Multi-ethnic lion dance, convivial practices, and inter-ethnic friendship

Conviviality has most often been studied in European and immigrant-receiving contexts of everyday multicultural encounter. This article asks how conviviality is produced in Malaysia, where ethnic pluralism is structured by institutional inequality and ongoing cross-ethnic negotiation. Focusing on multi-ethnic lion dance troupes, it explores how participation in a shared cultural practice fosters intimacy and belonging across ethnic difference. Drawing on qualitative interviews with members from different troupes, the article shows that conviviality emerges through the repeated coordination and mutual reliance required by training and performance, giving rise to forms of embodied interdependence that enable participants to live with difference in everyday life. The article argues that lion dance troupes constitute a grassroots social space in which conviviality is made through collective practice and carried beyond performance into wider social life. In doing so, it reconceptualizes inter-ethnic relations as an ongoing relational achievement and highlights the broader civic value of everyday cultural participation under unequal conditions.