The gastrophilosopher understood conviviality as the situation, common at the table, when different people come together over a good long meal, and time passes swiftly in excited conversations.
[citation needed] This interpretation is related to, but distinct from, several synonyms and cognates, including in French the enjoyment of the social company of others (convivialité), and Catalan popular discourse, informal neighborhood level politics, and social cohesion policy (Convivència) that views conflict in shared public space as inevitable and ultimately productive and preferable to order imposed by authorities.
Its[ambiguous] focus on joyful simple living, the localisation of production systems, links to Marxist economics, and Illich’s simultaneous criticism of overconsumption have resulted in conviviality being taken up by a range of academic and social movements, including as a pillar of degrowth theory and practice.
Illich recognised that the term in English was more likely to be associated with “tipsy jolliness” but derived his definition from the French and Spanish cognates, resulting in an interpretation that he felt was closer to a modern version of eutrapelia.
Illich introduced the term as the opposite of industrial productivity, with conviviality indicating a society where individual autonomy and creativity dominated.
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] As the title of the book suggests, the initial focus for Illich was how industrial tools and the expertise required to operate them constrained individuals’ autonomy.
It claims there is an urgent need to bring the three concepts of conviviality, cosmopolitanism, and creolisation back into focus and into dialogue with each other.
Anthropologist Brad Erickson places Catalan bottom-up convivència in contrast to civility imposed from above and explores the tension between them as shaping basic social categories and governmental projects.
[17] Alain Caillé, a French sociologist and founding member of the Anti-Utilitarian Movement in Social Sciences (MAUSS), defines convivialism as a broad-based humanist, civic, and political philosophy that spells out the normative principles that sustain the art of living together at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Alain Caillé published in 2020 The Second Convivialist Manifesto: Towards a Post-Neoliberal World,[18] signed by three hundred intellectuals from thirty-three countries.
[22] Conviviality is also employed in the Degrowth literature to describe things such as public spaces, goods, conservation movements, and even humans.