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Hope in homeless people through their social connectedness

Unlike psychology and philosophy, anthropology has largely ignored ‘hope’ as a descriptive and analytical category. An overview of the literature shows that only a few anthropologists have recently analysed the concept of hope. The introductory part of this paper will discuss these important attempts to render hope a concept of and for anthropological knowledge. The following part of this paper draws on ethnographic material that was collected in a national study among homeless people in Croatia. One of the main aims of this work is to elucidate instances of hope (and hopelessness) as they occurred in the lived experiences of homeless people. Gendered differences among homeless women and homeless men will be highlighted throughout this analysis. An attempt will be made to identify strategies that homeless people use to foster and maintain hope in the dire circumstances of shelter life. This will mainly focus on exploration of their formal (institutional) and informal (kinship or non-kin based) social and personal networks. The desire to ‘have a home of their own’ is also investigated as an aspiration that potentially offers hope for a different future. An understanding of hope among homeless people could provide a basis upon which to develop interventions that engender hope and to develop programmes that build on the hopes that homeless people hold.

hope; homelessness; social networks; social capital

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