Histories of Conviviality in a Northeast Brazilian Periferia

Abstract

This article critically discusses conviviality by identifying commonly conflated understandings of the concept including emic, etic, normative, and historically contingent discourses. I argue that conviviality can most usefully be understood as a particular mode of sociality, and as such is necessarily shaped by prior modes of sociality and their attendant values. Conviviality is then applied analytically to participant observation conducted in an urban peripheral community in Northeastern Brazil. I argue that, in this community, residents approached living together through the distinctive Nordestino values of self-reliance and dignity, which produced a mode of sociality anthropologists have characterized as “inter-household autonomy.” I also describe shifts in the experience of conviviality between the beginning of my fieldwork in 1998 and 2015, and thus demonstrate how modes of sociality are themselves historically contingent.