Compassionate and egalitarian: The charity paradox in two voluntary associations

Equality and respect

A concept such as ‘equality’ is ambiguous and begs for an explanation. When volunteers present themselves as egalitarians, as I show they do in the first part of the article, to what meaning of equality can we relate their claim? Although it may seem farfetched, to answer this question, the first port of call is Locke’s natural law theory. The revolutionary idea that ‘men [are], by nature, all free, equal and independent’ (Locke, 1689: Ch. VIII) signalled the birth of modernity (Taylor, 2004). It also defines the most widespread understanding of equality in Western countries up to the present day.

Originally a political principle, Tocqueville noted that this notion of equality ‘quietly penetrates deep into the institutions and manners of the country’ (De Tocqueville, 1966: 537; emphasis mine). In its colonization of different spheres of life, equality has adopted two related, but distinct, meanings that reflect Tocqueville’s perspicacious distinction. Modern democratic institutions grant equal political rights to all citizens. In addition, they strive to equalize the opportunity of people from disparate social origins to prosper in life. In the realm of manners, equality mutates into notions of equal concern, consideration and respect in everyday interactions. Volunteers’ wish to behave as egalitarians speaks to this latter, canonical, meaning of ‘equality’, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary summarizes as follows: ‘An ideal of uniformity in treatment or status by those in a position to affect either.’ To appreciate the novelty of this conception of equality consider pre-modern times, during which the social order was pervaded by ‘hierarchically complementary forms of life’ between, inter alia, master and servant or lord and peasant (Taylor, 2004). Interactions between people of different status were infused by a fundamental asymmetry in the dose of respect that each party owed to the other.

In sum, the egalitarian spirit prompted an equalization in the amount of consideration a person deserves. But are equality and respect concomitant? American philosopher Harry Frankfurt answered with a resounding no in his article ‘Equality and Respect’ (1997). He further argued that they may concur with one another, but do not necessarily do so. On the one hand, equality is a matter of each person having the same of one parameter, say, ‘humanity’ – which is understood as ‘a unity without distinction’ (Rosanvallon, 2011). On these grounds, all individuals deserve equal attention and consideration from others, independent of the status group, or social class, to which they belong. Here, Frankfurt observed, equality and respect coincide. This is indeed the understanding of equality that emerges from my interviews with volunteers, i.e. in a society of equals, everyone is someone (Rosanvallon, 2011) and should be treated with consideration.

On the other hand, there is another – ‘a more personal’, as Frankfurt stated – notion of respect. This notion reveals itself in my research through the analysis of volunteers'’ actions, which I present in the second empirical part of the article. ‘Treating a person with respect means … dealing with him exclusively on the basis of those aspects of his particular character or circumstances that are actually relevant to the issue at hand’ (Frankfurt, 1997: 8). Contrary to the mainstream idea that equality has moral value in itself, Frankfurt noted that, oftentimes, respecting people necessarily requires unequal treatment, i.e. the amount of respect that an individual deserves on account of her qualities. The brutal reality and harshness of living on the streets is the most relevant feature in the life of a homeless person. Considering the fact that the homeless occupy the lowest echelons of society, volunteers treated them with special care and deference in an attempt to both spare the needy feelings of embarrassment (Goffman, 1966), shame (Scheff, 1990) and humiliation and, correspondingly, respect their dignity as members of the ‘Family of Man’ (Margalit, 1996).

However, unequal treatment can also manifest the contrary, i.e. disrespect. I will show that there were occasions in which the devalued status of the homeless invited a lesser amount of attentiveness from volunteers than the latter would have given to people of equal social standing (for a related discussion see Goffman, 1990b: 30–1). In short, showing either more or less consideration to the homeless were examples of a conceptual divergence between the notions of equality and respect (Frankfurt, 1997: 9).

Whose side are we on?

Above, I presented a division between authors who emphasize the hierarchizing facet of compassion and those who highlight its equalizing dimension. The work of Robert Wuthnow (1991) relates to the latter and to a second split of the literature into two strands, depending on ‘whose side are we on?’ (Becker, 1967), not only in terms of our ideological preferences but also with regard to our role in the field: did we participate as volunteers or take on, in any way, their perspective? Or did we adopt the position of the recipients of volunteers’ attention? This choice often affects the evaluation of voluntarism. On the one hand, researchers who adopt volunteers’ point of view tend to produce an ethnographic representation of volunteering through tales of virtuosity, benevolence and fellow feelings (Allahyari, 2000; Wuthnow, 1991). On the other hand, when attention is drawn to the effects of volunteers on the poor, authors tend to portray volunteer groups as ‘sites of control’ (Himmelfarb, 1991) and providers of ‘accommodative services’ (Snow and Anderson, 1993) that, ultimately, maintain the needy population’s alienation from mainstream society. According to this interpretation, volunteers’ good deeds are a form of ‘repressive benevolence’ at best (Wagner, 2000).

Whose side, then, is the current article on? The volunteers’ outlook defines my research topic (that is, compassion, equality and respect) and my approach to the field because I participated as a volunteer. However, in the recording of events in fieldnotes and the subsequent analysis, I adopted a Goffmanian stance, which means that I centred my interpretation on the two-team social occasion that arose from the volunteer–homeless dyad. By focusing on interactions and on (in)equality as a situational accomplishment, this comparative ethnography escapes the dilemma of portraying volunteers as either exemplars of virtue or repressors because it finds that neither dictum is satisfying.

The plan

I begin by describing the composition of the voluntary associations and how they operated. Then, I briefly address how I conducted 40 in-depth interviews with volunteers and the homeless and the Goffmanian approach I used to analyse the notes I wrote during 18 months of fieldwork. Next, I argue that the first step volunteers took toward combining compassion and equality lay in their self-presentation as egalitarians who opposed ‘old-fashioned charity’ (in the words of Armando, a volunteer with The Protectors).

In the following sections I add ethnographic evidence to claim that the equalizing facet of compassion prevailed in actual interaction under one condition: each party of the encounter, the volunteers and the homeless, abided by the norm of collaboration among strangers that underpins everyday sociability in modern societies, i.e. ‘thou shall interact with fellow humans without embarrassing or humiliating them’ (a commandment that summarizes the contents of Goffman, 2008: 27–31; 2010: Ch. 4). Interactants who adhere to standard cues for opening and closing the encounter smoothly and for taking turns in speech show respect and consideration for the other’s position, preserve the dignity and autonomy of the interactants (Scheff, 1990) and, furthermore, foster their interpersonal solidarity (Collins, 2004).

In contrast, in the back-and-forth flow of talk, uncooperative interactants, wittingly or unwittingly, call into question the self-presentation of conversational partners and, ultimately, can disrespect and ‘face-attack’ them deliberately (Tracy and Tracy, 1998). Interestingly, the fieldnotes show that both parties, volunteers and the homeless, could flout the norm of collaboration, thereby re-enacting their supra-situational inequality. These are examples of ‘negatively eventful occasions’ (Goffman, 2010), which are the natural equivalent to Garfinkel’s (1967) breaching experiments. These occasions are analytical devices. They reveal a) the nature of betrayed expectations that, oftentimes, participants do not make explicit in the course of in-depth interviewing; and/or b) aspects of the volunteer–homeless relationship that would otherwise go unnoticed in the routine, taken-for-granted and unremarkable occasions that comprise our sense of ‘bland normalcy’ (on this point, see Collins, 2004: 79).

In the final section, I highlight the contribution of this article to the corpus of sociological and philosophical literature that has studied volunteers or has queried whether compassion and equality can flourish together.

Setting and fieldwork

I gathered the data during 18 months of fieldwork, which began when I answered the advertisement that The Protectors of the City (TP hereafter) placed in Borgo’s local newspaper in September 1999. TP was a recently formed group that was seeking volunteers to distribute food to the homeless. Behind the initiative was Roberto Rossi, a well-known local writer who was soon joined by Elisa and Maria, two single women in their 60s, and Armando and Michele, two friends in their 50s. These individuals were TP’s committed volunteers. Over time, other people joined and left and, on average, between five and eight volunteers arrived at the programmed encounters with the poor.

After a few months of operation, TP volunteers decided to wear a white t-shirt with the city’s emblem, a military-style red beret and disposable rubber gloves when serving the food. Unfortunately, I was out of town when they selected this impression management strategy. When I probed for information about how the idea originated, volunteers avoided elaborating on their answers. However, they agreed that it had been a common decision, a good idea on account of hygiene and because it made them ‘easily identifiable’, as Michele told me.

Roberto also enrolled the help of local bars and restaurants, and volunteers collected sandwiches and pastries from them the night before they met. On Tuesdays, volunteers arrived at the train station at midday and formed a semi-circular area with four or five trolleys against a balustrade. Standing within the space created, the volunteers served the homeless. The latter were mostly middle-aged or older Italian men and women, sporadically Roma women from Eastern Europe and their children and young South American women. At approximately 2:00 pm, the group left the scene. The volunteers met again on Wednesdays at 8:15 pm in the city centre and walked over to another square. On their way to the square, volunteers marched in a line of pairs and offered food, drink and a brief conversation to any homeless-looking person they met. At their destination, they set up a small distribution point. This social occasion continued until approximately 11 in the evening.

Meals on Wheels (MoW) was founded in the early 1990s. With 52 registered members, MoW was the largest lay social service association in Borgo. It was divided into six sub-groups, one for each night of the week excluding Sunday. Similar to TP, MoW volunteers collected unsold sandwiches and pastries from a set of bars. Occasionally, some volunteers brought home-cooked pasta. They distributed the food at three locations each night, without wearing a uniform and moving from one place to another using their own vehicles. First, they met in a square in the city centre at approximately 9 pm. At around 9:45 pm, they headed to a small railway station located in a residential area. Lastly, they travelled to the central railway station. The homeless were a combination of Italian men and women of all ages and young Albanian men. At each site, the volunteers and some of the recipients of their help maintained conversations of varying duration before and after the distribution.

The context: Volunteering and homelessness in Borgo and Italy

MoW and TP were the only lay social service voluntary associations distributing food to the homeless on the streets of Borgo. According to various estimations, there were approximately 600 people without fixed abode in this city (which I do not quote to keep the real name of Borgo undisclosed and ensure the right of informants to remain anonymous; see American Anthropological Association, 1971). The two associations were a weak form of social organization made of encounters; they lacked a strict organizational structure, entry barriers or exit procedures. To become a member, one simply showed up at their gatherings. (See Lichterman, 1995: 295, for a similar characterization of US associations.)

Other groups that interacted with Borgo’s homeless population were connected with either the Catholic Church or the local administration, which had two consequences. First, volunteers with Catholic associations did not rely on egalitarian expectations, as the opening excerpt from my fieldwork in the Caritas group illustrates. Second, for public employees and members of the Church, service to the poor was part of their professional identity. This fact raised questions with regard to their ‘identity work’ (Allahyari, 2000) and interactions with the needy, which differed from those that lay volunteers faced. Moreover, any dealings with the Italian administration, other than applications for a place in a public shelter, required the applicant to provide an address, which people of no fixed abode could not supply. As a consequence, homeless people in Borgo had little contact with public officials other than the police – and this contact was for matters of no concern to this article. Effectively, their welfare was left to the Church and to the minority of citizens who volunteered.

Around the time I conducted my fieldwork from 1999 to 2001, voluntarism was a rare phenomenon in Italy. Figures from Istat, the Italian National Bureau of Statistics, reveal that, in the 1990s, only 7 per cent of the population aged 14 or over volunteered on some occasion in the year prior to the survey (Istat, 1999). For its part, homeless people comprised 0.2 per cent of the Italian population in 2011, according to a recent and unique survey (Istat, 2012). Therefore, the significance of the phenomenon that I study is not found in its size. Rather, it is in the quality of the social bond, framed by compassion and spurred by an egalitarian ideal, that volunteers attempted to establish with some of the weakest and most disparaged members of society.

In-depth interviews and the Goffmanian ethnographer

I began the study as a participant observer. I introduced myself to the people I met regularly in the field as yet another volunteer and as a researcher. The most common reaction was indifference to my latter role. If anything, some felt flattered for being considered important enough to ‘merit’ the attention of a university research project. It was likely that my foreign accent was more significant to the forging of an identity –quite unlike that of an ordinary volunteer – than was my academic status. This fact played in my favour because it facilitated volunteers and the homeless alike to share their beliefs and feelings with me with what I took to be extraordinary frankness. For one thing, I could play the role of the ‘idiot’ who asks about anything, including the meaning of words that ‘even a child knows’, as one homeless woman told me.

I joined TP’s two outings per week and was a member of the Saturday group at MoW. In addition, in each week of my fieldwork I joined different night groups of MoW to ensure that the actions of the Saturday group were not exceptional. As I developed bonds of friendship and trust with volunteers and homeless people, I proposed to them holding in-depth interviews, all of which were quite long and open (ranging from an hour and a half to four hours). In total, I interviewed 29 volunteers and 11 homeless people. In the case of the volunteers, I began by inciting them to tell me their life history qua volunteers, i.e. when, where and how they started volunteering. Next, I inquired about their everyday actions in the group and, finally, what volunteering meant for them and what they thought it meant for the homeless.

Similarly, I attempted to reconstruct the life history of the homeless that I interviewed and then narrowed the topic to their current dealings with volunteers. However, formal, recorded and in-depth interviews with the homeless were difficult to arrange and manage. Throughout my fieldwork, I grew to learn that this type of interview was, for two reasons, not the method best suited to obtaining information under the harsh circumstances that the homeless endured. First, homeless people suffer from the same – even, arguably, more acute – loss of the fixed points with which we reckon the passage of time that Jahoda, Lazarsfeld and Zeisel (2002) unveiled among the unemployed. Second, Bourdieu noted that people do not tell their life histories in a linear and organized narrative. Rather, spontaneous narratives typically weave various stories together due to the latter’s homology at various levels, the ambiguity of anaphors and the like. Furthermore, the complexity in the account increases if the interviewee is under stress (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 206–8).

Therefore, it is understandable that, on many occasions, I did not find the homeless person that I had agreed to interview at the time we had arranged; if I did, I oftentimes could not centre the talk on any topic. In the end, I decided to consider interview material of not only the 11 formal interviews that I tape-recorded but also the excerpts from the many natural ongoing conversations with the homeless that I jotted down as they were occurring or immediately afterwards. An excellent occasion for this type of interview occurred in the conversational encounters with the homeless that MoW volunteers encouraged before and after the distribution of food.

For the analysis of fieldnotes, I used the work of Erving Goffman as a ‘method’ or, rather, as a toolkit, because two aspects in the oeuvre of the Canadian sociologist connect directly with the study of the homeless–volunteer pair. First, Goffman examined in great detail how people show (intentionally) and show off (unintentionally) their regard for others in the context of normatively ordered social occasions (Goffman, 1990a: 14). Second, Goffman observed that, whenever a stigmatized category of people and the syndicate in charge of dealing with it meet, there is a definite risk to their collaboration in sustaining equality, i.e. participation in the encounter gives off undesirable and embarrassing information about the self of the stigmatized as, for example, incapacitated or ill-fated (Goffman, 1990b; see also Clark, 1997: 248–9). In addition, the action of handing out food requires that people previously unknown to each other initiate an exchange in which there is ample opportunity for misunderstandings about the nature of the encounter. Given these two obstacles to equality, sustaining the norm of cooperation was a major challenge for volunteers and the homeless and set the scene for a Goffmanian approach to this study.

Questioning one’s self

Egalitarianism is quite an abstract notion. In the introduction, I argued for its centrality in the modern project, but a historian of ideas can trace it back to different religious and philosophical traditions, from Aristotle’s reflections on friendship and equality to Christianity’s universal ethics to Kant’s respect for a person as a form of compliance with the law (see, for example, Lukes, 1973: Ch. 18). In the course of my fieldwork, I stumbled upon such an intricate idea while attempting to tease out the meaning volunteers granted to the most concrete of their actions, the supply of food. After several months of work with MoW and TP, I had no doubt that the rationing out of food was the action that occupied most of the volunteers’ time on the streets. Therefore, I expected that volunteers would expand on this topic when I queried them about it in the in-depth interviews. To my surprise, the interviewees were swift to play food delivery down as the least of their worries; food was only an excuse to approach the homeless and lacked in interest per se.

This thing about food doesn’t interest me at all. Sure, it’s good to see that, when someone’s thirsty, they’re given a drink; that, when someone’s hungry, they’re given a sandwich. But, what we bring is awful! (Louisa, MoW, former nurse, now full-time housewife, originally from Norway, in her 50s)

Food’s an excuse to spend time together. (Armando, TP, banking clerk in his 50s)

In other words, the offering of food was an ‘ice-breaker’. In Goffmanian terms, it placed volunteers in an ‘opening position’ (Goffman, 1966: 128); it gave them the right to get underway a gathering with the homeless. Simultaneously, giving out food also placed volunteers in an ‘‘exposed position’ (Goffman, 1966: 125) that permitted the homeless to initiate a focused interaction (at least to some extent, as I show in the latter part of the article). This understanding of food delivery was the common ground between MoW and TP volunteers. But for MoW volunteers, the food was also a means of ‘setting up a personal relationship, so that we are able to give them more’ (Francesca, MoW). They wanted to become ‘sympathy entrepreneurs’ (Clark, 1997: 85–93) for one particular person in need.

You start relationships so that you get to know a few people better. And I reckon that these people choose you because in some way there’s more of a common sympathy, because you’ve got a connection that’s deeper. You don’t have the same connections with everyone. (Davide, MoW, marketing executive in his mid-30s)

However, building a relationship between a middle-class person and a homeless person, as was the intention of MoW volunteers, or simply engaging one another in conversation, required that both parties bridged their blatant ‘difference in social class, power and status’ (Liebow, 1995: 116). To shorten the distance, MoW and TP volunteers elaborated a self-presentation as egalitarians; they were able ‘to see through social trappings to human equality’ (Holden, 1997: 140), to our shared ‘essential identity’ (Wuthnow, 1991: 301) as human beings. The outcome of this self-understanding was a type of introspective equality, which was preoccupied with adopting the right disposition in conversational encounters. Volunteers proved to themselves that they were egalitarian if they treated the homeless as worthy of respect to the same extent as members of other social categories.

When I’m on the streets, I have the same attitude that I have at work or with people of a high level. For me, the interaction is the same. I don’t change! (Tamara, MoW, translator in her 50s)

I must put myself on the same plane as they [meaning ‘the homeless’] put themselves. I must always be myself because, if these people meet me elsewhere, they must find the same willingness in me that they find when I go to [meet them] … I’m always the same. (Michele, TP, solicitor in an insurance company, in his late 40s)

Still, one could wonder how volunteers reconciled their egalitarian disposition with the fact that they were giving something tangible, food, whereas the recipient could not repay in kind. How did they ally equality with a unilateral gift? The answer is that volunteers ‘framed’ (Goffman, 1974) the interaction as an emotional exchange. In the exchange, as noted in the following excerpts, the two parties were a priori on equal footing with regards to the flow of sentiments; it was, in Roberto’s words, an ‘internal barter’. (For similar evidence from the US, see Wuthnow, 1991: 288–90.)

We give them a hand, they give you a hand also. It’s not only giving. It’s giving and receiving because you give and they repay you with a smile, or a more sincere interaction, closer … more friendly, more intimate. I don’t even know … It’s difficult to express it. It’s an exchange of little things. Just a smile is enough. Also a thank-you … We don’t do it so as to receive something … A smile’s enough, a silent thank-you, that’s all. (Lorenzo, MoW, cleaner in his late 20s)

It’s important to go about it on a basis of equality, very humbly, as equals. Roberto and the homeless guy: two mates who talk on the basis that I’m no longer the founder, the writer. I’m no longer anyone special. I’m Roberto, who’s here to chat with you because I like being with you. I like doing what I call an internal barter. You know what barter is: exchange. (Roberto, TP, writer in his 60s, his emphasis)

The nature of what volunteers received was quite wide. If volunteers felt from the recipient’s reactions that they were creating a social bond (through, for example, silent appreciation, as Lorenzo indicated), they were rewarded by the giving itself (Godbout, 1992). Wuthnow argues that such gratification, and other good feelings about oneself, makes volunteering ‘a transaction with myself’ (Wuthnow, 1991: 288, 292). This interpretation takes us back to the giver’s self and another divergence in the egalitarianism of MoW and TP volunteers. MoW volunteers interpreted their inner selves as wanting. Helping others was an occasion for self-betterment and for the alignment of one’s self with notions of virtue – what Rebecca Allahyari (2000) has called ‘moral selving’.

We receive much more than we give. One receives much more. Because now I feel less lonely, more interested in things. For me volunteering means this. We’re enriched. You get back much, much more than you put in. By helping I rise, I see things in a new light. (Francesca, MoW, housewife in her 60s)

Viewing themselves as lacking, MoW volunteers claimed that they received more than they gave. This oft-repeated idea brought the giver down and the recipient up in an effort to level the ground for an egalitarian exchange to occur (Clark, 1997: 244). In contrast, TP volunteers believed that the giver’s inner self should be whole and healthy, otherwise it would ‘suck up’ from the homeless rather than entering into an egalitarian exchange, as Roberto asserts in the next excerpt. (See Wharton, 1991: 86–7, for an example of volunteers conveying this idea in the US.)

The danger is when the volunteer comes to do therapy on himself. In this case, he risks doing wrong to the assisted friend and to himself. I always say, ‘When you are depressed, annoyed, nervous, stay at home’. Otherwise, they suck up, suck up so much and give little because they don’t have energy to give. And you notice it in the encounter [with the homeless]. There is no rush of the heart. (Roberto)

The two styles of philosophizing, so to speak, in MoW and TP regarding the conditions for an egalitarian exchange to occur exemplify Allahyari’s point (2000) that different organizations with similar goals can construct moral personhood and social relations with distinct ‘group styles’ (Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003). MoW volunteers were forbearing with their own flaws. From their point of view, this stance brought them close to the homeless, who were lifted up as major counterparts in the emotional transaction. In contrast, TP volunteers claimed to be sympathizers with purely altruistic motives – a type of ‘moral saints’ in action (Wolf, 1994).

These opposing styles translated into the way that each group organized the encounter with the needy. In MoW, there was, in principle, a ‘relaxed and laissez-faire’ atmosphere, with volunteers and the homeless involved in conversations before and after food distribution. Conversely, the mood at TP was stilted, ‘directive and authoritarian’. The contrast echoed the variation in interaction styles that Liebow witnessed in two US shelters for homeless women (I have quoted the adjectives that Liebow, 1995: 9 employed originally). These differences influenced the extent to which each group was successful in nurturing an egalitarian and/or respectful interaction with the homeless, as I explain in the next section.

Collaboration in the making of equality

Participants in any social gathering can follow two courses of action. They can either show consideration for each other as ‘full persons’ (Goffman, 1971, 1990b), observing turn-taking in the flow of conversation, helping participants who have made a faux pas get over it and, generally, avoiding any type of embarrassment to themselves and others, or not (Goffman, 2008: Ch. 1). In this section I argue that, by abiding by the norm of cooperation, volunteers and the homeless acted as and felt like equals in the interaction regardless of their supra-situational statuses.

Among food service organizations, the first step in engaging in sociable conversations with the homeless was to offer them food. The most basic form of collaboration consisted of the homeless accepting the offering. For TP, this minimal form of cooperation was considered a success of the encounter. As Elisa, who succeeded Roberto as head of TP, told me in the in-depth interview, the sharing was a ‘joyous reception’. Ultimately, accepting the food was the only thing required to be a legitimate participant in TP’s ‘celebration’ (Elisa, pensioner in her 60s). Occasionally, some confused tourists just off their trains from other Italian towns would in fact eat the food displayed at the station’s entrance by TP.

Achieving this basic form of interaction was more challenging when TP volunteers initiated the face-to-face interaction with the homeless rather than waiting for the homeless to arrive at their point of distribution. For one thing, the offering could be refused, as I will show in the next section. To successfully deliver the food on these occasions, TP volunteers displayed exaggerated affection, thereby hoping to elevate the recipient from her down-and-out status.

In our walk across the city, Roberto, Elisa, Maria and I approached a homeless man in his 60s lying down on one corner of a building’s facade. Maria offered him a tray with some pastries while asking reverentially, ‘Would you like anything to eat?’ He shook his head. Then, Elisa asked whether he preferred to drink something. She showed him two bottles, one of water and one of orange soda, with the demeanour of a wine waitress. The man chose the water and she served him. Then, we expressed our best wishes for him and waved goodbye.

Although TP volunteers minimized the significance of food in the interview setting, the success in accomplishing their egalitarian ideal was satisfied by serving food to the homeless and eating the leftovers after the distribution. ‘We also eat. We are like them’, Armando explained to me on one occasion. One consequence of this approach was that the gatherings fostered by TP limited sociable conversations with the homeless, as the following fieldnote illustrates.

Today, while I was talking to one of the homeless men who came for lunch at the TP gathering in the train station, Roberto and Elisa yelled for me to come in the demarcated area from which they served the food: ‘Come with us!’, I heard them say repeatedly. When I did, I asked Elisa why I couldn’t speak to the man. She told me I could, but briefly, and added that other volunteers had complained about me, saying ‘Daniel doesn’t do anything. He’s always talking’.

On the other hand, MoW volunteers sought a stronger form of fraternizing, one that would foster the fellow feelings of the participants. For them, collaboration entailed engaging in an interaction with a counterpart who would respond to their egalitarian expectations. In the in-depth interview with Patrizia and Vincenzo, this married couple volunteering for MoW recalled an emotionally intense example that happened one New Year’s Eve:

Patrizia: Francesco [another volunteer] brought bubbly. Someone said, ‘You can’t give that, as members of MoW, we can’t give out wine’. But then, ‘Get off it! Just a mouthful!’ All in all it was … you felt this ….

Vincenzo: A bit of warmth.

Patrizia: It seemed to me that I was part of their life, that we had a fellow feeling. To be able to drink something with them, talk.

Beyond these moments of heightened emotional feelings of togetherness, a more common form of successful collaboration in sustaining a joint interaction involved small-talk between MoW volunteers and the homeless. Casual conversations happened routinely before and after the distribution of food, when small groups formed, dissolved and re-formed. For MoW’s members, these encounters were the true objective of their action. It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of these face-to-face, heart-to-heart exchanges for ‘normals’ and the stigmatized alike. Philosopher Philip Pettit captured the essence of what the ‘conversational stance’ entails for such participants as follows:

Your reports and remarks, your complaints and your quips, your gossip and your jokes are recognized as a contribution to a shared conversation. Your are not ignored, you are not ridiculed, and you are not dismissed. Your are a somebody, not a nobody. (Pettit, 1997: 53)

In addition, the repeated action of MoW facilitated the creation of personal ties between particular volunteers and homeless people. These bonds were enacted through minor rituals, such as addressing each other by their personal name and holding a long palaver about specific topics of conversation (Collins, 2004). Some of the homeless requested information about resources, such as jobs, accommodation or clothing, or told volunteers about their everyday lives, trials and tribulations, and even about the shame in being there as a homeless person receiving food. But the conversations could touch on any subject, from the weather to national politics and, mostly among male participants, from football to women, just as conversations among ‘normals’ do.

It was in these ‘focused encounters’ (Goffman, 1966), in the mutuality and give-and-take of conversation, where volunteers sought to temporarily cancel out the supra-situational inequality between ‘normals’ and the stigmatized and to establish an intimate and egalitarian connection (Holden, 1997; Lankenau, 1999) – ‘a high solidarity situation’ where participants felt convivial (Collins, 2004: 75).

To create this type of situational equality, each category of participant had to conduct a careful work of disattention to their supra-situational status (Goffman, 1990b: 57; see also Holden, 1997). Volunteers prided themselves on overlooking the dirtiness, skin diseases and toothless mouths of many homeless people. Touching, hugging and kissing the homeless were visual and tactile proof of volunteers’ egalitarianism and that they had accomplished the desired connection. As Olivia, a 45-year-old hairdresser and volunteer for MoW, stated in the in-depth interview: ‘Truly, it doesn’t disgust me. No, it has no effect on me. Not even Antonella, when she’s at her worst.’ (Antonella was a homeless woman with severe skin problems.)

For their part, the homeless had to overlook the shame arising from simply ‘being seen’ as needy in the company of volunteers and other homeless people (Goffman, 1990b: 64). For example, Yolanda, an elderly woman, once told me the following in a side conversation after MoW’s distribution:

I make so much effort by coming here, because there are these fools [meaning some of the other recipients of volunteers’ aid]. Now, this young man [pointing to a known drug addict who was another regular at MoW’s meetings] said to me, ‘Go home, old woman.’ So, it causes me a lot of pain coming here. Even if MoW do a wonderful job.

Hence, for many homeless, the dilemma of whether to go to the encounter with volunteers was a difficult choice between being seen in such a destitute position or missing a free lunch and the occasion to chat with someone (see Goffman, 1990b: 73, on this point). Under these circumstances, ‘to do good is difficult’, in the words of Caterina, a nurse in her 60s and MoW volunteer, referring to being caring without offending. Some sign of gratitude on the part of the homeless signalled that the volunteer had not ‘erred’ (Caterina); it was the final requirement for a successful interaction at MoW’s meetings.

It’s difficult to know if the other person’s understood your intention. If, for example, I say something to you that it seems to me all right to say, and you take it badly, then I’ve messed up, see? So it’s really difficult to manage to say things, or do the right things, in the right way, at the right time, for the right person … It’s not easy. When someone smiles at you and says ‘thanks’ to you, that means that you’ve hit on the right thing. (Caterina)

In sum, for MoW volunteers, accomplishing mutuality in conversation with the needy indicated that they had succeeded in their goal of offering help in a non-offending way. The volunteers had connected with the common humanity that they shared with the downtrodden; they had their equality confirmed.

Bringing inequality back in

I have argued that the most basic form of collaboration between volunteers and the homeless was the offering and acceptance of food. Conversely, the most basic way that a homeless person could reject collaborating with volunteers’ egalitarian expectations was to avoid their co-presence. Sometimes, the homeless never participated in the distribution of food; sometimes, they stopped going to it, as was the case with Giuseppe. This homeless man in his 50s participated in TP’s gatherings at the train station during the first months of operation of this group. However, after a certain point in time he did not return, even though he was seen at the train station at the time of TP’s distribution. For their part, TP volunteers dismissed him as an ungrateful mad man (see Holden, 1997: 135–9, for examples in the US of volunteers ‘othering’ the people they were supposed to relate to as equals). But there were other people who the volunteers offered food to, thereby assuming they were homeless, who were more explicit in their rejection of the encounter proposed.

At around 10:30 in the evening, TP volunteers were crossing one of the city’s bridges. Roberto approached a man who was sitting on the floor and asked, ‘Do you want to eat something?’ The whole group of six volunteers in their uniforms stopped and stared at the man. He moved some of his dreadlocks aside and replied with another question: ‘Do you have anything spicy?’ Someone said that the only food left was some pastries. There were a few seconds of silence. Then, the man addressed the whole group, ‘Why have you asked me? Ask the others’, he said, opening his arms to indicate the passersby. The volunteers were confused and began to walk away. After a while, the man approached the group from behind and shouted, ‘I’m going to buy a spicy pizza. Do you have any money to buy a pizza? If not, don’t break my balls!’

Arguably, this fieldnote shows that some of the people approached by volunteers disliked ‘having others decide when they [needed] sympathy’ (Clark, 1997: 242). But the homeless who joined in the distribution could also harbour feelings of resentment. For example, the homeless man in the next fieldnote bore a grudge against volunteers because he felt that he was part of an ‘exhibition meal’ (Goffman, 1990b: 93).

At midnight in the central train station, around 25 homeless people were getting ready for one of the first cold nights of the year. All of the volunteers of MoW were gone, but I had a good conversation with Mario, a middle-aged man. At one point in the chat, he told me he knew that MoW had opposed a proposal from the town hall to rent a room in the station. Mario stated that ‘MoW prefer to share the pizza outside, so that people can see it’. From behind the bars of a trolley, he imitated an imprisoned animal and concluded, ‘We are here like monkeys’.

Mario was convinced that there were hidden motives behind the volunteers’ altruism, if only the goal of gaining the ‘benefit of virtue’ for their good deeds (Bourdieu, 1994). In this way, he conveyed distance with his own involvement in the encounter. Ironically, Mario expressed these views to me, a volunteer-cum-researcher accomplishing the MoW volunteers’ major goal of talking with a homeless person one felt at ease with. Sitting on a trolley, smoking and chatting, we became two people on equal grounds because I took his viewpoint and he took my interest seriously.

More caustic to volunteers’ egalitarianism was to challenge their show of concern as a mere show (Goffman, 1990b: 139). ‘Immediate and automatic expressions’ (Clark, 1997: 241), as the next fieldnote describes, triggered this special case of a ‘character contest’ (Goffman, 2008: 239–58).

Quite late at night in the central train station, after MoW volunteers had already distributed the food, Walter, a homeless man in his 20s from southern Italy, arrived. It was some time since any of us had seen him. He was talking hastily, sweating and carrying a whole set of designs that he had painted. He showed us the artwork, pacing around and speaking rather quickly. One of the MoW volunteers, Manuela (a single woman in her early 60s), lifted up one of the paintings, looked at it briefly, and said, ‘Great, carry on’ [‘Bravo, vai’, in the original Italian] – a phrase she used frequently. When she returned the painting to Walter, his mood had changed. He looked her in the eyes defiantly and replied, ‘Hey, take a good look before you say it’s great’. Manuela was taken by surprise and only managed to defend herself timidly by saying in a low voice, ‘I did look properly’, while another volunteer changed the topic swiftly.

This fieldnote makes it plain that there were occasions in which people lower in the social hierarchy necessitated more deference and respect than people on equal footing. The reason is that, despite the diminished status of the homeless, or possibly because of it, some of them were quite sensitive to what they considered ‘belittling sympathy’ (Clark, 1997: 250; Liebow, 1995: 132) – the hierarchizing danger that there is to compassion. One way to restore their sense of being fully competent persons was to become assertive in their responses. For example, the homeless turned ‘wild cards’, standard words and expressions that weave more substantial parts in a conversation together, into signals that volunteers regarded them as incomplete beings or as people one step down. Manuela had suffered this misunderstanding with her usage of the phrase, ‘Great, carry on’. Arguably, expressions such as this reflect a certain degree of indifference to the story one is telling. Ironically, whereas a person of equal status oftentimes tolerates this minor level of aloofness, someone in a lower social position can take offense to it, as Sergio did because he understood it to be a lack of due respect – a sign that Manuela thought little of him.

Similarly, Artud, a young Albanian on the streets of Borgo since he arrived in Italy one year ago, did not like that volunteers said ‘I’m sorry’ (‘mi dispiace’). One night, he had an argument with a MoW volunteer for this reason. Later, in the aside after the food distribution, he told me he was infuriated if volunteers said ‘I’m sorry’ when they did not have something he had requested. ‘What does it mean?’, he queried rhetorically. ‘It’s offensive. You can say “sorry” when someone dies.’ He then flooded out in angry vituperation: ‘Eating, even dogs eat. Throw them a bone and they eat. You ask for work and they tell you “I'm sorry”. Italians talk, talk, just words.’

Other young Albanian men escalated their displays of disaffection with the encounter and engaged in interactional vandalism (Goffman, 1971: 269). Teasing and messing with volunteers, these migrants subverted the interaction order and put themselves in charge of it.

In the first square where MoW volunteers met, a short, young Albanian followed the volunteer that was distributing small pizzas to a group of fellow countrymen. The volunteer thought that he had been successful in convincing the latter that sitting down on a staircase was the best arrangement for the distribution of food. Actually, the men had sat down to enjoy the performance of their associate. At first, the volunteer did not notice that the Albanian was following and mocking him behind his back. When he noticed and confronted the saboteur, the young man asked for some food with gestures. The volunteer resisted making any exception and told him to sit down as the others had done. But the parodist continued following him, stirred by the tittering of his companions. Finally the volunteer, fed up with the acting, made a concession and gave him a slice of pizza. The mime picked at the pizza with a funny look, put the whole slice in his mouth at once and chewed with exaggeration. The audience praised this finale with guffaws of laughter.

Whether with anger or humour, some homeless people ‘displayed an attitude’ rather than expressed gratitude for the aid they received (Stein, 1989). They indulged in ‘performance risks’ (Goffman, 1990a) because their low social status ensured that they did not have anything to lose and a sense of satisfaction to gain. When recipients behaved in such a conspicuously troublesome manner, the gatherings became hurried and disorganized food hand-outs rather than platforms for building egalitarian relationships through conversational mutuality.

However, the ‘profane status’ (Goffman, 1990b) of the homeless had another side to it, as volunteers could become communication terrorists who sabotaged their own egalitarian ideal. The Protectors stood out in this self-defeating task. Their organization of the encounter at the train station created many occasions to reinforce the hierarchy between volunteers and the homeless and to short-circuit their socializing, as the next fieldnote illustrates.

When the bulk of the distribution was over, I stepped out of the trolley-demarcated area and approached Carlotta, a homeless woman in her 60s. She had sat down on an empty trolley and was eating alone. I noticed she was upset and asked why. She answered that ‘these guys from Meals on Wheels are the ones that steal everything’. I told her that these volunteers were the folks from TP. She replied that they were all the same and that she had just had a confrontation. Maria, a pensioner in her 60s, had told her off because she got close to the tray with sandwiches to point to one [and Maria thought she wanted to take it herself; TP’s rules forbade the homeless to help themselves to the food]. ‘If you don't know how to do volunteering, go and wash dishes’, Carlotta concluded with anger.

With their fleeting claim over a territory and the enforcement of rules, TP volunteers limited themselves to the technical function of serving food and drinks. During my fieldwork, I repeatedly asked myself why The Protectors settled on this minimal form of interaction with the homeless. At face value, this group style contrasted with their self-presentation in, for example, my interviews with them, where they came across as ‘moral saints’ (Wolf, 1994) aiming for the perfect gift. The only explanation I can propose is that, with the strict organization of their encounter, TP gained a certain degree of control over the anxiety and fear that characterizes non-scripted socializing with the homeless (a circumstance noted also by Liebow, 1995: 116). However, I recognize that this answer does not satisfactorily account for TP’s full abdication of their egalitarian principles, as when they profited from the status deprivation of the homeless to deny them any respect. The next fieldnote provides a case in point.

After TP’s main distribution in the train station ended, I spoke to Mila. Originally from Sarajevo, she was a homeless woman with diabetes. She told me that her last dose of insulin was two days earlier and that she was feeling very ill. I knew The Protectors had some funds for emergencies so, together with Mila, I approached Elisa, who was speaking to another person at that moment. ‘Elisa, listen, could we buy insulin for Mila?’, I asked. Elisa turned around, looked at the two of us, and said ‘No!’ Turning back to the person she was previously speaking to, she added, ‘This one’ll end up asking me [inaudible]’. Mila, appearing at a loss, gave a ‘miserable smile’ (Scheff, 1990: 83) and replied, ‘Okay, thanks’, as if Elisa was still talking to us.

Once again, the lack of cooperation of one of the teams manifested the ultimate inequality of the participants in the encounter. Analytically, these interactional failures demonstrated what cooperative participants accomplished. When the needy accepted the food from MoW and TP, especially if they were grateful for it, they signified volunteers as more than mere service providers. The volunteers came across as sensitive and egalitarian people who were able to see through the veil of social status and to relate with anyone as equals (Holden, 1997; Stein, 1989). For their part, cooperation signified the homeless as individuals with intrinsic worth and dignity, true members of the ‘Family of Man’ (Margalit, 1996). In short, dutiful interactants created equality there and then.

The situational re-enactment of (in)equality

In this article I have argued that two compassionate organizations adopted an egalitarian stance in their approach to the needy. This study contributes to the debate on compassion and equality by providing empirical evidence that the coexistence of both facets in contemporary volunteering is not an either–or situation. Egalitarianism, the belief in the equal worth and dignity of all human beings, was the volunteers’ way of overcoming the hierarchizing danger of compassion in their mind. Their goal was to give aid without hurting the recipients’ feelings.

However, while compassion and gift-giving could comfort and alleviate the harsh conditions of the homeless, they could also underline the latter’s one-down position and foster feelings of humiliation and shame. Avoiding the hierarchizing aspect of compassion required careful work of disattention. Volunteers had to get around and look beyond the physical stigma of the homeless. Moreover, they had to avoid communicating that they thought of the needy as impaired or disparaged people in any way. For their part, the homeless had to obviate the undesirable implications about themselves that merely participating in the encounter gave off.

In a nutshell, if non-homeless and homeless people honoured their interactional obligations and showed respect for each other, they sustained a form of situational equality in the encounter. Becoming aware of this fact was the outcome of an intellectual journey that began with Frankfurt’s argument that respect adjusts itself to the attribute in question – in this case, the ‘human generality’ of which all human beings partake (Rosanvallon, 2011). Volunteers corroborated this idea in the context of in-depth interviews.

But the analysis of the interaction order, that is, of ‘moments and their men’ (Goffman, 2008), suggests the reverse causality, i.e. through respect came situational equality. Certainly, the balance was fragile. Equality was a situational accomplishment that occurred whenever each category of participants adhered to the standard norms of deference and demeanour that Goffman (2008) claimed confer intrinsic value and worth to each person’s self. But too much or too little regard brought supra-situational inequality back into the encounter.

This analysis has stressed the inter-action between volunteers and the homeless. In doing so, it breaks with the dichotomy that characterizes most qualitative research on social service voluntary associations, which has traditionally centred on either the recipients of help or the givers. The current article presents ethnographic evidence in favour of the Goffmanian assertion that the definition of the situation cannot be imputed exclusively to the goals of the team forming the encounter. Volunteers forge a ‘sociological dyad’ (Becker, 1998) with the object of their concern. In organizations such as Meals on Wheels and The Protectors, volunteers needed a recipient with whom to prove their egalitarian self. Neither organization succeeded in the coupling of goals and practice without the cooperation of the targets of its action (Holden, 1997; Stein, 1989). This fact granted the downtrodden a certain degree of power, despite their vulnerable position within the social structure. It also revealed a type of situational egalitarianism, of which volunteers were unaware, that Goffman stressed in his work on team collaboration (Goffman, 1990a) and on the management of stigma (Goffman, 1990b).

Reading these results through the lenses of what Avishai Margalit calls ‘the charity paradox’ leads to interesting developments (Margalit, 1996: 240–6). Margalit’s considerations would lead us to conclude that equality was accomplished in the context of TP. In effect, TP volunteers held a version of egalitarianism that revolved around the selflessness of the giver. Moreover, their organization of the encounter with the poor pivoted around the physical set-up of the distribution of food and the strict observance of rules. By simply adopting the position of the served, the homeless provided volunteers with a feeling of self-satisfaction, thereby compensating the offering of food. Consequently, Margalit would argue that, from the viewpoint of the donee, a form of equality took hold of the moment because there was mutuality in the gift exchange. To this argument, it is helpful to add Goffman’s (1966: 208–9) observation that the most formal or ‘tight’ social occasions – he gives the extreme example of a military parade – confer the greatest inner freedom to participants. Thus, the stilted and directive interaction managed by TP also liberated the homeless on this front because it demanded little involvement from them – and from volunteers, for that matter.

The charity paradox continues, stating that ‘good motives’ oriented toward the well-being of the recipient reinstate inequality. In this scenario, the donee cannot help but feel gratitude to a benefactor who does not expect any and whose gift, consequently, has no return (Margalit, 1996: 240–6). In the present article, I have shown that MoW volunteers did not call for gratitude in the sense of demanding it from particular recipients; rather, they were gratified if they perceived that the homeless felt grateful because such a reaction was proof that they had not ‘erred’, as Caterina put it – that is, the social bond they were attempting to sustain with the needy was intact (on this point see also Godbout, 1992). The social organization of the encounter in which this complex emotional exchange occurred was more demanding and personal than that promoted by TP, where it was sufficient to simply take the food and go or pay lip service to thankfulness. In contrast, MoW volunteers promoted loose ‘unanchored interactions’ (Goffman, 1990b: 29) in which ‘normals’ and stigmatized participants were left to their own devices to figure out how to create and engage in ‘high-solidarity conversations’ (Collins, 2004). Such encounters were taxing on the concentration and social skills of the participants, who were required to keep on their toes emotionally and mentally (Goffman, 1966: 208–9).

It seems that claims that compassion and equality can coexist and feed each other in a virtuous cycle are put in checkmate. The original interpretation of the statements that opened the article, the one by Chiara, a volunteer with a religious voluntary association, and the other by Sandra, a volunteer with MoW, should be reversed: the more hierarchical the social encounter at face value, the greater the equality achieved in effect, and vice versa. However, Margalit does not grant due weight to the equalizing power of convivial conversation and to the feelings of togetherness, even ‘collective effervescence’, that can emerge from it (Collins, 2004). The reason is that Margalit’s ultimate objective is the definition of a society that systematically avoids humiliation, whereas volunteers’ success in forming egalitarian interactions is contingent and fleeting. In the second part of this article, I have shown that interactional equality and respect were constantly short-circuited, either by making a false move, as in the case of Meals on Wheels, or by design, as in the case of The Protectors.

In fact, volunteers, who are the instigators of the encounter, could betray their own egalitarian definition of the situation. This circumstance occurred when they abdicated their responsibilities toward the upkeep of regard and consideration for the self of the homeless. Such breaks from the volunteers’ intended line of action illuminate the hard-to-notice but onerous labour that interactants undertook to recognize each other as equals in a social occasion framed by social disparities and the emotion of compassion.

Finally, this article has brought to the foreground the fact that organizations with similar goals and comparable undertakings endorse distinct group styles. Future research should ask why some groups adopt a style of membership and action that is, in Lichterman’s words (2005), ‘inward-turning'’and self-involved, whereas others are outreaching. At the core of this quest lies the irony that egalitarians can promote inequality.