Austerity's implications: Parasitism and charity in an English village

Abstract

English political discourse has long featured accusations of parasitical behavior. In this article, I provide insight into how discussions of parasitism feature in English people's daily lives. Specifically, I discuss how more than a decade of austerity has informed perceptions of parasitical behavior. In exploring this, I make use of more than a dozen months of fieldwork conducted with residents of Lyon, a rural, postindustrial village in North East England. My specific focus is discussions of parasitism occurring in two fixtures of austerity‐era England: the food bank and the charity shop. After more than a decade of austerity, even those villagers volunteering at charity shops and food banks frequently engaged in conversations about parasitism. I draw on Michel Serres's scholarship on the parasite and place it in conversation with George Foster's various writings on the image of the limited good and the static economy to explain why this occurred. I suggest that the development of a worldview informed by a sense of limited good has encouraged beliefs about parasitism's contemporary prevalence.