Abstract
Often-overlooked practices take place on neighbourhood street corners and in squares, as well as in yards and hallways. I intertwine my interlocutors’ motivations, evaluations, and justifications with the descriptions of their seemingly obvious everyday lives. The process of conviviality embraces the challenges of changing contexts, structural limitations, migrant subjectivities, and uncertainty as central dimensions of urban life. Interacting is a way of learning about differences, which are negotiated and accommodated in processes of translation. Greeting practices foreground (truncated) multilingualism as a form of continuous translation and dwelling in open spaces demands negotiation. Sufficient respect, consideration, and reciprocity form part of emerging consensuses, which are kept minimal, fragile, and in flux. As convivial space reproduced its constitutive practices, conviviality remained ever-evolving, a consensus in progress.
Ziguinchor, Casamance, May 2010
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Notes
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Some said it was appropriated from the Wolof and/or Murids, who situate the ‘sensitive organ’ naw inside of the sternum; naw also means respect and consideration (cf. Sylla 1980, p. 91f).
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Keb and vale are local variations between Jola Fogny and Jola Kasa that were both spoken among the people I knew.
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Regarding bargaining, see a very detailed transactional analysis in Nairobi (Parkin 1974), from which I take some inspiration.
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Heil, T. (2020). Everyday Neighbourhood Encounters. In: Comparing Conviviality. Global Diversities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34717-8_3
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