Coping Strategies and Street Life: The Ethnography of Winnipeg's Skid Row Region

Derek Wilkinson is an associate professor of Sociology at Laurentian
University.

The aim of Hauch’s study is to describe the activities and culture of the more long-term residents of Winnipeg’s skid row. Hauch’s monograph is based on his Master’s thesis in anthropology at the University of Manitoba. The author worked as a participant observer with the Main Street Project, an organization providing temporary relief for transients, over a period of about seven years. This was neither punitive nor intrusive in its relations with skid-row residents, so informants were not likely to con the author, who appears extremely knowledgeable about his subject.

A major focus is the description of the economic situation of skid-row residents and their reliance on casual labour and the Salvation Army hostel. They might drink at local hotels but were less likely to take rooms because of the cost. Work was sporadic and welfare was difficult to obtain regularly unless one became chronically ill. There was also a constant risk of theft.

Since all sometimes needed resources, there was a culture of egalitarianism and sharing. Hauch describes the sharing phenomenon he calls “bingeing,” which occurs when someone receives a windfall of income. This type of expenditure on current gratification has been criticized by other authors as demonstrating their rationality of the downtrodden. But Hauch shows that the context makes it rational. Such bingeing makes the person less a target of envy, theft, or violence. It also obviates the individual’s responsibility for allocating amounts preferentially to relatives or friends. Finally, it leads to acceptance by the group, which helps in self-defence.

Hauch’s work stresses the rationality and predictability of the actions of skid-row denizens, given the predominant features of the environment in which they have to operate — an environment that is not adequately understood by those outside or by the social workers who have to deal with them.