Comparing Conviviality

Many people treat difference as a danger or a problem to be managed. Tilmann Heil asks instead how individuals actually get along in societies made up of many backgrounds. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic study of West Africans living in Senegal and Spain, he argues that conviviality means staying faithful to difference in all its forms, whether ethnic, linguistic, religious or cultural.

Heil weaves together long historical currents, political initiatives and the routines of ordinary life to show how coexistence takes shape. Much of the material comes from neighbourhood life in Casamance, Senegal, and Catalonia, Spain, two regions he treats as equally intricate. In both, Senegalese residents work through the subtleties of difference and authority, interpreting and mediating them as they go.

For Heil, conviviality is never fixed. It is always provisional and in flux. The book offers a grounded, realistic yet optimistic account of difference, social change, power and respect.

The work is aimed at students and researchers in African, migration and diversity studies, and speaks to anthropology, sociology, geography, political science and law.