Cast Out. Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective was energizing to read, but also painful. This excellent edited volume, with contributions by fourteen historically precise and intellectually sophisticated scholars, reminded me how difficult it had been in 1975 to prepare my dissertation précis, later published as From Slavery to Vagrancy in Brazil: Crime and Social Control in the Third World (Rutgers, 1984). It focused on the transition from slave to free labor in 19th-century Pernambuco, Brazil, and how vagrancy statutes were used to secure workers and restructure labor relations. I had found very little to guide my research in the 1970s.
Of Cast Out’s thirteen chapters, eight cover regions outside England or the United States - India (Arnold), French Mauritius (Allen), British East Africa (Burton and Ocobock), Rio de Janeiro (Holloway), Tsarist Russia (Gentes), Communist China (Smith), New Guinea (Gordon), Tokyo (Margolis). Three chapters--two by Beier and one by Woodbridge-- focus on vagrancy in pre-20th-century England and two more - one by DiGirolamo and one by Higbie - study U.S. vagrancy. Ocobock’s Introduction, “Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective,” provides a road map for reading this valuable compendium:
Who is ‘vagrant’?: “Poor, young, able-bodied, unemployed, rootless, and homeless” men (Ocobock, 1), including, “peasant farmers, literate ex-soldiers, famine victims, [fugitive and] former slaves, beggars, political agitators, newsboys, migrant laborers, street people, squatters, and in some cases, those the state and the upper classes feared had breached social norms” (Ibid, 2). Each category of poor is often subdivided by their detractors into ‘able-bodied’ and ‘worthy’ and therefore ‘non-vagrant’ poor (see Beier; DiGirolamo; Holloway).
Vagrancy serves social control and strata distinctions. While, most commonly, “arrest, incarceration, and institutionalization controlled the unemployed, rooted them in poverty, and preserved the social boundaries between elite, middling class, and poor” (Hislip-Viera in Bier and Ocobock, 15-16), not all ‘vagrants’ are from an ethnic underclass. Europeans in India incurred punishment as vagrants for behaving in a manner “demeaning to the white race” (Arnold, 117); in New Guinea punishment of Europeans as ‘vagrants’ helped uphold “that strange edifice called white prestige, which was…crucial in maintaining…[Papua’s] colonial state” (Gordon, 346). In 19th-century Mauritius,“vagrancy ordinances were often adaptive responses to significant changes in local socioeconomic relationships” (Allen, 143).
Fearful power creates vagrancy. In the 16th and 17th centuries, European literati “had a hand in fostering fear of the poor” (7); “Elite anxiety” plays an important role in powerful actors taking action against perceived ‘vagrants’ (Ocobock).
Laws institutionalize the ‘vagrancy’ label. Even in some formerly colonial societies, “vagrancy laws left over from the colonial period reinforce [post-colonial governments’] grip on society” (Ocobock; Holloway).
Vagrancy and State. A state that adequately serves ‘the poor’ has no need for a deviant category called ‘vagrants’ A weak or “collapsing” state, “incapable of delivering even the most fundamental services” (Gordon, 338), is sorely tempted to criminalize vagrancy. For Burton and Ocobock (282) vagrancy repression is a “short-term strategy aimed at relieving the state from costly responsibilities to alleviate underemployment, overcrowding, and crime.” However, Gordon argues that colonial New Guinea’s “ceremonial” state, sometimes erroneously described as ‘weak’ (Gordon, 330), “show[s] a striking ability to muddle through [by using] accoutrements, etiquette, and often exaggerated ceremonies rather than the provision of services.”
Vagrancy serves State building. Burton and Ocobock (273) point out that in 1920s British Kenya, “the regime, more confident in its ability to assert authority, gazetted a new range of legislation including,…a more aggressive vagrancy ordinance.” The ‘handling’ of vagrancy amplifies and extends State bureaucracy (Halloway)—characteristic of a strengthening State. Once a “a criminal class [is identified and represented to a public there is]…creation of new bodies to control it” (Beier, 90). Gentes (186) claims that one result of repression against vagrants in 19th-century Tsarist Russia was to institute “a larger process of ‘systematization’ whose intention was a ‘well-ordered police state.’”
Police and vagrancy enforcement. Police are often represent the ‘iron fist’ behind softer methods of vagrancy control. Maoist ‘reeducation’ programs for beggars were combined with forced labor managed by China’s Public Security Bureau (Smith). Beier (90), citing Gatrell , argues for Britain that, “crime [and the label ‘criminal’] was an ‘artificial construct’ created by a new ‘policeman state.’”
Cast Out is excellent for its historical depth and breadth and for its superb writing. The chapters are remarkable in illustrating vagrants as actors rather than merely acted upon (see DiGirolamo; Higbie; Margolis; Woodbridge). Not to the detriment of this remarkable compendium, nevertheless, as a sociologist, I found two things missing. First, I had hoped that from their volume’s rich historical materials the editors would develop a theoretical model illustrating the social construction of ‘vagrancy. ‘ Second, confusion may arise from seeming at times to conflate ‘vagrancy’ and ‘homelessness,’ even though at many points such an assumption is explicitly critiqued.
Modeling ‘vagrancy.’ The sociology of ‘social problems’ argues that something becomes a ‘social problem’ not because it is widespread or even objectively socially harmful. Social problems are in fact socially constructed, usually with a ‘moral entrepreneur’—a person or group with power-- taking the lead in framing and communicating a “problem.” ‘Elite anxiety’ is necessary, though not sufficient, to transform something into a ‘social problem.’ As Cast Out demonstrates for vagrancy, a ‘problem population’ must be identified and marginalized, a process that begins with material changes in rural areas—population growth, disease, drought, and famine. These increase the numbers of poor and seemingly rootless in urban areas, places pressure on urban spaces and services.
Other socio-economic and political changes—economic slumps, rural land enclosures, abolition of serfdom, of slavery, and of colonial rule, as well as military conflict, and troop demobilization—have nurtured urban migration and influenced how migrants are handled. However, for ‘vagrancy’ to become a fully recognized ‘social problem,’ there has to be on-going ‘othering.’ This process of casting out and stigmatizing must communicate elite concerns to the middling classes (see Moore, 2007). ‘Othering’ can involve creating a Manichean division of society, as promoted by Journalist Henry Mayhew for mid-19th-century England, as “divided into two camps—wanderers and settlers—[the former] differentiated from ‘civilized man’,…prey[s] on the settled population to make a living” (Beier, 97). Such fears are enhanced when a problem seems ubiquitous: In 1768, “’mass panic’ erupted in northern and central China as sorcerers were apparently roving the land,…and stealing souls” (Smith, 306). Fear and loathing are further enhanced when cultural differences are magnified: Japanese representations of homelessness portray homeless as the cultural opposite of Japan’s revered “archetypal salarymen” (Margolis, 356); or when one deviant group is connected to another one: An “overlapping subculture [between U.S. ‘hoboes’ and] homosexual men,…encapsulated for mainstream society the dangerous aspects of vagrancy” (Higbie, 263; see also DiGirolamo). Criminalization institutionalizes and hardens ‘vagrant’ status.
Ironically, however, an exclusionist State cannot afford to cast out all vagrant ‘miscreants.’ While some especially ‘problematic’ and ‘dangerous’ vagrants are literally “cast out”--deported or banished; jailed or imprisoned--many more are forced to labor--in fields, ‘poor houses,’ hospitals and asylums. Besides the affordable labor provided by such ‘vagrants,’ the State’s criminalizing actions infuse “the habit of authority” into these ‘miscreants’ (in Gordon, 346; Foucault, 1979; Gentes, Gordon, Smith). Such actions keep some allegedly ‘rootless’ vagrants inside the social and economic system--albeit as stigmatized ‘others.’
My second issue with Cast Out is the editors’ appearing to conflate “vagrancy” and “homelessness,” sometimes suggesting that the latter causes the former. Homelessness is the absence of something—a dwelling--while vagrancy is the possession of something--a stigmatizing socio-legal status. It is not at all certain that homelessness need exist for a vagrancy designation to be applied. Diagramming the theoretical relationship of homelessness to vagrancy according to cases in Cast Out , produces a four-part ‘vagrancy-homelessness,’ taxonomy.
The ‘Pure vagrant,’ with no fixed abode, fits the criminalized image of ‘vagrancy.’ However, as the book illustrates, ‘pure vagrants’ are but a small portion of those labeled and punished for vagrancy (see DiGirolamo; Higbie; Woodbridge). Data on U.S. migratory harvest workers (1919 and 1921) showed that “no more than a fifth…were…migratory workers without homes” (Higbie, 259).1
‘Dweller/workers’—fixed dwellers not stigmatized as ‘vagrants’—are ‘true conformists,’ able-bodied men who are settled and work. However, as is illustrated, such actors have frequently been criminalized as ‘vagrants,’ becoming in the process, dweller/’vagrants’ (see, Allen; Arnold; Burton/Ocobock; Gordon; Higbie). Such stigmatizing of ‘dweller/vagrants’ was dramatically illustrated for demobilized soldiers in Elizabethan England: That some soldiers had dwellings was back staged by their having weapons, rendering them “a vagrant with a gun” (Woodbridge, 70; see also Gordon). Likewise, dissident IWW “Wobblies” who traveled to organize U.S. migrant workers could be labeled ‘dangerous vagrants,’ even though not actually ‘homeless’ (Higbie). Finally, some designated ‘homeless’—especially those labeled “legitimate poor”--escape the ‘vagrant’ label altogether. Such “homeless/non-vagrants” are excused by their inability to work (see Arnold; Beier; Halloway), apparently transforming their homelessness into a non-issue.
In the end, being without a dwelling appears less important to vagrancy’s becoming a ‘social problem’ than the personal, political, and built environment markers that create what Ocobock calls ‘elite anxiety.’ As Beier (111) argues for mid-nineteenth-century British journalist Henry Mayhew, the journalist’s fixation with criminal vagrant culture, “should be considered in the light of [its] symbolic significance for him.” Sociology would add that Mayhew and other elites had the resources to translate their world views into public policy.
Notes
1 Would this figure decline even further, if researchers included as ‘ a dwelling,’ the spatially bounded survival strategies of street people to create a ‘street home’ in urban areas? While such a street community is not within a physically bounded house, street survival in fixed locations is achieved just the same (see DiGirolamo; Margolis; Huggins and Rodrigues 2004).
References
Howard Becker, Outsiders. Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, New York 1997.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, New York 1979.
Martha K. Huggins, Sandra Rodrigues, Kids Working on Paulista Avenue, in: Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, 11 2004).
R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, New York 2007.