From human conviviality to multispecies conviviality

The notion of conviviality was introduced to the Western scholarly corpus by the Austrian philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich. Illich was an adamant commentator of institutionalized modernity in the industrial postwar West and in his widely celebrated Tools for conviviality (Reference Illich2009 [Reference Illich1973]) coined conviviality as an ideal to combat the degrading effects of capitalism. Following Illich (Reference Illich2009, 18), conviviality has to be understood in opposition to (capitalist) industrial productivity. Whereas, in capitalist regimes, workers are alienated from their products, conviviality was offered as a means to describe and foster ‘autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment […] in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made [sic!] environment’ (Illich Reference Illich2009, 19, emphasis added). For Illich (Reference Illich2009, 19), conviviality therefore conveyed the aspiration for ‘individual freedom realized in personal interdependence’, thus having ‘intrinsic ethical value.’ As Krauss (Reference Krauss2021) points out, Illich’s account is premised on justice and freedom in responsible interdependence, with the hope of engendering a ‘convival society’ founded upon ‘knowledge and tools not serving individualized profit and industrialized production, but the common good, while limiting resource consumption for the rich.’ Conviviality, in this context, already implies the idea of a ‘commons’ (Ostrom Reference Ostrom1990) – it helps to both cultivate and perpetuate it – yet ‘commoning’ is primarily (still) understood as an intra-human process that highlights participatory, distributed and bottom-up society-making.

Illich’s (Reference Illich2009 [Reference Illich1973]) timeless reaction to the negative and future-threatening trends that run through contemporary societies and his thorough critique of capitalism and consumerism became a referential point for the conviviality movement – a group of French intellectuals who, in two manifestos, called for convivialism as a regulative idea for alternative forms of collaborative, joyful post-growth social cohabitation (The Convivialist Manifesto 2014; The Second Convivialist Manifesto 2020). These authors offer an understanding of convivialism as ‘a mode of living together (con-vivere) that values human relationships and cooperation and enables us to challenge one another without resorting to mutual slaughter and in a way that ensures consideration for others and for nature’ (The Convivialist Manifesto 2014, 25), practicable for example through grassroot movements, participatory collaboratives and ‘slow’ initiatives. Convivialism advocates new forms of life based on ideas of a common humanity, common sociality, individuation and managed conflict. The point is not to seek social harmony or the absence of contention but to foster a sense of cohesion and sharedness that rests on a delicate balance between sameness and difference. Conviviality in this sense resides in the capacity of individuals to generatively interact with one another on their own accord and on their own terms, while nonetheless satisfying their possibly divergent needs and agendas.

In the foreword to the first conviviality manifesto, Adloff (Reference Adloff2014, 10) acutely notes that the basis for this way of re-thinking social life is an updated reading of Marcel Mauss’ landmark study of The Gift (Reference Mauss2011 [1925]). The core idea, resonating with much contemporary scholarship on sociality and co-sociality, is that any meaningful social relationship is underwritten by some form of reciprocity, even if it is ‘unbalanced’ or ‘asymmetrical’. The French convivialists have thereby extended the Maussian notion of gift exchange as a society-making obligate practice to also include the natural world, maintaining that ‘the gift/counter-gift relationship, and the relationship of interdependence, must [also] be applied to [nonhuman] animals – which must no longer be thought of as fodder for industry – and to the earth in general’ (The Convivialist Manifesto 2014, 33). Significantly, writing in the current atmosphere of catastrophe, environmental emergency and the long shadow of the Anthropocene, they accordingly identify conviviality with animals as a key condition for a good, just and sustainable life on Earth.

The resulting vision of equity, the basis for conviviality, must then encompass ‘the animal world in the name of anti-speciesism and common naturalness’ (The Second Convivialist Manifesto 2020). This understanding not only reverberates with the understanding of conviviality in the English academic discourse as a form of living together across difference and diversity (Heil Reference Heil2020; Samanani Reference Samanani2023) – sometimes celebrated as the ‘convivial turn’ in cultural and postcolonial studies (e.g. Gidley Reference Gidley2013; Lapiņa Reference Lapiņa2016; Neal et al. Reference Neal, Bennett, Cochrane and Mohan2019) – it coevally takes up recent generalizations of gift-exchange as a constitutive and regulatory dynamic of generative interspecies relationships in archaeology and cultural anthropology (Hussain et al. Reference Hussain, Weiss and Nielsen Kellberg2022; Hussain and Floss Reference Hussain and Floss2015; Nadasdy Reference Nadasdy2007). Stuart Hall’s (Reference Hall1993, 361) incisive declaration that the capacity to ‘live with difference’ likely delineates ‘the coming question of the twenty-first century’ – in the light of pressing Anthropocene challenges – then calls for capacities, concepts and imaginaries to ‘live with other species’ in the near and long-term future. Historical and future-oriented analyses of conviviality here promise to help formulate and identify affirmative, constructive models for thinking and living otherwise in more-than-human worlds. As Gilroy (Reference Gilroy2004) insists, the development of convivial cultures based on the perpetual negotiation of other-directed hospitality in the face of growing, omnipresent and often overwhelming prejudice-driven hostility must rank among the big, overriding ambitions, and perhaps even the destiny-making projects, of our time.

When contextualized and understood in this way, it is not surprising that considerations of conviviality have recently surfaced in the ecological literature on ecosystem conservation and restoration (Büscher and Fletcher Reference Büscher and Fletcher2020; Massarella et al. Reference Massarella, Krauss and Kiwango2022, Reference Massarella, Krauss, Kiwango and Fletcher2023). Conviviality is framed there as the ‘building of long-lasting, engaging and open-ended relationships with nonhumans and ecologies’ (Büscher and Fletcher Reference Büscher and Fletcher2019, 286), which has given voice to the ‘convivial conservation’ proposal as a radical antithesis to dominant Western and explicitly human-centred alternatives. Conviviality, from this perspective, shifts the attention from the protection of individual species and the emphasis on human benefits to the importance of promoting and curating ecological interactions in which diverse species can thrive, and thus to larger constellations of multispecies life. Convivial conservation implies questioning and dismantling the modernist gaze (Krauss Reference Krauss2021), for example, with regard to easily naturalized human–animal hierarchies and power relations, and encouraging viable forms of species co-living, not necessarily devoid of conflict but providing enough room for mutual development (see, e.g., Given Reference Given2018). Conviviality, in this framework, effectively enacts a critique of essentialism in ecological thought and conservationist practice; it draws attention to the affording qualities of multispecies cohabitation and the many possibilities, even though often asymmetric, that emerge where species meet. This notion of conviviality comes close to presently developed understandings of the term in multispecies studies, where based on the agenda-setting work of Haraway (Reference Haraway2008), conviviality is often defined in relation to the possibilities of ‘becoming-with’. Convivial life, in this view, is above all characterized by its salient, and perhaps unique, capacity to enable co-becoming, and thus ideally results in the profusion of multispecies opportunities and potentialities that depend on the ecological whole in which humans and nonhumans participate. This again suggests, in sync with other scholarship on this issue, that conviviality operates on the level of emergent biocultural totalities – be it systems, structures, assemblages or networks – not individuals.

Convivialists across disciplines commonly accept the relational underpinnings of their projects (e.g. Foggin et al. Reference Foggin, Brombal and Razmkhah2021), but, depending on their background, often face difficulties with properly describing and integrating either human or nonhuman contributions. The environmental humanities and some branches of environmental and animal history have so far spawned the most elaborate and considerate attempts to consolidate the two (e.g. Donati Reference Donati2019; Moraru Reference Moraru2015; Rigby Reference Rigby2020; Van Dooren Reference Van Dooren2019), framing conviviality from the perspective of how species interfere with each other’s projects to commission other-affirmative change and novelty. In particular cityscapes have garnered much attention within these discussions as they ‘have always been, to a greater or lesser extent, multispecies locales’ (Rigby Reference Rigby2018, 73). ‘Green cities’ have to accommodate both humans and nonhumans and cater to their needs; they have to seek out synergistic solutions, both material and immaterial, facilitating multispecies cohabitation and the forging of opportunities for all city dwellers irrespective of their taxonomic status. Rigby (Reference Rigby2018) articulates this project explicitly with Val Plumwood’s (Reference Plumwood2003; Reference Plumwood2006) call for cultural practices of ‘deep sustainability’, which are on the constant look-out beyond the human. For Rose and Van Dooren (Reference Van Dooren and Rose2012, 17), urban multispecies conviviality consists of a ‘being together that is not reducible to shared identities […] but [consists of] a temporary identification with others in a shared place’, where ‘“[i]dentification,” in contrast to “identity,” does not require that we share an essence or even a project, but simply that we are attentive to another’s presence, to their way of being in a place.’ For environmental humanists, the plasticity and adaptability of animal behaviour thus needs to be met with (radical) human cultural openness towards the nonhuman other, new forms of multispecies sensibility and attentiveness, and, crucially, a new ethics of more-than-human care. Conviviality, in this view, cannot be reduced to mere ‘matters of fact’ but conjures the urgency to examine and reflect on the responsibilities of earthly co-inhabitation as more-than-human ‘matters of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa Reference Puig de la Bellacasa2017), precisely because multispecies life is complicated and needs to be continously retuned and renegotiated.

As noted above, early formulations of conviviality have resonated with a more-or-less explicit notion of the ‘commons’, and this legacy has recently been belaboured by more-than-human approaches in a range of disciplines to draw acute awareness to the importance of a ‘multispecies commons’ (e.g. Baynes-Rock Reference Baynes-Rock2013; Bresnihan Reference Bresnihan2015; Haldrup et al. Reference Haldrup, Samson and Laurien2022) in fostering conviviality-affording practices and broader convivial constellations of life. As Hussain and Brusgaard (Reference Hussain and Brusgaard2024) have argued, comparative explorations of multispecies commoning can be conducive to answering important questions of multispecies conviviality past and present, for example in the context of human–beaver relations, where convivial life depends on the sharing of key resources within co-inhabited and co-curated landscapes. By extending the notion of the commons to a multispecies world, we can perhaps arrive at an understanding of conviviality as an affirmative coming together of independent agentic life built on a recognized and cultivated commons that is enacted across difference (including, importantly, species boundaries).

Conviviality in this sense can be an analytical lens to bring up the past in new ways or to reinterpret the archaeological evidence at hand, but it can also be understood as an open and inviting method to be applied in the service of post-qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre Reference St. Pierre2021). Drawing on this promise and by emphasizing the concept’s ethical dimension and critical potential, we in the following investigate the possibilities of deploying it as an experimental archaeological lens. What kind of issues can be addressed by mobilizing conviviality in the context of the multispecies deep past? How may convivial thinking affect our understandings and interpretations of the past? Does conviviality have the potential to bring (radically) different pasts and their varied representations to attention? And how may conviviality thinking change narratives about past multispecies relationships and interdependences?

Probing conviviality in the deep past

The Anthropocene moment – as a counterpoint to the human deep past – has proffered a host of novel ‘intracorporeal encounters’ between diverse human and nonhuman agents and has come to frame a range of significant ‘wild spaces of conviviality […] emerging in multispecies cities where improvisation, risk, and accountability are all in play’ (Kirksey et al. Reference Kirksey, Munro and Dooren2018, 617). Arregui (Reference Arregui2023) has, for example, shown how the meeting of humans and wild pigs in the suburban periphery of Barcelona decisively reorients the behaviour and attitudes of all of the involved agents, thereby promoting unique forms of reciprocal but always precarious human–porcine co-living. The author proposes to address this emergent form of species co-living as an ‘infraspecies’ relationship, as convivial coexistence unfolds not with reference to supposedly stable species categories but is negotiated between individual humans and pigs who interfere with each other’s lives in situated, often idiosyncratic and deeply ambivalent ways. Arregui’s (Reference Arregui2023) infraspecies ethnography powerfully documents that humans and pigs are drawn together as peri-urban co-dwellers – facilitated by acorn-rich forest, household garbage, lawns, plentiful water resources and anthropogenic feeding – and they have to cultivate generative forms of mutually attentive ‘indifference’ and ‘interpatience’ (Candea Reference Candea2010), allowing them to coordinate their projects without serious cutbacks or existential trouble. In this specific ecological setting, humans and pigs exhibit habituated forms of ‘relational attunement’ (Arregui Reference Arregui2023, 121) and the ways they encounter, perceive and co-constitute each other regularly resists ‘fixation’ – they ‘“reciprocally capture” one another in relations that are far from set’ (Stengers Reference Stengers2011; quote from Arregui Reference Arregui2023, 120). This fragile coming together of humans and pigs can be described as a form of multispecies conviviality, yet configured in such a way that porcine others may simultaneously appear as ‘wild’ and ‘tame’, ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ or as ‘pest’ and ‘neighbour’. These descriptors are first of all about the ascribed agencies (sensu Howell Reference Howell2018) of pigs. Yet, they also speak about the potentials, not the essentials, of pigs to inscribe themselves in certain ways into human lives and livelihoods, always depending on the particularities and contingencies of concrete, spatiotemporally specific human–pig encounters and gatherings.

Human–pig relationships in the deep past can be examined in similar ways and may reveal previously unrecognized patterns of convivial life. The importance of pigs in the lifeworlds and ecosystems inhabited by early-to-mid-Holocene people in Northern Europe, especially in Southern Scandinavia, has long been recognized for example, but the question has traditionally been cast as ‘hunting’ (wild boar) versus ‘farming’ (domestic pig). Only recently have archaeologists started to search for evidence of more subtle forms of pig management and its material and biochemical signatures. Stable isotope analysis has for example revealed that some wild boar specimens may have consistently exploited aquatic resources made available by human activity in the landscape (Maring and Riede Reference Maring and Riede2019). The evidence for gradual changes in wild boar morphology documented over the course of the Mesolithic is taken to signal changed livelihoods in increasingly human-shaped habitats (e.g. Cucchi et al. Reference Cucchi, Harbers and Neaux2023; Magnell Reference Magnell2006) and thereby coincides with the availability of open spaces, and presumably pasture, close to human habitations as well as a general shift in woodland ecologies, with notably increased oak abundance in the later Mesolithic (Berglund and Larsson Reference Berglund and Larsson1991). At the same time, the remains of pigs – especially their teeth, but also their mandibles – are increasingly associated with Mesolithic human burials (Grünberg Reference Grünberg2013), and some of these items may have been curated and exchanged over considerable distances (Mannermaa et al. Reference Mannermaa, Gerasimov, Girya and Sablin2019). An early Mesolithic deposit at the site of Blätterhöhle recognized as intentional, for example, contains the skull remains of both a human and several wild boars (Orschiedt et al. Reference Orschiedt, Gehlen, Schön and Gröning2012), pointing to socially significant relationships between some representatives of the two species. These associations can be interpreted as zoomaterializations of increasingly intimate, co-woven human and suid lives. The underlying dynamic at least strongly supports a convivial interpretation: Wild pigs benefit from environmental changes and human-catered landscape affordances, are in turn drawn into human taskscapes (sensu Ingold Reference Ingold2022) and thus elicit human attention. Importantly, this human–suid configuration also unlocks new hunting opportunities for people and can thus be described as reciprocal, as both humans and pigs can benefit and thrive (Hussain Reference Hussain2024a).

Human–pig conviviality may have been further amplified when human foragers also developed an interest in oaks, tending and expanding oak stands, for example by means of pyrotechnology, and, through ‘ecologies of fear’ maintained by anthropogenic activity, rendered these habitats comparatively devoid of suid predators. Such a scenario is for example supported by contextual evidence from the Jomon (Bleed and Matsui Reference Bleed and Matsui2010) – complex hunter-gatherer societies inhabiting parts of Japan from the Late Pleistocene to the Late Holocene. Consonant with Late Mesolithic Scandinavia, stable isotope data from Jomon suggest that some wild boar were encouraged by human-procured aquatic resources (Matsui et al., Reference Matsui, Ishiguro and Hongo2002), and some Jomon foragers promoted clustered oak-rich habitats close to settlement sites (Bleed and Matsui Reference Bleed and Matsui2010; Crawford Reference Crawford2008, Reference Crawford, Pişkin, Marciniak and Bartkowiak2018) and in turn captured wild boar and other animals attracted in this way. Similar dynamics may have fuelled millennial-scale trajectories of wild pig management in Southwest Asia (Vigne et al. Reference Vigne, Zazzo, Saliège and Simmons2009), supplying the synanthropic basis (Baumann Reference Baumann2023; Hussain Reference Hussain2024a) for subsequent pig domestication. Brumm and colleagues (Reference Brumm, Oktaviana and Burhan2021), making a comparable argument, have discussed the prominent place of suids in the earliest Paleolithic rock art of Southeast Asia in relation to the possible accruement of deep-historical forms of human–pig commensalism. Such pig-centring visual culture may similarly reflect the generative dimension of situated systems of human–nonhuman conviviality: It produces multispecies intimacies and fosters habitual attunement, while delegating both humans and pigs an important place in each other’s daily pursuits, without curtailing their development, agency and livelihood.

Hussain and Brusgaard (Reference Hussain and Brusgaard2024) have recently suggested that the Mesolithic settlement of Northern Europe was profoundly facilitated by the landscape-scale activity of beavers – what they term beaver ‘geopraxis’ (following Schroer Reference Schroer2022). The situated systems of human–beaver co-existence the authors reconstruct are primarily based on human foraging dependencies on beaver-generated resource affordances but also point to an important convivial element. The combination of salient hunting, fowling, fishing and plant-gathering opportunities for human foragers opened up and curated by beaver others (see also Coles Reference Coles2006) renders beaver neighbourhoods intrinsically valuable (Hjørungdal Reference Hjørungdal2019), orienting human sensibility, attentiveness and care towards the presence and world-making proficiency of these landscape-engineering animals. Human forager projects, in other words, align with some key beaver projects in the landscape, and beaver livelihood therefore demands appraisal and affirmation. Curational hunting practices – i.e., the lack of evident overharvesting of beavers – throughout the Mesolithic may be cited in support of this convivial logic of human–beaver cohabitation. In addition, Hussain and Brusgaard (Reference Hussain and Brusgaard2024) draw attention to the possibility that such evolved human–beaver commons are undermined and ultimately dissolved as pastoralist and agriculturalist practices shift the attention to other animals and habitats and put growing ecological pressure on beavers (for similar arguments, see Liarsou Reference Liarsou2013; Reference Liarsou2015; Reference Liarsou2020), so that some human projects began to gradually repel beaver projects.

Other examples for possible forms of deep-time multispecies conviviality can be distilled from the evolution of early synanthropism (Baumann Reference Baumann2023; Hussain Reference Hussain2024b; Klegarth Reference Klegarth, Bezanson, MacKinnon and Riley2017; O’Connor Reference O’Connor2013). Baumann and colleagues (Reference Baumann, Hussain, Roblíčková, Riede, Mannino and Bocherens2023) have for example shown that hunter-gatherer settlement activity and surplus hunting during the earlier Gravettian of Moravia consistently created valuable high-caloric point resources – in some cases even ‘food bonanzas’ – and in this way attracted common ravens. These findings confirm earlier hypotheses formulated on the basis of the unique archaeological settlement signature and avifaunal spectrum of the relevant Gravettian sites in what is today the Czech Republic (Bochenski et al. Reference Bochenski, Tomek and Wilczyński2009; Hussain Reference Hussain2019; Kost and Hussain Reference Kost and Hussain2019; O’Connor Reference O’Connor2013). They enable new interpretations of the role of ravens in the respective Gravettian societies: Humans emerged as highly predictable herbivore carrion accumulators – notably of mammoth – and simultaneously deterred other larger carnivores, as signalled by the rarity of bite or gnaw marks within zooarchaeological assemblages (generally <1%; Svoboda et al. Reference Svoboda, Krejčí, Krejčí, Dohnalová, Sázelová, Wilczyński and Wojtal2019; Wilczyński et al. Reference Wilczyński, Wojtal, Robličková and Oliva2015; Reference Wilczyński, Wojtal and Svoboda2017; Wojtal et al. Reference Wojtal, Wilczyński, Bocheński and Svoboda2012; Reference Wojtal, Svoboda, Roblíčková and Wilczyński2020). Carnivores were possibly even removed purposefully from settlement and carrion sites (Wilczyński et al. Reference Wilczyński, Haynes, Sobczyk, Svoboda, Roblíčková and Wojtal2020), and there is evidence that humans likely maintained meat and bone caches as well as waste disposal areas in the vicinity (Svoboda et al. Reference Svoboda, Krejčí, Krejčí, Dohnalová, Sázelová, Wilczyński and Wojtal2019). Gravettian corvids adapted to these early anthropogenic micro-ecologies, were in turn demographically promoted and became consistently entangled with human lifeworlds and key foraging activities in the wider landscape (Hussain and Baumann Reference Hussain and Baumann2024). Gravettian humans, in response, integrated the birds into their cultural and cosmological repertoire, arguably not so much because of their intrinsic significance but because of the emergent relational attunement of humans and ravens, and the latter’s situated prominence afforded by the specific exposition of the two in the landscape (cf. Hussain Reference Hussain2024a). The acquisition of raven feathers as an important cultural practice in this Gravettian setting (Wertz et al. Reference Wertz, Wilczyński and Tomek2015) may then be seen not so much as an expression of human ability and cognition, but as a result of the phenomenological imbrication and salience of ravens within the everyday pursuits and projects of human foragers. The importance of raven bones in these zooarchaeological assemblages, in other words, gives witness to a ‘mutual ecology’ (Fuentes Reference Fuentes2010) and a more-than-human neighbourhood, in which both humans and ravens can thrive and ‘co-become’, orienting their behaviours, attentions and concerns towards each other. As such, this deep-time configuration may qualify as a convivial form of Upper Paleolithic multispecies life.

A similar argument can be made for some early human–fox encounters. Red foxes rank among candidate ‘early adopter’ species (O’Connor Reference O’Connor2013), with the capacity to quickly redress their behaviours to make a living close to or in emerging human-shaped ecologies. Stable isotope evidence obtained from Pleistocene red foxes spanning the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic sequence in the Swabian Jura in south-western Germany indicates that foxes systematically took advantage of human foraging spoils, especially from horse and reindeer, from the Early Upper Paleolithic onwards, thereby framing a distinct human-adapted feeding niche, yet such behaviour is undocumented in the preceding Middle Paleolithic (Baumann Reference Baumann2023; Baumann et al. Reference Baumann, Bocherens, Drucker and Conard2020). While most attention has been paid to the implications of this pattern in terms of ecosystem impacts and the potential role of Homo sapiens as a hyper-niche constructor, precipitating more recent Earth-system transformations, the lessons for conviviality studies have so far hardly been considered. In the Eastern Mediterranean Levant, where foxes are notably abundant throughout the Epipaleolithic–Neolithic sequence (Yeshurun et al. Reference Yeshurun, Bar-Oz and Weinstein-Evron2009), and were likely promoted by increasing human site fidelity and waste accumulation, foxes or some of their body parts also make an appearance in human burials (Maher et al. Reference Maher, Stock and Finney2011; Reference Maher, Richter and Stock2012). This is not only suggestive of evolved forms of human–fox co-sociality, mediated by increasingly interwoven human and fox lifeworlds but, similar to the infraspecies human–pig relations discussed above, points to mutual habituation and contingent forms of other-oriented engagement with long-term consequences for both human and fox behaviours and livelihoods. Attending to foxes, in other words, may have become more than just a question of sustenance and/or resource acquisition and incurred questions of meaning and care to past people, questions which are central to negotiations of convivial constellations of species cohabitation caught in-between tensions of care and control.

To conclude, mobilizing the concept of conviviality opens up some promising avenues to fundamentally reimagine the deep past and the nature of human life therein. Though our perspective is inescapably grounded in Central and Eastern European academic pursuits and research traditions, querying deep-time convivialities in this manner may have merit for other localized perspectives as well, hence illustrating the concept’s productive flexibility beyond settler colonial frameworks and research traditions. Deploying conviviality as a critical lens generally helps to flag up and deconstruct one-sided default framings and shifts the attention to the contexts and reasons for successful, millennial-scale species cohabitation. What comes into view, in this way, is a dynamic of behavioural cross-adjustment and co-orientation that intervenes with the course of evolutionary and historical developments. The strength of this perspective lies in the potential to work out what forms of conviviality become possible under which circumstances, and how and when they fail and succeed, and why they do. Not every interspecies relationship is a testimony of convivial life, of course, and paleo-conviviality studies may therefore isolate important pitfalls for how to live together with other animals without collapsing their potential to thrive and act on their own terms. These insights can be crucial, even if often basic, for envisioning truly multispecies futures and novel convivial approaches to nature conservation. In the following section, we explore the implications of this potential of a convivial perspective for museum narratives and other heritage practices.

Presenting conviviality. Archaeological museum narratives

Dodd and colleagues (Reference Dodd, Rader and Thorsen2013, 1) have pointed out that museums – as institutions that frame and address important societal problems and engage visitors to critically discuss them – should also responsibly approach the increasingly paramount subject of nonhuman animals and their place in human history, not least because the way the subject is exhibited can greatly affect and shape current and future interactions with animal others. Dodd et al. (Reference Dodd, Rader and Thorsen2013) identify two main motivations for presenting and centring nonhuman animals and their broader environmental context in museums: (1) to evoke appreciation of the rich and diverse worlds of nonhuman animals, and (2) to provoke reflection on how cruel and destructive humans have often acted towards them today. These two motivations are rooted in a critical reading of late capitalist attitudes towards animals (see, e.g., McMullen Reference McMullen2015; Sayers Reference Sayers2014; Stache Reference Stache2020; Taylor and Twine Reference Taylor and Twine2014), especially the ways in which they have been marginalized and frequently been reduced to mere objects or commodities in industrial production chains (but see Mc Loughlin Reference Mc Loughlin2022 for the involved complexities). Conviviality, originally formulated as a critique of degrading effects of capitalism, supports the critical engagement with this topic with regard to nonhuman animals on display, and draws attention to the many forms of capitalist ‘alienation’ from animals as nature (Cassegård Reference Cassegård2021; Stache Reference Stache2020) as well as the resulting rifts separating human and animal lives, lifeworlds and sensibilities. Archaeological museums can recontextualize this diagnosis with knowledge and open questions on human–animal relations in deep history and how humans and animals may live together differently.

Archaeological museums, then, might be important instigators for renewed discussions on conviviality and multispecies co-living, and they can join and supplement cross-cultural (e.g. Schroer Reference Schroer2021; Whitehouse Reference Whitehouse2015) and Indigenous perspectives (e.g. Kimmerer Reference Kimmerer2021) on how to imagine and forge a different, other-inclusive, postanthropocentric future. Although archaeological museums traditionally showcase diverse zoomaterialities and varied exhibits reference past human–animal relationships, they have tended to solidify human-centred narratives and clichés that boil down to framing animals as resources (or, alternatively, as abstracted symbols and/or mythological capital), and therefore as canvassing the human domestication and conquest of nature; only very rarely are they staged as companions, co-actors or valued significant others in past worlds (but see Mulville Reference Mulville2019). Stobiecka (Reference Stobiecka2023) has argued that archaeological museums have the immense potential here to probe new theories and approaches and help overcome such one-sided and increasingly problematic narratives, hosting critical and more engaged displays. This call to substantially re-configure more traditional approaches in the museum space, focusing less on practical concerns (such as conservation, documentation, the maintenance of collections and digitization; see, e.g., Skeates Reference Skeates2017) and more on engaging visitors with acute and wicked problems, debates, crises and challenges currently high on the socio-political agenda (Harrison and Sterling Reference Harrison and Sterling2020; Hussain and Riede Reference Hussain and Riede2020; Sterling Reference Sterling2020; Stevenson Reference Stevenson2022; Stobiecka Reference Stobiecka2022b) is also supported by the re-definition of the museum championed by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in 2022. Today’s museums need to be inclusive hubs that foster diversity and sustainability and spark critical and constructive discourse as how to achieve these gleaming aims, including how to bes formulate the associated problems to begin with. Museums themselves are thus increasingly seen as ‘contact zones’ (Clifford Reference Clifford1997), providing a social space and ‘testbed’ for dialogue and negotiation. As such, museums need not just respond to ‘matters of fact’ but emphatically speak to ‘matters of concern’ (Latour Reference Latour2004) – indeed aspire to become ‘disruptive’ voices in discourse (Fenske and Elpers Reference Fenske and Elpers2020). Calling on Bewes’s (Reference Bewes2010) post-critical stance, museums should accordingly attend to their time ‘not against the grain’ but ‘with it’ (emphasis added). Given this role, museums, and particularly archaeological museums, should also be sites of creative, provocative and engaged convivial thinking.

Against this broader backdrop of emerging museum and heritage theory, an exploration of how multispecies conviviality of the deep past is belaboured and staged in archaeological museums is useful and can help to identify current constrictions and potentials in broader heritage debates. While arguing that museums have the potential to participate in critical theory-work in archaeology and beyond (see also Stobiecka Reference Stobiecka2023, 6), we probe into two archaeological exhibitions with conviviality purchase to exemplify and reframe museum spaces as agents of debating, practicing and learning about alternative forms of interspecies cohabitation: The permanent exhibition of Lascaux IV – Centre International de l’Art Pariétal in Montignac-Lascaux and the Age of Animals, a part of the permanent display in the Stone Age gallery of the Neues Museum in Berlin.

Conclusions. Archaeology of conviviality in theory and practice

This paper has offered conviviality (1) as a method to reexamine past human–animal relationships and challenge their traditional representations, and (2) as a critically engaged lens to spark creative dialogue on multispecies co-living, responsible attentiveness to the nonhuman other in securing local and planetary livelihoods and radical reimaginations of the possibilities for species coexistence in the near and long-term future. By harnessing, deploying and encouraging conviviality thinking, archaeology can make a substantial contribution to today’s existential challenges and concerns in society and environment. Playing to its empirical strengths and the need to continuously rearticulate past, present and future horizons of significance and to probe what the field has to say in times of total crisis, archaeology can so join other voices in the academy and beyond to provide fresh perspectives on the diversity of species cohabitation; its conditions, consequences and limitations; and its many material, cultural and cognitive imports. Archaeological perspectives, alternative readings and rereadings of an always contested past in this way also promise to complement nature conservation efforts in the present, as conviviality-oriented analyses expose the fundamental inseparability of human and nonhuman lives and livelihoods, highlighting the importance of equally considering human behaviour and material infrastructures in nature conservation and ecological restoration programs. Mapping out and comparing convivial forms of life as they unfold in different deep-historical contexts and at the intersection of different species can thereby add to the emerging body of Indigenous and anthropological literature on ecosystem stewardship (Hoffman et al. Reference Hoffman, Davis, Wickham, Schang, Johnson, Larking, Lauriault, Le, Swerdfager and Trant2021; Solange Bandiaky-Badji et al. Reference Bandiaky-Badji, Lovera, Márquez, Javier Araos Leiva, Robinson, Smith, Currey, Ross, Agrawal and White2023) and complement calls for ‘applied zooarchaeology’ (Lyman Reference Lyman2012; Wolverton et al. Reference Wolverton, Nagaoka and Rick2016) and ‘archaeoecology’ (Crabtree and Dunne Reference Crabtree and Dunne2022), as well as archaeological extinction and biodiversity studies (Andermann et al. Reference Andermann, Faurby, Turvey, Antonelli and Silvestro2020; Rick and Sandweiss Reference Rick and Sandweiss2020). Thinking through the past and deep past in terms of conviviality may also provide further context for broader histories of zoonotic disease and so resituate phenomena considered typical for the 21st century (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) within deep history. We have argued that conviviality thinking can thus help realign archaeological discourse with broader societal and political preoccupations of our time and move beyond critique – to not simply read the past ‘against the grain’ but ‘with it’, and in a transformative spirit of ‘slow hope’ (Mauch Reference Mauch2019; see also Black Trowel Collective et al. Reference Black Trowel Collective, Berihuete-Azorín and Blackmore2024 for an anarchist view).

A concern with conviviality and convivial forms of life yields a transformative impetus for how we think about archaeological museums and more-than-human heritage, reconfiguring the sensibilities and responsibilities of an engaged archaeology in the Anthropocene moment. We have argued that conviviality can thereby help motivate and catalyse new forms of creative engagement with archaeological pasts in the context of a post-critical, mission-conscious museum and beyond the epistemological and conceptual stereotyping and rigidification that has scourged many archaeologies for too long. Conviviality offers the opportunity to reposition archaeological knowledge as crucial for understanding the fundamental interwovenness of nature and culture and the interpenetration of human and nonhuman behaviours and lives from local to planetary scales. As a method for museum studies, conviviality aids in overcoming the tyranny of the text and enables foregrounding and articulating varied yet instructive relations between narration and materiality (Stobiecka Reference Stobiecka2023); it thereby (if only methodologically) embraces a symmetrical approach (Olsen Reference Olsen2012; Reference Olsen2013; Olsen et al. Reference Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore2012), recognizes the museum as a creative assemblage (Pfefferkorn Reference Pfefferkorn2024) and is committed to multimodal storytelling. Attending to conviviality as a concept hence affords the ability to forge new visions of how we as humans want to inhabit this planet in the future, raise awareness of the co-dependency of humans and other forms of life and foster dialogue and learning as to the accountability and ethical obligations of human agency in the Anthropocene. Doing so entails the decentring of humans and their projects in representations of the past and ultimately the overcoming of representationalist approaches altogether, as interactive deep pasts emphasizing diversity in autonomy that can inspire hopeful futures and repairing a damaged planet are forcefully brought to the fore. Commonly understood as human-exclusive spaces, archaeological museums themselves then need to be re-imagined and as multispecies gatherings may hold much hitherto overlooked potential as a transformative ‘mangle of practice’ (sensu Pickering Reference Pickering2009). As Flexner (Reference Flexner2020) argues, ethical consideration of conviviality may even transform archaeological practices themselves, to contribute to de-growth within archaeology (see also Zorzin Reference Zorzin2021) and beyond (e.g. D’Alisa et al. Reference D’Alisa, Demaria and Kallis2015; Fraser Reference Fraser2021) and/or to alternative forms of ecocultural governance and biopolitics.