Panhandling and the Pity Economy

• In Event: 411 - Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 14. Topics in Inequality.

Abstract

Using Arlie R. Hochschild’s pioneering work on emotional labor as a theoretical and analytical frame, this paper asks how chronically and episodically homeless urban panhandlers give affective performances to elicit emotional responses and benefactions from passersby. It focuses on the evocation of pity, in particular, an emotion positioned to do unique work within the practice of public solicitation because of the afflicted/observer binary that sustains it. Drawing on several months of ethnographic research, I suggest that panhandlers’ efforts at income generation often materialize in pity labor, the commodification and management of one’s own affect in service of pity excitation in others. Pity labor operates within a street-based pity economy, which itself is dependent on the exchange of emotional capital for emotional responses and, ideally, monetary or material donations. I describe several forms of pity labor and suggest that they, in turn, allow panhandlers to extract utility from their poverty and suffering.

Author

• Joseph Wallerstein, Harvard University