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Contribution type: New Concept
Concept: Convivéncia
Name of the contributor: Audren Letellier
E-mail of the contributor: aletellier@escp.eu
Etymology: Occitan, from Latin convivere, "to live together, to feast together."
Definition: Convivéncia refers to an ethic and a practice of living with difference rather than merely tolerating it. Rooted in the troubadour courts of medieval Occitania and shared across Occitan, Catalan, Castilian and Portuguese cultures, the concept was recovered by the modern Occitan movement from the 1980s onward as an answer to vergonha, the campaign, beginning with the 1539 Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts and sharpened by Henri Grégoire's 1794 report calling for the eradication of regional languages, that taught generations of Occitan speakers to feel shame for their own tongue. Today convivéncia organizes an actual practice. Convergéncia Occitana, a federation of eighty associations, defines it as "l'art de viure amassa, dins lo respècte mutual de l'alteritat," the art of living together in mutual respect for otherness, and stages it each year at the Sant Joan festival, where children from Occitan-language schools, children from disadvantaged neighborhoods, and young migrants from Sudan and Afghanistan perform together on stage, in Occitan. The concept draws on paratge, the older troubadour value of worth recognized between equals rather than inherited by birth, and stands against a still-active political claim, that a single national language and culture are the price of belonging.