The relational concept of homelessness and dependence on a social service of a homeless shelter alias a construction of an alternative home

Abstract

The homelessness is defined differently by various experts. The case study is intended to present homeless people as a class of people without conventional housing, internally based on a relational concept shaped largely by a symphatetic social network that connects these people and offers them a survival adaptation mechanism in a given life situation. Study is based on homeless shelter ethnographic research executed throughout the years 2017–2019 in a position of social worker assistant in Czech Republic. It is a product of engaged anthropology with its role of presenting negatively effecting situations as a way of adjustment to special homeless situation of a person, supported by adequate quotations of homeless people in each chapter. The aim of the study is to describe the so-called dependency on a shelter viewed by the major society and social services within the terms of creating of an essential alternative home.