Explorations on a topological map of hegemony: Review of Erik Hansson’s The Begging Question: Sweden’s Social Responses to the Roma Destitute

Abstract

In this review of Erik Hansson’s The Begging Question: Sweden’s Social Responses to the Roma Destitute, I explore the book’s critical excavation of the circular logics that produce begging as a social and moral problem in Sweden. Drawing on Lacanian and Marxist theory, Hansson traces how begging produces anxiety by challenging Sweden’s self-image as a welfare state. This review focusses on Hansson’s intriguing ‘topological map of hegemony’, which models the interrelations of ideology, social conditions, national mythology, racialization, and unconscious processes. In my critical reading, I probe the limits of Hansson’s sophisticated analysis by asking whether psychoanalytic insights might destabilize rather than reinforce Marxist frameworks. Bringing Hansson’s analysis into conversation with Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (2021), I contemplate whether alternative, nonhegemonic understandings of need and reciprocity may unsettle the very category of ‘begging.’ The review closes by reflecting on the affective dynamics of begging across contexts, from Sweden to the United States, and on the possibility of counter-histories in which asking and giving are normalized acts of shared humanity.