Begging and belonging in the city: a semiotic approach

Abstract

Citizens develop routine spatial enunciations through which they “domesticate” both the intensity of transition and the extension of distance implied by moving across a city and smooth out the frontiers between environments of belonging (e.g. home) and environments of non-belonging (e.g. the streets). Yet urban “accidents” constantly threaten the impermeability of such routine spatial enunciations. Beggars represent, from the point of view of citizens, an instance of such urban “accidents”. The primary goal of urban beggars is to intercept the routine spatial enunciations of citizens, stop them, and convince them to donate part of their money. In order to achieve these goals, beggars develop a series of micro-strategies that can be analyzed as both semiotic practices and urban performances. At the same time, citizens constantly reabsorb these micro-strategies in their routine spatial enunciations, pushing beggars to the elaboration of new strategies, and so on and so forth, in a continuous struggle between the citizens’ desire to protect their feeling of sedentary belonging and the beggars’ need to invade it. From this point of view, routines of sedentary belonging are a manifestation of power. But why are citizens willing to have their routine spatial enunciations through the city be stopped by all sorts of agencies (for instance, the commercial agency of advertisement), whereas they cannot wait to expel beggars from the urban landscape? Perhaps this discrepancy depends on the elimination of the spiritual discourse of charity from the urban arena?

Keywords:

• begging
• cities
• routines
• belonging
• power
• semiotics

Acknowledgements

The present article is partially based on Leone (2008). The author thanks the two anonymous referees of the present paper for their extremely valuable considerations.

Notes

1. The pair of concepts “extension of distance/intensity of transition” seeks to seize the phenomenology of the crossing of frontiers and therefore the dialectics between placement and displacement, from the twofold point of view offered by the structural, and above all Greimasian, conception of space: the concept of “extension of distance” grasps the phenomenology of crossing from the perspective of space meant as étendue (i.e. as extension), whereas the concept of intensity of transition grasps the same phenomenology from the perspective of space meant as forme (i.e. as semantic modulation of such extension). Summarizing, whereas the latter factor measures the neatness of the transition between belonging and non-belonging that a figure of crossing manifests in narrative terms (intensity of transition), the former factor measures how dramatic is the distance between placement and displacement, which a certain figure of crossing reveals through narrative forms (extension of distance). On the one hand, the intensity of transition measures the semantic differential brought about by the crossing of a frontier; on the other hand, the extension of distance measures the syntactic differential necessary in order for the crossing of the frontier to take place. These two aspects are, of course, inextricably intertwined in experience and can be singled out only theoretically (see Leone 2011b).

2. Furthermore, it is perhaps this need to continuously negotiate the meaning of the urban fabric without ever being able to crystallize it into a grammar that underlies the reflections of Leonardo Piasere, one of the most prominent Italian experts on Gipsy cultures, about the education of Roma children: “[…] so as to live amidst Gağes [that is, the non-Gipsy], Roma, Sinti, and other Gipsy must be eclectic and ready to change and – it is fundamental – must legate to their children the capacity of being eclectic and ready to change” (“[…] per vivere in mezzo ai Gağe [ossia i non-rom] i Roma, i Sinti, ecc. devono essere eclettici e pronti al cambiamento e – cosa fondamentale – devono lasciare in eredità ai figli la capacità di essere eclettici e di essere pronti al cambiamento”) (Piasere 1995, 175; present author's translation).

3. See V.S. Naipaul's evocation of African hongo in Naipaul (2010).

4. It is necessary to emphasize that the observations put forward by the present article are not tantamount to a perfectly articulated typology of begging but, more modestly, represent some notes to be used and developed in view of its constitution. On the one hand, more types of begging interaction should be included (as suggested to me by the anonymous referee of the present paper: one might consider pretty widespread habits such as “give me MY money!”, begging “for bread”, to which a shopper might respond by offering a loaf after shopping [the loaf usually demonstratively to be thrown into the bin next to the beggar], and other cases that would affect and be beneficial for the typology); on the other hand, the phenomenological and semiotic survey should be complemented by other approaches, such as those of ethno-methodology, ecological psychology, and whole areas such as psychology, sociology, and semiotics of persuasion, and the consequent reflection on such central topics as social conflict, anomie, otherness, behavior settings. A systematic treatment of such subjects goes beyond the scope of the present paper but might well be the purpose of a subsequent research.