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The affective dimension of class belonging in the context of charitable giving and receiving

In this paper, we examine the affective dimension of social class belonging in the context of charitable “giving” and “receiving”, inspired by Reay’s (2005) work on the “psychic economy of class”. For Reay (2005), social class is not only a matter of objective life circumstances and chances, but is rather deeply etched into people’s psyches with emotions such as envy, arrogance, pride, embarrassment and pity contributing to the “affective lexicon of class” (2005: 913). We empirically explore this understanding of the lived experiences of social class belonging by drawing on ethnographic data, including interviews and observations, conducted in late 2017 and early 2018, in two contrasting socioeconomic contexts in Croatia: a charity organization devoted to humanitarian causes, traditionally linked to upper-middle class membership, and a soup kitchen that caters to socially disadvantaged citizens. Briefly, the narratives of our upper-middle class interviewees suggest they take pride in their charitable activities, describing their “giving” as acts of generosity grounded in empathy with those groups they choose to help. In the soup kitchen, by contrast, a critique of the post- socialist Croatian setting devastated by privatization, as well as recalled nostalgic memories of a caring socialist state, takes central stage in the narratives of our lower- class interviewees, for whom “receiving” is a matter of survival. The soup kitchen is indispensable to their livelihoods, with their initial feelings of stigma and shame overcome over the years of soup kitchen use. Importantly, the emotions expressed by the people eating in the soup kitchen are not merely negative—rather, “failure” yields to a quest for dignity and pride. Indeed, acts of gift-giving on the part of our lower-class interviewees’, particularly to those employed in the soup kitchen, dignify the straitened conditions in which users of the soup kitchen live. On the basis of our comparative analysis of the two sites, we develop an affective perspective on classed gift-giving and receiving (Mauss 1925 ; Muehlebach 2012).

charity ; social class ; psychic economy of class ; postsocialism

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