Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T09:06:30.708Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2019

THOMAS CHAMBERS
THOMAS CHAMBERS*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Oxford Brookes University Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Through 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Special Issue 3: Marginal Hubs: Conviviality Beyond the Urban Centre in Asia , May 2019 , pp. 776 - 799
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Original fieldwork was completed through an ESRC Doctoral Scholarship (1+3) ES/I900934/1 held at the University of Sussex. My thanks go to the editors of this special issue for their support and guidance. Additional thanks to Professor Geert de Neve and Professor Filippo Osella, my doctoral supervisors at the University of Sussex.

References

1 Nowicka, M. and Vertovec, S., ‘Introduction. Comparing convivialities: Dreams and realities of living-with-difference’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2013, pp. 1–16Google Scholar; Wise, A. and Velayutham, S., ‘Conviviality in everyday multiculturalism: Some brief comparisons between Singapore and Sydney’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2013, pp. 406–430CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Nowicka and Vertovec, ‘Introduction. Comparing convivialities’, p. 10.

3 Ibid.

4 Gandhi, A. and Hoek, L., ‘Introduction to crowds and conviviality: Ethnographies of the South Asian city’, Ethnography, Vol. 13, No. 1, March 2012, pp. 3–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gilroy, P., After empire: Melancholia or convivial culture?, Routledge, London, 2014Google Scholar; Shaftoe, H., Convivial urban spaces: Creating effective public places, Earthscan, London, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Donner, H. and de Neve, G. (eds), The meaning of the local: Politics of place in urban India, Routledge, London, 2007Google Scholar.

6 Gandhi, A., ‘Crowds, congestion, conviviality: The enduring life of the old city’, in A Companion to the Anthropology of India, Clark-Decès, I. (ed.), Wiley, Chichester, pp. 202–222Google Scholar (p. 207).

7 Donner and de Neve (eds), The meaning of the local; Gayer, L. and Jaffrelot, C., Muslims in Indian cities: Trajectories of marginalisation, Columbia University Press, Columbia, 2013Google Scholar; Jeffrey, C., Timepass: Youth, class, and the politics of waiting in India, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Saharanpur Religion Census 2011, May 2011, http://www.census2011.co.in/data/religion/district/503-saharanpur.html, [accessed 28 November 2018].

9 Ibid.

10 Hansen, T. B., The saffron wave: Democracy and Hindu nationalism in modern India, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1999CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Mookherjee, N., ‘Culinary boundaries and the making of place in Bangladesh’, Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1, April 2008, pp. 56–75Google Scholar (p. 58).

12 Chigateri, S., ‘“Glory to the cow”: Cultural difference and social justice in the food hierarchy in India’, Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1, April 2008, pp. 10–35Google Scholar.

13 T. Chambers, ‘Continuity in mind: Imagination and migration in India and the Gulf’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 52, No. 4, July 2018, pp. 1420–1456.

14 T. Chambers, and A. Ansari, ‘Ghar Mein Kām Hai (There is work in the house): When female factory workers become “coopted domestic labour”’, Journal of South Asian Development, Vol. 13, No. 2, August 2018, pp. 141–163. T. Chambers, Carving lives: Networks, labour and migration among Indian Muslim artisans, UCL Press, London, forthcoming.

15 Tsing, A., ‘The global situation’, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 15, No. 3, August 2000, pp. 327–360CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 338); A. Tsing, ‘What is emerging? Supply chains and the remaking of Asia’, The Professional Geographer, Vol. 68, No. 2, May 2016, pp. 330–337.

16 Sassen, S., Losing control? Sovereignty in an age of globalisation, Columbia University Press, Columbia, 1996.Google Scholar

17 Mayaram, S. (ed.), The other global city, Routledge, Abingdon, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Wise, A. and Noble, G., ‘Convivialities: An orientation’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Vol. 37, No. 5, August 2016, pp. 423–431CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 For example, M. Mohsini, ‘Crafting Muslim artisans agency and exclusion in India's urban crafts communities’, in C. M. Wilkinson-Weber and A. O. DeNicola (eds), Critical craft: Technology, globalization, and capitalism, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2016, pp. 239–258; C. M. Wilkinson-Weber, Embroidering lives: Women's work and skill in the Lucknow embroidery industry, SUNY Press, New York, 1999; O. Ruthven, ‘Metal and morals in Moradabad: Perspectives on ethics in the workplace across a global supply chain’, PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2008; A. Mezzadri, ‘The informalization of capital and interlocking in labour contracting networks’, Progress in Development Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2016, pp. 124–139.

20 See also Gandhi, Crowds, congestion, conviviality.

21 Gayer and Jaffrelot, Muslims in Indian cities.

22 Chandavarkar, R., History, culture and the Indian city, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, p. 111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Sen, A., ‘“Exist, endure, erase the city” (Sheher mein jiye, is ko sahe, ya ise mitaye?): Child vigilantes and micro-cultures of urban violence in a riot-affected Hyderabad slum’, Ethnography, Vol. 13, No. 1, March 2012, pp. 71–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Usually seen as looser than Hindu caste.

25 Chandavarkar, R., The origins of industrial capitalism in India: Business strategies and the working class in Bombay, 1900–1940, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Wise and Velayutham, ‘Conviviality in everyday multiculturalism’.

27 Ibid., p. 425.

28 Ibid., p. 12.

29 Brenner, N., ‘The urban question as a scale question: Reflections on Henri Lefebvre, urban theory and the politics of scale’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 24, No. 2, June 2000, pp. 361–378CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 See Kumar, N., The artisans of Banaras: Popular culture and identity, 1880–1986, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998Google Scholar; M. Mohsini, ‘The rise and fall of glitter: Craft, modernity and the Zardoz of Old Delhi’, PhD thesis, SOAS, University of London, 2010.

31 Pseudonym.

32 Thrift, N., Non-representational theory. Space, politics, affect, Routledge, London, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Nowicka and Vertovec, ‘Introduction. Comparing convivialities’.

34 Ibid., p. 6.

35 D. Massey, For Space, Sage, London, 2005.

36 All names have been changed.

37 Faisal (September 2010).

38 As recalled by an elderly informant who was at the Masjid as a child. No transcript of the speech exists.

39 Pernau, M., ‘Love and compassion for the community: Emotions and practices among North Indian Muslims, c. 1870–1930’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 54, No. 1, January 2017, pp. 21–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Pernua states that the author's name is missing, but suggests it is likely to be Saiyid Ahmad Khan, ibid.

41 Ibid., p. 21.

42 Ibid., p. 22.

43 Husain, A. M., Composite nationalism and Islam (Muttahida qaumiyat aur Islam), Mohammad Anwer Hussain (trans.), Manohar Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi, 2005 [1938], pp. 133–134Google Scholar.

44 Pernau, ‘Love and compassion for the community’, p. 21.

45 Whose father had come to Saharanpur along the river from Yamuna Nager during partition.

46 It is worth noting the potentiality of the researcher to act as a ‘convivial bridge-builder’.

47 I. Illich and A. Lang, ‘Tools for conviviality’, 1973, http://o500.org/books/ivan_illich_tools_for_conviviality.pdf, [accessed 25 January 2019].

48 Particularly mobile phones.

49 Wise and Velayutham, ‘Conviviality in everyday multiculturalism’, p. 415.

50 Gurmeet (November 2011).

51 A. Tsing, ‘Sorting out commodities: How capitalist value is made through gifts’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 2013, pp. 21–43.

52 Bano (December 2011).

53 El-Said, H. and Harrigan, J., ‘“You reap what you plant”: Social networks in the Arab world—The Hashemite kingdom of Jordan’, World Development, Vol. 37, No. 7, July 2009, pp. 1235–1249CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 1238).

54 Hutchings, K. and Weir, D., ‘Guanxi and wasta: A comparison’, Thunderbird International Business Review, Vol. 48, No. 1, January 2006, pp. 141–156CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Massey, For Space.

56 Pernau, ‘Love and compassion for the community’, p. 21.

57 Das, V. and Poole, D., Anthropology in the margins of the state, SAR Press, Santa Fe, 2004Google Scholar.

58 Agamben, G., ‘State of exception’, Nova srpska politička misao, Vol. 12, No. 1+4, pp. 135–145Google Scholar (p. 6).

59 For example, Max Weber's emphases on the role of religion in M. Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in sociology, Routledge, Abingdon, 2013.

60 Scott, J. C., The art of not being governed. An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2009Google ScholarPubMed.

61 Das and Poole, Anthropology in the margins of the state.

62 Meaning ‘land of the Hindu’, ‘Hindustani’ evokes a sense of living in a nation of and for ‘the other’. It was widely used by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, to evoke the idea of Pakistan (‘land of the pure’).

63 See also G. Carswell, T. Chambers and G. de Neve, ‘Waiting for the state: Gender, citizenship and everyday encounters with bureaucracy in India’, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263774X18802930.

64 This has gradually been replaced by the biometric Aadhaar Card.

65 Islam (August 2015).

66 Williams, P., ‘An absent presence: Experiences of the “welfare state” in an Indian Muslim mohallā’, Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2011, pp. 263–280CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 227).

67 Donnan, H. and Haller, D., ‘Liminal no more’, Ethnologia Europaea, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2000, pp. 7–22Google Scholar.

68 Cons, J., ‘Narrating boundaries: Framing and contesting suffering, community, and belonging in enclaves along the India–Bangladesh border’, Political Geography, Vol. 35, July 2013, pp. 37–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Aggarwal, R., Beyond lines of control: Performance and politics on the disputed borders of Ladakh, India, Duke University Press, New York, 2004CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Donnan and Haller, ‘Liminal no more’; Gerwin, M. and Bergmann, C., ‘Geopolitical relations and regional restructuring: The case of the Kumaon Himalaya, India’, Erdkunde, April 2012, pp. 91–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 Aggarwal, Beyond lines of control.

72 Ibid., p. 17.

73 Demetriou, O., Capricious borders: Minority, population, and counter-conduct between Greece and Turkey, Berghahn, Oxford, 2013Google Scholar.

74 Ibid., p. 10.

75 Gandhi and Hoek, ‘Introduction to crowds and conviviality, p. 4.

76 Account anonymized.

77 Demetriou, Capricious borders.