Both in public imagination and scholarship, begging is often associated with passivity, waiting, inactivity and as such defined as the opposite of ‘real work’. During two years of fieldwork with people sleeping rough in Paris, I observed my informants to the contrary describe begging as their occupation. In this paper, I present an ethnographically grounded argument that the people experiencing homelessness I accompanied over the course of two years experienced begging as labour which involved constructing and supporting emotional narratives of neediness, deservingness and personal connections in scripts, stories and hustles. My interlocutors often understood this labour to be a hopeful one, one that structured their day (and thoughts) but also one that enabled their projets de vies, their struggles into the future. In the wake of overwhelming suffering and structural violence, I observed begging not only a short-term fix for consumption but also as keeping the future open – the more long-term future of eventually leaving the street behind.

无论是在公众的想象力还是学术上，乞讨通常都与消极，等待，无所作为相关联，因此被定义为与“真实作品”相反。在两年的野外工作与人们在巴黎睡不着觉的过程中，我观察到我的线人相反地将乞讨描述为他们的职业。在本文中，我提出了一个基于人种学的论点，即我陪伴的经历了两年的无家可归的人们经历了乞讨，因为这需要在剧本，故事和琐事中构建和支持对需要，应得和个人关系的情感叙事。我的对话者通常将这项工作理解为一种希望的工作，既可以构成他们的一天（和思想），又可以使他们的经历脱颖而出。，他们为未来而奋斗。在遭受压倒性的痛苦和结构性暴力之后，我观察到，乞求不仅是短期的消费解决方案，而且还是使未来保持开放状态–最终走上街头的更长远的未来。