In search of conviviality in Latin American cities

Abstract

This chapter consists of a bibliographical essay about the ways in which recent research in urban anthropology analyzes forms of living together in contemporary Latin American cities. Instead of being a concept with a normative horizon, “conviviality” is in this chapter a descriptive category that seeks to describe and understand the effective and situated modes in which interactions, negotiations, and conflicts take place in heterogeneous and unequal urban contexts. The challenge is to exercise a “transversal reading” that seeks to understand how conviviality unfolds in Latin American urban contexts from research that does not have this concept as the center of its investigation. Against the usual images of chaos and urban unpredictability on the one hand, and separation and fragmentation on the other, the chapter demonstrates that in Latin American cities there are socio-spatial orders that unequally and differentially distribute actors, actions, and activities. The chapter suggests that the degree of normative control over urban order and the social distance between intervening actors explain the differences between contexts and forms of conviviality in Latin American cities.

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