Paper Short Abstract:

Nels Anderson’s 1923 master’s thesis was a pathbreaking publication about the unhoused that reflects new ethnographic methods and illustrates both care and violation. Unwriting Anderson helps us better understand the experiences and lives of those whose lack of a fixed address have marginalized them.

Paper Abstract:

Among the most marginalized of individuals throughout the world are those who lack permanent homes. In many languages, the words to describe them are negative literally in the sense of pointing to a lack: homeless or unhoused, sans domicile fixe or sans abri, sin hogar, obdachlos, daaklos, beskućnici, bezpajumtnieki, бездомный, and many more.

One of the first scholars to closely study members of this group was Nels Anderson (1889–1986), the son of Swedish Americans, who left his parents’ home as a teenager to travel the country as a hobo. After serving in the US Army during World War I, Anderson graduated from Brigham Young University in his early thirties. He then studied sociology at the University of Chicago, where his 1923 master’s thesis, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man, became a pathbreaking publication about the unhoused, reflecting new ethnographic methods of participatory observation.

Because Anderson remains little known today, this paper proposes to explore Anderson’s scholarship as examples of both care and violation of the unhoused. On one hand, Anderson could be extremely sympathetic: writing how “absolute democracy reigns” in their outdoor camps and how many are victims of “economic forces in modern industrial society.” However, Anderson also excoriated others, particularly those who were “wholly or partially dependent,” as “the most pitiable and the most repulsive types of the down-and-outs.” Unwriting Anderson helps us to better understand the experiences and lives of groups of individuals who have been marginalized because they lack a fixed address.