"With an astute ethnographic eye, Kate Swanson rescripts begging as work, work that brings children and families to towns but provides means for their home villages to stay afloat, work that is embedded in kin networks whose sprawling geographies give new meaning to the notion of extended family, work whose received constructions suggest laziness and shame but which offers young people the autonomy to go to school and otherwise advance in their encounters with a rapidly globalizing economy. Reimagining the situated practices of begging and household reproduction strategies in Ecuador, Begging as a Path to Progress works across scale and locality to see the country in the city, the city in the country, and probe the differentiated consequences of global tourism and policies like ‘zero tolerance’ as they ricochet across national frontiers."
—Cindi Katz, author of Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives

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In 1992, Calhuasí, an isolated Andean town, got its first road. Newly connected to Ecuador’s large cities, Calhuasí experienced rapid social-spatial change, which Kate Swanson richly describes in Begging as a Path to Progress.

Based on nineteen months of fieldwork, Swanson’s study pays particular attention to the ideas and practices surrounding youth. While begging seems to be inconsistent with—or even an affront to—ideas about childhood in the developed world, Swanson demonstrates that the majority of income earned from begging goes toward funding Ecuadorian children’s educations in hopes of securing more prosperous futures.

Examining beggars’ organized migration networks, as well as the degree to which children can express agency and fulfill personal ambitions through begging, Swanson argues that Calhuasí’s beggars are capable of canny engagement with the forces of change. She also shows how frequent movement between rural and urban Ecuador has altered both, masculinizing the countryside and complicating the Ecuadorian…

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