This chapter is based upon a research project entitled 'Contact Zones' that explored what I have termed 'everyday multiculturalism, or 'multiculturalism from below' 1. The project focused on quotidian modes of intercultural crossing in culturally diverse localities. It aimed to identify points of affinity and disjuncture in order to better understand how, where, and why diverse Australians 'get along' or 'rub-along' (Watson 2006, p. 2) together (or not) and how they negotiate the 'accident' of propinquity in shared multicultural spaces. In this chapter, I argue that there exists certain 'everyday' individuals I term 'transversal enablers' who employ and facilitate 'transversal practices' which, in essence, are forms of exchange and gift relation that foster everyday relationships across cultural difference in multicultural settings. The Field Sites Between 2002 and 2005 the project involved in-depth qualitative research in two Australian settings; Ashfield, a multicultural suburb in Sydney, and Griffith, a midsized country town in regional New South Wales. With 43% of its population born overseas, Ashfield is an old suburb with a large population of elderly Anglo-Celtic Australians 2. During the post WWII migration boom, Ashfield became home to a sizeable Italian and Greek population, and later to migrants from places such as Lebanon and the Philippines, and since the 1990s to large numbers from China and India. The Ashfield fieldwork involved ethnographic participant observation in and around the local shopping centre and high street, and in local pubs, clubs, parks and churches over a period of three years. It also included in-depth open ended interviews with forty residents from Anglo-Celtic, Italian, Greek, Indian and Chinese backgrounds. Griffith is a town of about 50,000 residents. There are some seventy first languages represented there and at least forty settled communities. A citrus farming area, Griffith was established following WWI by Anglo-Celtic solider settlers in the 1920s who were closely followed by a large settlement of Italian migrants pre and post

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This article considers the question of conviviality in everyday multiculturalism. It elaborates the concept of ‘convivial multiculture’ through case studies from Sydney and Singapore. In comparing these two contexts, the article considers what underpins conviviality across three themes: spatial ordering, where consideration is given to the role of built environment and material furnishings of place in shaping encounters with difference; connecting and bridging work, where we discuss the concept of ‘transversal enablers’, and intercultural gift exchange; and intercultural habitus, where disposition, habit and linguistic accommodation are discussed. It closes with some reflection upon larger forces that mediate local encounters, and the necessity to consider the full range of interactions, patterns, behaviours and meanings at work, and the interconnection between ‘happy’ and ‘hard’ forms of coexistence.

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This essay draws on the fieldwork from three research projects undertaken in Australia between 2002 and 2007. The general research was concerned with investigating the phenomenology of everyday diversity as it was experienced in a number of spatial contexts (suburban, urban, regional, shopping mall, church and so on). Material interactions with food were found to be a privileged arena for experiences of living within a multi culture, and food consumption constituted a site for experiences of cultural anxiety and disjuncture as well as for prosaic forms of low-level cosmopolitanism. Living in common means living with common resources. Commensality -in its etymology -names the practice of eating at the same table; in its more general meaning it describes the practice of living together with others. This paper explores commensal practices that encourage convivial experiences of multiculturalism while also investigating how the experience of sitting down with others can exacerbate cultural differences.

In this article, we develop the concept of the translocal village as a subset of transnationalism to describe the highly circumscribed social relations that often emerge from small‐scale translocalized rural villages. In the article we explore the translocal dimensions of a rural South Indian village in Tamil Nadu as a case study to advance this theoretical position. Like all transnational communities involved in the production of locality, identity and social viability, Soorapallam villagers and fellow Musuguntha Vellalar caste members now based in Singapore maintain strong social and cultural ties with their village. However, what is most interesting about this community is that its involvement in translocal practices is determined by a moral economy of obligations and responsibilities based on caste membership, which, in turn, is regulated by regimes of affect and policed through the gaze of fellow translocals. We will demonstrate the specific ways in which this moral economy is reproduced and maintained across distance.