Paper short abstract:

Tent cities are an increasingly familiar feature in the US landscape, serving as a new form of home for increasing numbers of the poor. This paper considers how law's uncertain application and a "politics of show-and-tell" influence home-making activities among homeless camp dwellers.

Paper long abstract:

Recent theoretical moves to "rematerialize" anthropological analyses of sociopolitical belonging have focused on residential patterns and practices as a means to redirect attention to place and everyday life. These studies have often been based on various modes of "squatting" on land without formal recognition by the state. Yet the purported qualities of the individuals inhabiting these spaces have sometimes been underexamined in relation to the broader system of social assumptions in which they are embedded.

This paper analyzes the materiality of a homeless camp in the Midwestern US sited on land circumscribed by highways. The material practices in this interstitial space are structured by the potentiality of eviction. The landowner—a state Department of Transportation—has communicated tacit tolerance of the camp's presence as long as it actively searches for an alternative site and makes no "permanent" alterations to the land. This uncertainty has limited the kinds of home-making projects the camp, and individual residents have decided to undertake.

The political prospects of the camp are shaped by the injured social position it inhabits—"homelessness" is understood on both the Right and Left as a potentially eradicable condition given appropriate state and community interventions. Such assumptions, which view "homelessness" as an ethically transient condition instead of an inevitable consequence of neoliberalism, inheres that the camp be semiotically and materially consonant with imaginings of homelessness as a temporary problem. Paradoxically, the kinds of autoconstructed homes thus generated by such hopeful understandings of homelessness may place tent city residents at risk of harm.