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But beautiful …

2021; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/716698

2575-1433

Kim Hopper,

Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics

Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumBut beautiful … Grohmann, Steph. 2020. The ethics of space: Homelessness and squatting in urban England. Chicago: Hau Books.Kim HopperKim HopperColumbia University Mailman School of Public Health Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThings get a bit tricky when it comes to documenting the lifeways of elusive (even scofflaw) groups, but they too have proven fair quarry for anthropology on the homefront. Rarely, though, has this been done with the wit, fortitude, theoretical verve, and commitment that Steph Grohmann brings to her portrayal of squatters in Bristol, England. Not that it was exactly planned that way: yes, it was supposed to be dissertation research, but early in this account, she lets on that what had begun as a project had morphed into a necessity. We don’t learn the details (“long story short” is about as revealing as it gets), but we assuredly reap the benefit. Her equanimity throughout this ordeal—at times a grueling slog, at others a defensive fortification, and at still others near-transcendent solidarity—is remarkable. Grohmann’s métier is the makeshift; she enlists, improvises, pulls her weight, and chronicles the lives of otherwise unaccommodated women and men and the powers messing with them. (Not for her the gnomic Goffman observation: “What may end up as a freemasonry may begin with a shudder.” Twice displaced herself, Grohmann simply skips the shudder phase.) All of which is to open this commentary with a salud.The ethics of space is something of a romp: it has (sometime mischievous) fun with theory, finds ordeal and opportunity in fieldwork, builds solidarity as a work and communal ethic, faces violence frontally, and embodies a respect for lumpen ingenuity and resilience annealed by a slow burning contempt for the polity that makes them necessary. (If there were a David Graeber award for theory-driven forays into the makeshifts of austerity, she’d be in the running.) For all that, it ends on a note of sober, cautionary maturity. Grohmann’s not going anywhere; a bit bloodied and worn, she’s still game for the pending legal battles. But her readers are left wary, chilled by adumbrations of a hellish past and alert to what may lie on the horizon of a neoliberalism increasingly at ease with disposability.1All of which suggests that The ethics of space will be an ethnographic mainstay for some time to come. That has less to do with how closely Grohmann hews to established templates than with how capably she challenges them. She brings a steady hand, calm voice, and astonishing poise to this project. Withal, this is a free-ranging mustang of a book, bridling at its confinement within scholarly protocols while demonstrating the formidable admixture of observation, reflection, vignette, policy analysis, moral philosophy, social theorizing, and raw feeling those protocols can be made to accommodate. At some 250 pages, it’s not a long book, but its reach and coverage make my own commentary both select and wanting. It’s rare to see the neoliberal circus of austerity—coupling evident distaste for what Mill once called the “spectacle of pain” with steeled disregard for provisions to alleviate it—dissected with such precision and attention to local contingencies.Pride of place here may be the story of a shuttered drop-in center for the homeless (“The Hub”), reopened by squatters as both principled protest and surrogate service, and promptly countered by dodgy “real estate” interests, using legal and illegal means. Spread over two chapters, Grohmann delivers a fierce diatribe against a comically cross-interested local government—“We are providing a vital service to Bristol’s most vulnerable in an area that the Council does not even acknowledge exists,” as one squatter leaflet put it—while providing a thumbnail history of the housing crisis, introducing some choice Marxist aperçus on property as fetish, and carefully dusting the story for unmistakable traces of neoliberal mythology. Hers is a defiantly distinct brand of precarity scholarship.CodingAs hinted above, one thing Grohmann does especially well is to decipher the sinuous jacketing of legal instruments and policy—existing property rights, absentee owner machinations in the court, deceptively written statutes and regulations—as essential parts of the enabling/constraining boundary conditions within which squatting actions take place. They fix the price (sometimes a steep one) of such counterhegemonic practices. Private property rights are sometimes viewed as the triumph of market liberalism over governmental interference, but are more accurately read, as Pistor argues, as evidence of “the state’s willingness to back the private coding of assets in law” (Pistor 2019: 4). Anomalous court rulings deferring to “adverse possession”2 (when an act of open trespass is found to trump the property rights of the actual owner)—to say nothing of the fact that for much of Grohmann’s tenure in Bristol squatting was “entirely legal” (p. 154)—serve as instructive exceptions to the massive rule of legally sanctioned title.But enforcement is only part of it. Law, its bulwark of property rights in particular, matters because high-flown theory (ideology) has a way of leaching into the uninspected “background” assumptions of fluid “social imaginaries” (Taylor 2003). More to the point here, Grohmann shows how entrenched legal mechanisms for “coding capital” (Pistor 2019) make alternative codings—the “legitimacy of need as the basis of a moral claim” (p. 229), for example—all but unthinkable.EmbeddingCharted simply as “happenstance,” Grohmann pulls off what many students of the street- and shelter-using homeless poor have found difficult to do: adapting the tools and sensibility of “a dwelling science” to follow a group whose lifeways are dwelling-less, defined by instability, disruption, and uncertainty. Membership fluctuates, policing waxes and wanes, community tolerance shifts—and the group moves on, over time and across a “transient and unstable” (p. 229) landscape of survival. Even the redoubtable photo-journalist, Margaret Morton, chronicler of the denizens of The tunnel in New York (1995), was stymied when the urban squatters whose lives she later was documenting (Morton 2004) were violently dislodged by a staged fire alarm and scattered to the four winds.3 Grohmann manages it in a time-honored fashion: not by becoming the most durable member (and de facto elder) of a shifting cast of characters in a specialty shelter (as Bob Desjarlais found himself when writing Shelter blues [1997]); nor by mining archives and concentrating on the more stable members of a defined habitat (see Kelly Knight, with San Franciscan SROs in Addicted, pregnant, poor [2015], or Michele Wakin, with a Santa Barbara beachfront in Hobo jungle [2020]). Instead, Grohmann draws on the ethnographic playbook of circumpolar reindeer herders, Bedouin camel traders, San hunter-gatherers, and Roma travellers: she turns nomad herself and rolls with the precarity, toiling and suffering alongside a changeable roster of Bristol squatters. She logs what amounts to a counternarrative to the fanciful “ethnographer’s tale” in Perec’s Life: A user’s manual (1987): instead of a self-indicting dispatch on Sumatran tribal mobility,4 Grohmann delivers an account, deftly theorized and closely documented, of what it takes to stay put, provisionally, while dodging the law, defending against external threats, and experimenting with anarchist social governance.As I’ve noted, “happenstance” figures prominently throughout this account (on happenstance, see Armstrong and Agulnik 2020). But it’s a real jolt to learn—first in passing (p. 19), later as methodological caveat (p. 64)—that managing the “splitting maneuver” marking off “fieldwork” from “life” was taken out of Grohmann’s hands a few months into the project: “I lost access to any kind of accommodation outside of squatting and found myself formally and practically homeless.” (More colorfully, she had “inadvertently and against my will, ‘gone native.’”) From here on, she’s negotiating the transit from unplanned accident to earned/extended membership, and doing so while writing a book. We never learn more about the terms of her severance, but in that reticence a small moral may lie: not everything that happens is grist for the ethnographer’s mill. Whatever the reasons, her standing among the squatters decidedly changes. What had been an elective interest5 became a scramble to survive.One might have wished she’d been more forthcoming here, but her refusal strikes me both as tribute to the slow braising that self-understanding can require, and as reminder that not all parts of an ethnography mature at the same rate. Like others before her (Bosk 2003; Favret-Saada 2015), Grohmann may choose to revisit this in some future iteration. For now, her reticence seems mete, just, and sane.6ConclusionThe fortunes of ethnographic research in public health have long been bound up with emergent crises (HIV/AIDS), durable adversity (poverty, substance abuse, incarceration), and political upheaval (postwar demobilization, encampment protests). COVID-19 is the latest occasion, and homelessness is one stage on which it is playing out. Among the many gifts of The ethics of space is its tribute to the ingenuity and care these vernacular forms of settlement can show.7 Last fall (2020) in the United States, the CDC issued guidelines for doing street outreach during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the obvious hazards of warehouse-style, often overcrowded shelters, the CDC cautioned tolerance toward street encampments and advised providing their occupants with necessities needed for sanitation and personal protection.8 Local advocates in New Orleans used these guidelines not only to stop ill-advised razing of shanty settlements, but also to argue successfully for relocation efforts that made use of the suddenly vacant stock of commercial hotels (desperate for custom during the pandemic), with support services as needed.9 “Sheltering in place” was suddenly a viable option for people (as Brecht once described them) forced “to bribe with empty hands.”That said, it’s the elegiac tone of Grohmann’s epilogue that lingers, and the disheartening prospects of squatting as counterhegemonic practice. Like Morton before her, she takes actuarial stock of the toll that property wars of attrition have racked up: grotesquely asymmetrical provisioning, tipped hands of the state and the law, dispossession and subsequent diaspora of activists, the sheer fatigue of protagonists. (In a pinch, too, the strategic offer of secure housing to vanguard die-hards can be really hard to resist.) Unsurprisingly, as she woefully notes: “Those who remained in urban squats were mostly the most troubled … the moral rhetoric of the criminalization campaign had thus turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy” (p. 232). It’s this trend, intensifying at the time of her writing, which explains her late christening of this work as “salvage ethnography.” What were formerly spaces for experimentation, reimagining the spatial and the social, have become redoubts for the “desperate … [with] no other option” (p. 234).Absent the reframing rhetoric and substantial growth of a still-nascent “housing justice” movement, it’s difficult to see how squatting politics could fare otherwise. But the pandemic may have ignited a major revaluation/recoding of commercial space, “adverse possession,” and alternative use. The threat of eviction—postponed by moratoria but not erased—looms in a way invisibly borne “rent burdens” never did. And the moment may not be far off when the unsheltered “morally offensive foreigner” (p. 236) is revealed to be our ex-neighbor.Notes1. The first sign of a nascent totalitarianism, Arendt argued (1973), is that certain people are deemed “superfluous.”2. Legally, “possession” is defined as “power or control over something … as distinct from lawful ownership” (O.E.D., emphasis added).3. By luck and hard work, she was later able to track down many of the three dozen residents, only to learn that four had died in the years following the eviction.4. Every ethnographer’s nightmare: it slowly dawns on the miserable author that the tribe is repeatedly decamping to escape this unwanted intruder.5. And because of that, she notes in an extended reflection on position (or “nonposition”) in fieldwork, the object of scorn from one of her major informants/friends/collaborators, Gavin (pp. 48–49, 231–32).6. The explanatory/interpretive yield made possible by acquiring the secondary habitus of the competent squatter is undeniable: “With constant exposure, as I was to learn, a situation like this produces a peculiar form or embodiment, a sense of physical interdependency with those around oneself.” For these squatters, she adds, “being politically active was their life” (pp. 64, 63n).7. In that vein, Evan Stark’s anarchic tribute to popular democratic experimentation in the wake of yellow fever epidemics in nineteenth-century America (1977) is too little known.8. For more detailed guidelines and argument, see Malson and Blasi 2020.9. Presentation by Martha Kegel, Unity of Greater New Orleans, Columbia Law School, February 26, 2021.ReferencesArendt, Hannah. 1973. The origins of totalitarianism. 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Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarKim Hopper is professor of clinical sociomedical sciences at Mailman School of Public Health and a long-time student of contemporary homelessness.Kim Hopper[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 11, Number 2Autumn 2021 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716698 © 2021 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.