‘This Place Should (Not) Exist’: An Ethnography of Shelter Workers and the In-Between by Amy Elizabeth Fisher A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department for the Study of Religion University of Toronto © Copyright by Amy Elizabeth Fisher 2015 ‘This Place Should (Not) Exist’: An Ethnography of Shelter Workers and the In-Between Amy Elizabeth Fisher Doctor of Philosophy Department for the Study of Religion University of Toronto 2015 Abstract This dissertation draws on twenty-one months of participant observation at The Salvation Army Gateway, a shelter for men in Toronto. It pays particular attention to the shelter’s thirty-two workers, to their efforts to be both “the best shelter in the city” and to “befriend the poor.” The story told here employs Victor and Edith Turner’s theory of liminality as both prompt and foil. The understanding of the liminal it employs and the rationale for deploying it in relation to the Gateway are the subject of Part I. Aspects of the liminal (in-between) stage/state have been paired with various aspects of shelter life – certain repertoires, objects, ideas. There are eighteen such pairings, each provoking a short, ethnographically driven chapter. The interplay between the shelter and the liminal is at times illuminating, ironic, even incomplete. The chapters are clustered according to four themes – also called the coefficients of life at the shelter: stuckedness, subjunctivity, immaturity, irony. These four are simultaneously plotted in such a way as to lead the reader deeper into Gateway life. Part II Stuckedness, discusses contexts that surround the Gateway and hold it in place. Part III Subjunctivity, enters the shelter by way of the workers’ own ideas, desires, and intentions for the way the Gateway operates, especially its friendliness. Part IV Immaturity, tells the story of any-given day at the Gateway in order to consider its ambient youthfulness, and the significance of such for the ii formation of alternative community there. Part V Irony, unpacks the irreconcilable ironies that the workers live with. Understanding the Gateway as liminal space offers opportunity to think about whether or not the shelter system ought to exist in a city like Toronto and how all of us are implicated in sustaining it. While this thesis tries to preserve some of the undecideability of such a question, it also seeks to complicate the notion that people ought always to leave shelters in favour of “housing” or having their “own home.” This dissertation ultimately offers “homefulness” as a better measure for what is and is not lacking among the so-called “homeless.” iii Acknowledgements Appreciation belongs first to the Gateway workers and residents who let me in, shared some of their time and their truth with me, who may have always thought my presence there a little bit odd, but who stayed engaged in the process and interested in the outcome, regardless. I’m indebted especially to those who go here by the names of Buck, Eddy, Holden, Jill, Neil, Sam, Seth, and Wes. Much of what follows was hashed out with them over cups of coffee, long car rides, and even longer shelter shifts. This project would have been substantially different without their insight and their friendship, and my time at the Gateway much less profound. To all who donned the blue shirt and hung out at the Gateway during my time there, I offer unspeakable thanks. I would think it impossible to ask for a better supervisory committee for such an experimental project. I have always thought it an extraordinary stroke of good fortune to have wound up the student of Pamela Klassen. She offered a finely tuned balance of freedom and feedback, and was always a voice I could trust. Ruth Marshall’s stunning sentences and fierce courage have inspired me. And I have learned considerable lessons from Simon Coleman’s keen attention to detail and his startling breadth of expertise. At the defense stage, Kathryn Lofton’s impassioned reading helped me to smooth some of the rough edges, stand up for some others, and decide which was which. Judy Han’s notes on what was missing have made this account fuller and rounder than it would otherwise have been. I’ve received constructive criticism on portions of this work from audiences at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting, the AAR Eastern-International Regional meeting, the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, the University of Toronto Graduate Student Colloquium Series, and the Youth, Religion and Identity Workshop at the University of Ottawa. Brian Walsh, students in multiple sessions of his course Beyond Homelessness, and the Wine Before Breakfast community which he leads, have all indelibly shaped my thoughts on this topic. I will always maintain that I would not have embarked on the PhD without the uncanny eye of Dr. William Closson James, who saw some potential in a reticent undergrad. Over eight years, I have been in awe of the clever community of scholars who make up the Department for Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, especially those with whom I have shared the journey of graduate studies most closely: in the beginning, there was Michael Friesen and at the end Maria Dasios; Erin Vearncombe and I were together in the thick of things all along. Thomas Nicholas Schonhoffer was with me (and all of us) too briefly. Rebekka King went before and generously showed iv me the path at every turn. Jenny Gilbert and Sarina Annis were such bright lights along the way. All of them have taught me things I might not otherwise have known. All things related to life and learning have been enriched by the extraordinary friendship of Ann and Lydell Andree-Wiebe, Esther Bettney, Sharon Jones-Ryan, Leah Sheasby, and Liska Stefko. They have graciously engaged in countless conversations on what to write and how to live with it. Ann and Maria, along with my sister Samantha, read the whole dissertation purely for the purpose of helping me to see it clearly when clouds were looming and I was losing sight of its worth. That was such a gift. Samantha and Joel Fisher have always felt like two external thirds of my own soul. My own sense of home – both its rarity and its fullness only exists in relation to them. Their spouses James Pedlar and Morgan Fisher first taught me what it meant to stretch homefulness further and thereby make it both richer and stronger. I’m grateful that Lorraine, Peter and Christoph Steiner have taken me into the fullness of their home, too. My captivating nieces, Keira and Moira, have given me something to smile about on both trying and ordinary writing days. Ed Fisher read every page before anyone else; he fixed my sentences and fixed my attention on what was most important. His esteem has always been the most worth working for. Carol Fisher has been an unfailing confidante, example, and guide. I still want to grow up to be as strong as she is. Jason Steiner showed up just in time, stayed close and stayed hopeful when many lesser souls would have grown impatient with the process and the pain of producing this thing. Such as it is, this work is for the three of them. v Table of Contents PREFACE ……………………………………………………………….……….…………….. p. viii PART 1 – Liminality ……………………………………………………………..………….... p. 1 “this place should not exist” p. 2 rethinking liminality p. 7 ritual keepers of the in-between p. 25 PART 2 – Stuckedness ………………………………………………………….……….……. p. 42 “do-gooders” p. 46 “five guys with nothing” p. 60 the streets p. 69 “spent the night at the Sally Ann” p. 78 PART 3 – Subjunctivity ……………………………………………………….……………… p. 95 more than shelter (or, “we give a shit”) p. 96 friendship: acting-as-if p. 109 no-glass p. 116 “if Jesus were alive today, he would be here, hanging out with the poor” p. 126 PART 4 – Immaturity ……………………………………………………….……….…...…… p. 146 “I guess I got addicted to this work” p. 147 shelter talk p. 156 coffee, cards, cigarettes, and riding around in a van p. 165 “meaningfully wasting time” p. 176 immaturity revisited p. 184 PART 5 – Irony…………………………………………………………….………………….. p.191 damp p. 193 numb p. 201 a suckling pig p. 214 of housing kits and homefulness p. 226 solution(s) to homelessness? p. 235 CODA: “stays with us” ………………………………………………….……………………… p. 245 Bibliography …………………………………………………………….……………………... p. 249 vi You who know, and whose vast knowing is born of poverty, abundance of poverty— make it so the poor are no longer despised and thrown away. Look at them standing about— like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow. —Rainer Maria Rilke The Book of Hours, III,19 vii PREFACE Somewhere along the line, I wagered that a doctoral dissertation could be something like Derek Walcott’s understanding of a poem: “If you know what you’re going to write when you’re writing a poem,” he proposes, “it’s going to be average.”1 As it happens, I didn’t know what I was going to write until it was written, and that what follows is other than ‘average.’ To begin with, the story of what happens at the Gateway (a shelter for men in downtown Toronto) felt to me like too much: too much to take in, too much to make sense of. After fieldwork but before writing, I remember making a list of all the things I might write about, it ran five or six pages and seemed to baffle anyone I talked to about the project, and maybe most of all me. What would the thesis really be about? And how would it all hang together? It took a long time for these things to sort themselves out.