Experimental Conviviality: Exploring Convivial and Sustainable Practices

Abstract The paper develops a concept of conviviality as a form of friendly togetherness that includes people, technical infrastructures and nature. Therefore, Marcel Mauss’s concept of the gift, different strands of thinking about conviviality (e.g. Ivan Illich), John Dewey’ experimentalism and the political theory and movement of convivialism are firstly depicted and discussed. The goal, secondly, is to integrate these various theoretical perspectives in order a) to better grasp already existent forms of conviviality and to b) develop an analytical and normative standpoint that on the one hand helps to evaluate unsustainable, non-convivial and on the other convivial forms of living together. Thus, such an analytical and normative model of modes of conviviality points out that associative self-organisation is decisive for the theory and practice of conviviality. Exchange without remuneration (between people and between people and nature) as well as self-organised gathering can be seen as the basis of a convivial social order which is differentiated from a solely instrumental, unsustainable and monetarily defined version of prosperity and the good life.