In everyday use, “conviviality” might conjure images of living it up, or feasting and carousing. In their edited collection of essays The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia, Overing and Passes use the idea of conviviality as a way of exploring what they call the “aesthetics of community.” I'm taking this idea of conviviality from the work of two anthropologists, Joanna Overing and Alan Passes. So in this piece, we're going to think instead in terms of community, and we're going to be asking what makes a human community convivial. This can open up a rift between the question of how to live in society, and the more intimate questions and issues we face in our everyday lives: the poking and prodding and tickling and cuddling and annoying and soothing and arguing and gossiping and loving and hating. We imagine society as something out there, a coolly rational public realm at odds with the hot and messy private world of our domestic sphere. Our biology makes us social.īut what does it mean to be a social animal? One way of asking this question would be by asking “what is society?” But the idea of “society” can seem rather abstract. But the biological machinery of love is not just about the mechanics of our individual bodies, or about our individual desires. We saw in the previous article how love involves both ancient biological machinery and the various roles we assume within the society of which we are a part. When seen in the context of our evolutionary heritage, it is not surprising the philosophy of love is so very complex. Throughout history, human beings have conjured wildly diverse ways of answering this question, and managing all the complex dynamics of living in society. And the question any self-aware primate one day has to ask themselves is this: How do you best manage all of this complexity? There's a lot to think about, a lot to process. It's a complicated business being a social primate. And through all this, we try to live as best we can. We snuggle and cuddle, struggle and quarrel. We manage the competing demands of living out the lives we want, and living alongside the others on whom we depend. We like play and mutual grooming and sex. One of the fundamental questions for human life is this: how can we live well with our fellow human beings-and with the other beings (animals, gods, spirits, strangers, the dead and so on) with whom we share our lives and our worlds?Īt root, we are social primates. So one way to make inroads into thinking about love is by thinking about what it means to be live alongside others. Love is not so much personal as interpersonal. It is about how we feel about others, how we think about them, how we connect with them, what we do with them. Whatever else it might be about, love is about connection. Oct.In this week's class, we are exploring Amazonian social philosophies of love and community, and how for social primates, community is fundamental to how we live and love. That process has always been the same for us, and I think this record was the result of that.” Turnstile Fall 2022 Tour Dates: If a song feels good, we just kind of let it happen. We always leave the door open for endless possibilities when it comes to making a song or trying things. “Everything is just a reflection of what we really want to do, so it’s always felt the same. “I think we never intentionally try to expand ,” Yates told SPIN last year of Glow On, which has propelled the Baltimore-based band to new levels of popularity.
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