Conviviality

I believe with conviviality it is actually useful to start from the roots. In English the word means “the enjoyment of festive society, festivity” is a word loaned indefinitely without payment from the French. Convivialite in French coined by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin gastrophilosopher in his 1825 book Physiologie du gout to describe the atmosphere at the table when different people come together over a meal, and spend time in excited conversation. An alternate root may be the Spanish la convivencia used by Americo Castro in 1948 to mean the peaceful coexistence between different religious groups in Spain between the eighth and fifteenth centuries.

The meaning I am aiming to use is the one developed by Ivan Ilich in Tools for Conviviality 1973. In which, he uses it to mean something akin to eutarapelia as a lens to analyse tools. To quote from wikipedia:

“He contrasted this with industrialised societies where individuals are reduced to “mere consumers”, unable to choose what is produced or how things are made in a world governed by a “radical monopoly”[4] that divided the population into experts that could use the tools and laypeople that could not.[5]”

I like this framing, for the centering of community through an experience most all people can empathise with. Moments of bonding over food, at the wateringhole setting a clear goal of community building and mutual-aid. Reading further into the book on the Internet Archive…