Social hospice: Refuseniks, labors of love, and American homelessness

Abstract

This essay revisits an episode of insurgent citizenship in the author's late mother's life, one that seemed to have off‐putting elements of near farce. She had mounted a door‐to‐door neighborhood canvass of pennies on behalf of the homeless poor and then kept at it for some time. I try to read the self‐imposed constraints on this mendicancy project—the physical labor involved, the pathetic nature of the request, minimal return on effort, and negligible impact on the people of concern—as surface indicators of some shadow purpose in play. Drawing upon anthropological resources, I then try to find a way of decoding this purported subversive agenda. That inept interpretive effort is unexpectedly upset, and the scholastic conceit itself is challenged, when a previously unknown data cache surfaces, one that gives her performance an integrity of its own device.