‘Performed Conviviality’: Space, bordering, and silence in the city

Abstract

AbstractThrough ethnographic material gathered in the Muslim woodworking mohallas (neighbourhoods) of a North Indian city, this article attends to ‘performed’ elements of everyday convivial interactions. It builds on work that situates conviviality as a normative project aimed at understanding and fostering interaction within urban space which bridges forms of difference. Through descriptive accounts, the article illustrates how convivial exchanges can embody degrees of instrumentality and conceal relations of power and marginalization that act to silence outrage or contestation. This ‘performed conviviality’ is dealt with in a broader context of ‘scale’ to consider how marginalization and connectedness—the marginal hub—intersect in even the most mundane moments of convivial exchange. By tracing processes of marginalization, boundary making, and bordering within the local, city-wide, state, and international contexts, the article follows the production of a marginalized or ‘border’ subjectivity through to the individual level. The subjectivities produced in this context act to enforce degrees of self-imposed silence among those subjected to processes of marginalization. In addition—and again attending to scale through an acknowledgement of the connected nature of the mohallas—the article also considers the role of conviviality in global chains of supply through the creation and maintenance of bonds and obligations that facilitate production in the city's wood industry.