Rethinking conviviality: materiality, sociability, and power in Israel/Palestine

Abstract

Conviviality has developed as a framework for interpreting everyday social life in diverse urban contexts, but the entanglement of power with convivial social interactions remains underexplored. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the urban margins of Jaffa, contemporary Israel, this article engages this dearth through an analysis of the relationship between the materiality of the built environment and everyday social interaction, building on an existing literature that makes this connection. Following the mass exodus of Palestinians from Jaffa in 1948 and decades of housing construction and state-generated migration to Jaffa by the Israeli state, the city’s dense urban periphery illustrates the concurrence of uneven material and legal infrastructures, deceptive discourses, and everyday sociability between inhabitants. Thus, the article suggests a reengagement with a conceptualization of conviviality made decades earlier. Applied to Jaffa, Mbembe’s argument indicates ways in which conviviality can be a register of power.