where this phenomenon thrived, especially in nineteenth-century urban Bahia. The investigation is based on more than five hundred cases of enslaved slaveowners registered in ecclesiastical and manumission records in the provincial capital city of Salvador. The paper discusses the positive legal basis and common law rights that made possible this peculiar form of slave ownership. The paper relates slave ownership by slaves with the direction and volume of the slave trade, the specific contours of urban slavery, access by slaves to slave trade networks, and slave/master relations. It also discusses the web of convivial relations that involved the slaves of slaves, focusing on the ethnic and gender profiles of the enslaved master and their slaves.
nº 35 (abr. 2021) | ENCARNACIÓN GUTIÉRREZ-RODRÍGUEZ
This Working Paper discusses entangled migrations as territorially and temporally entangled onto-epistemological phenomena. As a theoretical-analytical framework, it addresses the material, epistemological and ethical premises of spatial-temporal entanglements and relationality in the understanding of migration as a modern colonial phenomenon. Entangled migrations acknowledges that local migratory movements mirror global migrations in complex ways, engaging with the analysis of historical connections, territorial entrenchments, cultural confluences, and overlapping antagonistic relations across nations and continents. […]
nº 34 (abr. 2021) | GREGORY PAPPAS
In this paper, I argue that despite their different circumstances (size, location, history, demography), the Zapatistas (Chiapas, Mexico), Boggs Center (Detroit, USA), and Casa Pueblo (Adjuntas, Puerto Rico) share common lessons that are worth considering, at a time when there is so much uncertainty and disagreement about how best to address social injustices and much disillusionment with representative democracy. After a summary of the history and accomplishments of each of these American communal activist organisations, I present the common lessons and consider some challenges and possible objections. They provide an alternative between naïve optimism and
cynical passive pessimism. They practice horizontal models of conviviality and a holistic, ecological, and experimental approach to ameliorating injustices.
nº 33 (mar. 2021) | JAN BOESTEN
This essay aims to utilize the concept of conviviality for connecting the coexistence of seemingly contradictory phenomena in Colombia. It argues that while conviviality implies a normative content – a society in which members do not slaughter each other is better than one in which members resort to violence – the meekness of that normative claim suggests that it is better used as an analytical tool that seeks to connect the contradictions that coexist in the real lifeworld. Colombia’s history of violence and democracy is such a contradictory case. Comparativists have situated Colombia’s deficits on the “extra-institutional playing field”, lamenting that it is a “besieged” or “threatened democracy”. Conviviality helps us to specify these “extra-institutional” defects by suggesting impediments exogenous and endogenous to the state-building logic of the Colombian nation-state.
nº 32 (fev. 2021) | CAMILA ROCHA
This paper traces the origins of the New Brazilian Right, regarding the emergence of new leaders, new forms of expression and organization, as well as new sets of ideas, namely libertarianism and anti-globalism. Based on more than thirty in-depth interviews, conducted between 2015 and 2019 with right-wing leaders and activists; on a collection of historical data from right-wing organisations’ archives between 2015 and 2018, and on public data, I argue that this phenomenon started in the mid-2000s, after the onset of a corruption scandal related to the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and the dissemination of the pioneering social network Orkut in Brazil. […]
nº 31 (jan. 2021) | NILMA LINO GOMES
This Working Paper is a revised manuscript of the keynote lecture delivered on March 5, 2020, at the conference Living on the Edge: Studying Conviviality-Inequality in Uncertain Times (Mecila, São Paulo).
nº 30 (dez. 2020) | SUSANNE KLENGEL
The radical aesthetic of the historical avant-garde movements has often been explained as a reaction to the catastrophic experience of the First World War and a denouncement of the bourgeoisie’s responsibility for its horrors. This article explores a blind spot in these familiar interpretations of the international avant-garde. Not only the violence of the World War but also the experience of a worldwide deadly pandemic, the Spanish flu, have moulded the literary and artistic production of the 1920s. In this paper, I explore this hypothesis through the example of Mário de Andrade’s famous book of poetry Pauliceia desvairada (1922), which I reinterpret in the light of historical studies on the Spanish flu in São Paulo. […]
nº 29 (dez. 2020) | MAYA MANZI
In the context of our current planetary crises, in a world that continues to be shaped by capitalist, colonialist, androcentric and anthropocentric visions, we are faced with the urgency of reconsidering, at the deepest levels, the way we relate with other human and nonhuman beings. This working paper aims to contribute towards that end by looking at human-nonhuman relations through the concept of conviviality, understood as the everyday living together with difference, and how it intersects with inequality. […]
nº 28 (nov. 2020) | RAQUEL GIL MONTERO
Este working paper propone analizar el trabajo coactivo y la servidumbre en los Andes coloniales a partir de la reconstrucción de la convivencia en las haciendas con mano de obra de diferente origen. En particular se centra en los reclamos de personas que siendo legalmente libres se consideraban esclavizadas y/o eran consideradas así por testigos de su situación. El texto se inscribe en una sociedad que por definición era desigual, la de Charcas, y estaba obsesionada por la clasificación de las personas, ya que así se definían las condiciones sociales a las que se les reconocían privilegios, derechos y obligaciones. […]
nº 27 (out. 2020) | RAQUEL ROJAS SCHEFFER
Households that hire domestic workers are a space of compulsive encounters where people of different origins and social class meet, experiencing physical proximity that makes the social distance that prevails between them even more noticeable. Drawing on current research and scholarship on paid domestic work in Latin America, this paper explores the different ways of analysing the encounters of women from highly unequal social positions in the narrowness of the private household, arguing that the combination of physical proximity and affective ties fosters the (re)production of social inequalities and asymmetries of power. But while it is within the convivial relations of these households that inequality becomes evident, it is also there where it can be negotiated, fought, or mitigated. […]
nº 26 (set. 2020) | GABRIEL FELTRAN
In sustainedly unequal societies such as the Latin American ones, conviviality is inescapably linked to the reproduction of inequalities. Are convivial situations also part of the reproduction of violence, in societies that are not only unequal but also violent? This paper explores marginal conviviality, adding empirical evidence to Costa’s argument, as well as addressing his theoretical framework from an ethnographic point of view. A life story, followed empirically from 2005-2018 in a district of São Paulo, guides my argumentation.
nº 25 (ago. 2020) | FERNANDO BALDRAIA
This paper, inspired by Frantz Fanon’s thought, offers a diagnostic of our present times enacted as a “psychotic reaction” that melts together different scriptural registers to advance the notion of conviviality as a space of analytical experimentation where inequality and difference share the condition of conceptual isonomy. The particular thought experiment performed here tries to accomplish this goal by exploring the vernacular repertoire of the Brazilian junction of an afro-indigenous Atlantic. Its analytical gamble, zumbification, is the sketch of an epistemological subject-position whose labor consists in a kinesics of (at least) three movements: 1) the situatedness needed for effectively making political demands; 2) the decenteredness necessary for attenuating the harmful effects of (even strategic) essentialism as well as of the unavoidable reproduction of hegemonic exclusionary patterns; 3) the willfulness required for amplifying subalternized epistemological approaches so that they may become more pervasive.
nº 24 (jul. 2020) | JULIA VON SIGSFELD
The government of Rafael Correa (2007-2017) embarked on an ambitious project of diversifying the national economy to transition from a primary resource exporting economy to a competitive Knowledge Society and a Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy as biodiversity was conceptualized as the country’s most significant comparative advantage. This paper traces how peoples’ and nationalities’ knowledges, so-called ancestral knowledges, were elicited in unprecedented ways in this context of bringing about a change of the productive matrix. While knowledge in general was reframed as an infinite resource, ancestral knowledges were made productive for a state-led project of capitalist modernization.
nº 23 (jun. 2020) | ALEJANDRA MAILHE
Este trabajo analiza la resignificación del legado cultural indígena en la obra de varios intelectuales argentinos vinculados al espiritualismo (Joaquín V. González, Ricardo Rojas y Ernesto Quesada) entre fines del siglo XIX y los años treinta. En contraste con perspectivas hegemónicas que devalúan la alteridad indígena — como en el caso de Estanislao Zeballos y Bartolomé Mitre —, estos autores destacan la importancia de los vínculos socio-culturales entre las elites tradicionales y los indígenas. Forjados especialmente en el noroeste argentino (NOA) desde la Conquista, estos lazos se basarían en el supuesto vínculo de los grupos indígenas con las “grandes” civilizaciones precolombinas, y en su participación en las guerras de emancipación. Al imaginar instancias de convivialidad entre actores sociales antagónicos, estos discursos tienden a ocultar asimetrías implícitas a lo largo de la historia nacional, y a negar a los indígenas como sujetos sociales activos en el presente.
nº 22 (jan. 2020)| BARBARA POTTHAST
This paper traces the origin of the powerful mestizaje discourse as a marker of Paraguayan identity through the lens of gender and family relations. Rules and practices of family formation and sexuality reflect not only cultural but also sociopolitical hierarchies, and they allow us to connect the micro- and macro levels. An analysis of the different regimes of conviviality in Paraguay and the role that legitimate or illegitimate birth played in the struggle over group formation and social hierarchy also shows the capacities of a peripheral colonial elite to establish their own standards of social distinction, or the ones of the old elite in early independence period to circumvent a policy directed at their destruction. Finally, we explain the rise of the nationalistic ideology of mestizaje as a uniquely Paraguayan characteristic at the beginning of the 20th century, and the reasons for its persistence in the 21st century […]
nº 21 (set. 2019) | RAQUEL ROJAS SCHEFFER
Housewives and paid domestic workers perform – to a certain extent – the same kinds of tasks. They also tend to share interest in the valorisation of domestic work: If this activity were recognised as such – as work – housewives could claim retirement rights, while domestic workers should be granted the same labour rights as any other worker. But even when sharing the historical burden of house and care work, there are other social hierarchies that interrupt the common experience of these women and hinder the creation of alliances between them. This paper analyses the relationship between paid domestic workers’ and housewives’ organisations in Uruguay and Paraguay, two Latin American countries that share many similarities in terms of territorial extension, population and economy size, but show contrasts regarding the organisation of domestic workers, particularly their relation to housewives’ organisations.
nº 20 (ago. 2019) | CLAUDIA BRIONES
Distintas teorías políticas contemporáneas debaten maneras de reordenar un sistemamundo en que diferencias y desigualdades entre personas, colectivos y países aparecen tan densa como disparmente anudadas. Pocas de esas teorías se piensan por fuera de una modernidad que, como episteme, enmarca las jerarquías ideológicas, epistemológicas y ontológicas que naturalizan parte de tales anudamientos. Este ensayo hace foco en propuestas indígenas de Buen Vivir, para identificar qué diagnósticos y cuestionamientos esas propuestas realizan respecto de formas hegemónicas de convivialidad; qué contrapropuestas de convivencia promueven; y qué de ellas tiende a permanecer inaudible e invisible cuando distintos agentes no indígenas buscan reformularlas y universalizarlas como posible “alternativa civilizatoria”. […]
nº 19 (ago. 2019) | RAQUEL GIL MONTERO; SARAH ALBIEZ-WIECK
In this paper, we analyse an unusual travel account from the seventeenth century. Besides the rarity of travel accounts from this period, its singularity resides primarily in the fact that the traveller, Gregorio de Robles, self-identified as a peasant. This exceptional Spaniard travelled dominions of the Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch empires in America and Europe, and even briefly touched Southern Africa. His travel account is rich in information, but here we focus on one specific aspect: conviviality with the people he encountered along his way, with a special emphasis on his fellow compatriots. We will argue that this conviviality allowed Robles to create new networks and accumulate social capital and that the relationship with his paisanos resignified his belonging. By moving and traveling, he could attain a more privileged position than he had apparently been enjoying in his Castilian hometown.
nº 18 (jul. 2019) | GUILHERMO BONZANATO
Desde el comienzo de la era digital, determinadas políticas de gestión de la ciencia han incrementado las inequidades en las condiciones de producción del conocimiento y en las posibilidades de diálogo entre los colectivos de investigadores. A fines del siglo XX y principios del XXI se inició una reacción en las más prestigiosas bibliotecas y comunidades científicas de América del Norte y Europa Occidental, y América Latina comenzó el desarrollo de sistemas de visibilidad propios, al tiempo que sucesivas declaraciones fueron definiendo al Acceso Abierto como estrategia para superar tales inequidades. En esta dirección, se han desarrollado revistas en Acceso Abierto cuya sustentabilidad está siendo puesta a prueba. Este trabajo presenta un breve estado de situación actualizado sobre algunos problemas que enfrentan los autores, evaluadores y editores latinoamericanos en la gestión y publicación de los resultados de las investigaciones.
nº 17 (jul. 2019) | SÉRGIO COSTA
Starting from a detailed review of recent publications oriented by the concept of conviviality and etymologically related expressions (convivialisme, Konvivenz, Konvivialität), the article explores a common analytical deficit in these different contributions: the disregard of the reciprocal constitution of conviviality and inequality. To overcome this deficiency, the essay develops an analytical framework, according to which inequalities – defined along four complementary and interdependent axes (material, power, environmental and epistemological asymmetries) – are always signified, reproduced, and negotiated within convivial interactions.
nº 16 (jun. 2019) | ANNA GUITERAS MOMBIOLA
In the 1930s, the Bolivian elites promoted an education policy inspired by indigenist thought which sought to solve the problems faced by indigenous people – concerning welfare, hygiene, agricultural techniques, land issues – and to value to some extent their own culture. The ideal pursued was to shape a truly conviviality of Bolivian society with its otherness, giving rise to a new type of ‘Indian’ who would contribute actively and voluntarily to the progress of the nation. This educational project also addressed the Amazonian societies through the so-called school centres for “savages”. The ‘wild nature’ and ‘primitive state’ of the ethnic groups with which these schools operated – specifically the Siriono and the Moré – however, meant that the educational actions undertaken under indigenist ideals were also impregnated with civilizing principles.
nº 15 (jun. 2019) | MAYA MANZI
Throughout Brazilian history, Northeastern droughts have been the context for massive rural flight and intra-national migrations. State policies and interventions have played a significant role in promoting or restraining the movements of those affected by such “natural” plights. In this paper, we examine the political ecology and moral economies that have underlined state intervention over drought and peasant migrations since the end of the 19th century. We compare two historical periods marked by contrasting regional perspectives on nature-society relations within the context of Brazilian semi-arid climate: the period known as the “fight against drought” (1915-1980) and the period of “coexistence with the semi-arid” (1990-now)
🎧 Podcast: “Lutar contra ou conviver com a seca?“
nº 14 (jun. 2019) | TILMANN HEIL
Current academic usages of the notion of conviviality often carry a normative connotation in which it is opposed to tension and conflict. Instead, I propose to use conviviality as an analytical term. This everyday living together is characterized by tensions, contradictions, and inconsistencies that complicate abstract theorization and the use of clearly defined concepts whose role is, as Stuart Hall once suggested, to give us a good night’s rest by feigning a stability we long for. If conviviality is, as I suggest, understood as a notion that embraces the inconsistencies, multiplicities, and complexities of new urban ways, I inquire into the emerging relationalities between recently-arrived Senegalese and their social context in Rio de Janeiro under the impact of multiple hierarchical orders, including race, origin, education, and class.
nº 13 (jun. 2019) | OSVALDO BARRENECHE
Como el “principio olvidado” de la Revolución Francesa, uno que de todos modos ha permanecido en el vocabulario y la praxis política latinoamericana, este trabajo argumenta que la fraternidad tiene una dimensión política. Primero, la pieza analiza algunos aspectos generales de la fraternidad política. Luego, se tratan las principales objeciones al concepto. Posteriormente, el trabajo señala la presencia histórica de la fraternidad política en el contexto latinoamericano. Finalmente, se comparan los conceptos de diversidad, convivialismo y fraternidad, señalando algunas características comunes como así también las críticas que ellos reciben. El trabajo concluye destacando la importancia de profundizar el estudio de conceptos tales como Convivialismo y fraternidad, para reconocer y aplicar ideas innovadoras en el “vivir juntos con diferencias”.
nº 12 (jun. 2019) | LUCIANE SCARATO
This paper analyses convivial contexts in unequal societies from a historical and comparative perspective in Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Río de la Plata between the Conquest and the early twentieth century. It seeks to highlight how occurred on the ebb and flow of everyday life in unequal societies. In doing so, it aims to demonstrate that conviviality exists within inequality. It starts with a brief semantic cartography of the term conviviality, followed by its application on a selection of case studies about gender and family in Latin America. It explores ideals and structures of conviviality, underscoring individuals’ creativity to negotiate unequal power relations. It also looks at social movements to analyse conviviality in crisis, focusing on strategies to deal with, overcome, and subvert inequalities. In the end, it hopes to contribute to our understanding of conviviality in unequal societies.
nº 11 (abr. 2019) | RAMIRO SEGURA
Este artículo explora los modos en que la antropología urbana abordó la convivialidad en ciudades latinoamericanas. Para esto se despliega una lectura transversal a un conjunto de investigaciones sobre temas diversos en distintas ciudades de la región que no tienen a la convivialidad como preocupación explícita, buscando indicios sobre las formas de vivir juntos en ciudades socialmente desiguales y culturalmente heterogéneas. Como resultado del análisis del corpus construido, se identifican distintos “contextos de convivialidad” en el espacio urbano, que dan lugar a “formas de convivialidad” específicas. Asimismo, más allá de sus diferencias, se proponen algunas características compartidas por estos contextos y formas de convivialidad y se esbozan líneas de acción para un análisis explícito de la convivialidad en el espacio urbano.
nº 10 (dez. 2018) | NICOLAS WASSER
The present paper discusses conviviality in the ambivalent power relations of paid female domestic labour, by tracing the ways in which affects articulate social and employment status. As several feminist scholars in Brazil have shown (Kofes 2001, Brites 2007, Biroli 2018), feelings in the domestic working sphere are oriented toward the family and friendship. In my reading, these studies foreground that expressing such affection facilitates the inclusion of a “strange” woman in the household, enables domestic workers to ask for support in difficult moments, but at the same time creates an emotional surrounding in which both hierarchy and inequality are felt more intensely. In accentuating these ambivalent power relations on the level of daily interactions, I foreground an analytical lens informed by queer, feminist and affect studies towards difference that strives to integrate symbolic, structural and subjective aspects of social inequality. […]
nº 9 (dez. 2018) | FELIPE CASTRO GUTIÉRREZ
Este artículo reconstruye y examina la relación entre convivencia y violencia en una ciudad de México colonial. Argumenta que la violencia, lejos de ser una anomalía, era parte integral del tejido de la vida cotidiana, y asimismo una forma codificada de expresar y preservar las jerarquías sociales. Pero que, por otro lado, tenía regulaciones explícitas e implícitas que la acotaban e impedían que derivara en incidentes mayores, de participación colectiva. Asimismo, plantea que la violencia no siempre seguía la línea de las grandes desigualdades sociales, que estaban organizadas en formas de cortesía, lenguajes corporales y representaciones personales. Así, se marcaban límites y derechos que ciertamente eran desiguales, pero también recíprocos.
nº 8 (out. 2018) | KAREN GRAUBART
Late medieval and early modern Iberian monarchs governed through a competitive delegation of certain forms of jurisdiction. They invited corporate groups, including frontier settlers and urban citizens, but also resident Muslims and Jews, or indigenous peoples of the Americas, to live under customary law that was legitimated under conditions of close interaction and cohabitation. This created a tense form of everyday conviviality, wherein group members were intimately knowledgeable about aspects of the laws of other groups onvivial relations thus produced legal markers of difference that could reflect the way that superior powers dominated, but subaltern actors could also use those differentiations strategically. The analytic of conviviality, as a way to focus on the ways that difference functioned within everyday life rather than acted solely as a barrier, reveals the ways that consensus had to be constantly renegotiated within multiple group dynamics rather than imposed or achieved.
nº 7 (ago. 2018) | PETER WADE
This paper explores the history and meanings of mestizaje in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, and assessing its relationship to practices of conviviality. A brief overview of the colonial origins and significance of mixture is followed by an exploration of the way mestizaje figured as a nation-building discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Challenges to the image of the mestizo nation that were strengthened by the regional turn to multiculturalism are then assessed, before re-evaluating mestizaje as a resilient ideology that has not been easily toppled, partly because it contains within it contradictory tensions between conviviality and racism, which make it adaptable. Finally, the paper reviews recent work in genomic science that reiterates the image of the mestizo nation.
nº 6 (jul. 2018) | JOSÉ BENJAMÍN INUCA LECHÓN
Los pueblos y nacionalidades del Ecuador desde mediados del siglo XX impulsaron acciones de movilización por tierra, educación, identidad, cultura y vida que generaron nuevos discursos como los de nacionalidad, plurinacionalidad, interculturalidad, alli kawsay y sumak kawsay. La nacionalidad implica la autodeterminación como pueblos milenarios; la plurinacionalidad exige la construcción de un estado donde los pueblos ejerzan sus derechos territoriales y democráticos. La categoría “entre pueblos” pide a la sociedad la convivencia entre culturas diversas y el fin de las inequidades. Los conceptos de alli kawsay (vida buena) y sumak kawsay (vida hermosa, plena, digna) como fenómenos sociales, filosóficos y políticos de los pueblos andino-amazónicos confrontan el sistema desarrollista y de explotación del mundo occidental. […]
nº 5 (jul. 2018) | ARJUN APPADURAI
This Working Paper is a revised manuscript of the keynote lecture delivered on July 13th, 2017 at the inaugural conference of the Maria Sibylla Merian International Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America (Mecila) inaugural conference “Conviviality in Unequal Societies” (Berlin, Germany).
nº 4 (mai. 2018) | PAULA MONTERO
Using the Brazilian case as a reference we demonstrate that since the country’s first republican constitution “religious diversity” was legally constructed as a form of allocating in the field of religion popular practices perceived as dangerous and or superstitious. My hypothesis is that this religious diversity does not at first signify pluralism, given that it was organized under the aegis of Catholicism, within the ideology of syncretism. Using the constitutional congress of 1988 as an important point of inflection in the form of treating differences, I argue that since this time, pluralism became instituted as the main legal and political organizer of differences and in particular of religious diversity. Associated to the decline of the hegemony of the Catholic Church, this principle, by defining religions as relative to each other, promotes competition among religious organizations for social influence and primacy in their relationship with the state. […]
nº 3 (abr. 2018) | FRANK ADLOFF
The working paper firstly discusses the Convivialist Manifesto which was published by a group of French academics in 2013. Secondly, the concepts of convivialism as a social and political theory and conviviality as a lived practice are compared. Finally, a normative model of modes of conviviality is developed. Associative self-organisation is decisive for the theory and practice of conviviality. Exchange without remuneration and self-organised gathering can be seen as the basis of a convivial social order which is differentiated from a solely material and monetarily defined version of prosperity and the good life. […]
nº 2 (abr. 2018) | GESINE MÜLLER
The Caribbean has in recent decades consistently been one of the privileged sites for theoretical production, including the attempt to look concretely at conviviality in the Caribbean and its diaspora. One question that is still being asked is how to grasp ethnic difference without falling back into essentialisms. This paper asks about the norms and the forms of knowledge about conviviality in Caribbean literatures of the nineteenth century, as the discourses of racism were being established and the question of conviviality was negotiated very intensely. The question is to what degree it is possible to critically challenge essentialist constructions in an era that has gone down in history as the heyday of racism. Can a sharper look at representations of conviviality lead us to relativize canonized frames of nineteenth-century reference, such as race and nation? […]
nº 1 (nov. 2017) | MECILA
The Maria Sibylla Merian International Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America (Mecila) will study past and present forms of social, political, religious and cultural conviviality, above all in Latin America and the Caribbean while also considering comparisons and interdependencies between this region and other parts of the world. Conviviality, for the purpose of Mecila, is an analytical concept to circumscribe ways of living together in concrete contexts. Therefore, conviviality admits gradations – from more horizontal forms to highly asymmetrical convivial models. […]
