Book Review: Making Better Lives

Making Better Lives: Hope, Freedom and Home-Making Among People Sleeping Rough in Paris, by Johannes Lenhard (2022). New York: Berghahn Books.  

In his new book Making Better Lives, Johannes Lenhard focuses on how Paris’s unhoused population survives in the present while hoping for a better future. In doing so, the author questions how hope is sustained among this group of people by investigating its short- and long-term implications. However, in pursuing short-term “pleasures,” his interlocutors often lose sight of the long-term challenges that will inevitably present themselves on their path to a more hopeful future.

Lenhard’s work is a successful example of “street-level ethnography,” in which he traces the “mobility paths” of his study participants and conceives his fieldwork as taking place in a “fluid-site.” He captures the home-making practices and lived experiences of Paris’s unhoused residents, amidst a societal tendency to view them as a threat and efforts to relocate them to the suburbs (under the pretext of “health risks” and “safety concerns”). Lenhard deserves recognition for immersing himself in these “dirty and violent” spaces, which are often overlooked—not because they are closed, but because they always remain open, to everything and everyone, in contrast to the protected and comfortable spaces found in cafés, libraries, universities, and community centers. Lenhard’s willingness to conduct participant-observation in these challenging settings reflects his commitment to understanding firsthand the people living in them.

Notwithstanding some limitations in the book—such as the author’s lack of contact with unhoused women and refugees and a limited focus on intersectionality—Lenhard deserves praise for conducting ethnographic research directly on the streets of Paris. His clear, accessible language keeps readers engaged throughout, while his portrayal of informants as active participants in shaping their lives emphasizes their agency. By focusing on this, Lenhard refuses to depict his informants as passive victims at the mercy of wider societal forces or fate. Instead, he skillfully illustrates how they struggle to navigate existential anxieties with a strong sense of self-assertion.

Departing from tropes of the “anthropology of suffering,” Lenhard endeavors to study how his interlocutors act against structural injustices and constraints; indeed, to do the opposite would, for him, present an incomplete picture. Based on my own fieldwork experience with caste-oppressed communities in northern India, I can assert that not attending to the hope and joy of my informants would be an injustice to their stories and lived realities. How, after all, can a person survive amidst widespread suffering in the absence of pleasure, meaning, and hope?

The first part of this book, “Frame,” provides a theoretical grounding upon which the overall work is built. Here, Lenhard tries to answer a question that I often pose when I deal with study participants who are suffering from social, physical, and psychic ailments: how can people create a “good life” beyond what is presently accessible to them? As such, hope as an analytical category is a common thread that weaves together the chapters in the book. To do this, Lenhard categorizes hope into two forms—a daily short-term hope to fulfill material and emotional needs, and the long-term hope of having one’s own home. While begging, shelter-making, and taking drugs constitute short-term versions of hope, having adequate space and social and emotional security in the form of love, care, and resources make up this population’s hopes in the long term. From these different temporalities and versions of hope, the author also shows how his interlocutors’ drug and alcohol use causes them to try to forget past traumas and reduce anxiety about the future, and yet these diversions make their immediate survival in the present exceedingly difficult.

In the first chapter, the author explains how begging is a kind of labor, which challenges common misunderstandings implying that those who beg are not willing to work. In this light, presenting oneself as needy, choosing the right location, identifying potential givers, and formulating a “begging script” cannot be done without emotional and physical labor. In the second chapter, the author describes how unhoused individuals find shelter and make it their “home,” which involves endless searching and frequent conflict that is mediated by “structuralizing routines.” Indeed, for many of Lenhard’s interlocutors, coping with everyday struggles often necessitates the “help” of drugs and alcohol. He calls this “drug time,” which he summarizes in the third chapter—defined by behaviors that often do more harm in the long run by providing users with a false sense of “taking control.” The fourth and fifth chapters shed light on the roles that rehabilitation institutions play in orienting Lenhard’s study participants toward better futures via “technologies of the self” (à la Foucault). These institutions allow his interlocutors to formulate long-term hopes for a home of their own through self-management practices like re-experiencing life under a roof, away from daily life in the streets. Regardless, he sees these efforts by local institutions as an “imposition of order” onto their beneficiaries within the city’s unhoused population.

The sixth chapter details the transitional spaces of “testing” and “ruliness” in rehabilitation centers, which are created through Foucauldian “technologies of the self” rather than via the external discipline of institutions. This chapter and the conclusion describe how people who live on the streets struggle to create something morally better. Lenhard shows that unhoused people do not lack reflection and deliberation in their daily lives; rather, it is the precarity that accompanies homelessness and poverty—and the substance use that makes this suffering bearable—that results in their lives being so strenuous.

If I were to summarize this book in one sentence, it would be that this is a story of hope—hope as a tool to resist structural oppression and deprivation. Whether people’s lives are marked by precarity, food insecurity, or oppression, it is hope that provides them with a means to stand up for a more dignified existence. But where are we to find hope in this most radical form? As shown in Making Better Lives, it can be found in the streets and public spaces of Paris, where abandoned members of society are forced to live and beg. In describing this seeming paradox, Lenhard succeeds in bringing to life homelessness in Paris, a city far better known for its world-class monuments and tourist attractions than for the material depravity facing its most vulnerable residents.

Author Biography

Devashish Chauhan is PhD scholar of sociology and social anthropology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Currently, he is researching the cultures of food and health found in caste-oppressed communities in northern India by centering his work at the intersections of caste, class, and gender.