People can relate well across difference without fully understanding each other.
Evidence
The impasse between Emma and Selam, and its partial resolution, can be seen as a moment of relating across, and ultimately through opacities. Emma’s vocabulary of mental health is unfamiliar, even frightening to Selam, just as Selam’s embodied anxiety was not fully apprehensible to Emma. Both seem to recognise they understand one another – and are understood – in some ways but not in others. Rather than trying to overcome these gaps, they act in response to them, each placing tentative trust in the other’s partly-inaccessible perspective. — Farhan Samanani, Conviviality and its others, 65
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: A dense working model of conviviality: trust survives mutual opacity because neither party insists on perfect legibility of the other. Resists one-sentence summary.
- DEFINE: Frames ‘opacity’ as a positive working concept in plural living-with-difference, not a failure to be overcome.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Farhan Samanani, Conviviality and its others: for a…, 65
- XREF: connects to: Gilroy’s conviviality means ease with diversity without reasserting fixed ethnic identities. — Sivamohan Valluvan, Conviviality and Multiculture: A…, 8