Representing poverty and attacking representations: Perspectives on poverty from social anthropology

Abstract

This article considers the potential contribution of social anthropology to understanding poverty as both social relation and category of international development practice. Despite its association with research in communities and countries now considered poor anthropology has remained disengaged from the current poverty agenda. This disengagement is partly explained by the disciplinary starting point of anthropology which explores the processes though which categories come to have salience. It is accentuated by the relationship of anthropology as a discipline to the development policy and the research commissioned to support it. An anthropological perspective on poverty and inequality can shed light on the ways in which particular social categories come to be situated as poor. It can also reveal the social processes through which poverty as policy objective becomes institutionalised in development practice and in the social institutions established to monitor, assess and address it.

Acknowledgements

The support of the UK Economic and Social Research Council is gratefully acknowledged. The work was part of the programme of the ESRC Global Poverty Research Group (grant M571255001). This paper was originally presented as part of a session on methodologies for addressing poverty organised by GPRG at the International Conference on Chronic Poverty in Manchester in April 2003. I am grateful to colleagues in GPRG and to the anonymous reviewers at JDS whose critical insights have informed the revisions of this paper.

Notes

1. But there are exceptions. See for example Farmer (2003), Passaro (1996) and Scheper Hughes (1992).

2. See the Bank's website for the full mission statement and accounts of how the Bank works with the poorest people in the poorest countries and its aspirations to be the primary source of knowledge about development (http://www.worldbank.org).

3. Once poverty reduction becomes a goal for public policy then poverty must be turned into something tangible that can be measured and about which correlates can be identified.

4. For a comparative example in the west see O'Connor (2001), who shows that while early poverty studies in the UK and US were influenced by an activist agenda poverty knowledge since the 1960s, certainly in the US, has been largely policy determined.

5. James Ferguson (1990: 27) remarks of such statements apparently based on empirical research which find their way into development documentation and which are contradicted by more academic studies, which are not cited, that ‘It must be recognized that which is being done here is not some sort of strangely bad scholarship, but something else entirely.’

6. Hence Chambers' (2001: 306) rhetorical suggestion that the World Development Report 2010 be titled ‘Challenging wealth and power’.

7. See for example Baumann's (1998) description of the new ‘poor’ in consumer societies whose poverty is manifested through inability to share in the purchase of the consumer items through which identity is articulated.

8. For a discussion of the relation between subjection and agency in academic representations of the ‘Other’ see Prakash (1994).

9. The book is concerned with averagely educated adults in urban communities in the US, who have not had anything other than elementary education in mathematics. Lave shows how most think of themselves as unable to ‘do math’, but in practice are adept at managing essential calculations in daily life, a kind of popular mathematics.

10. Riles' (2001) ethnography of transnational activist networks leading in up to a UN summit is another pertinent example.

11. Devereux's (2003) distinction between poverty and destitution is pertinent here, in highlighting the social nature of destitution as a situation where people are rendered dependent on others through social and economic constraints which render their livelihoods unsustainable.

12. Similarly, the economic stagnation of much of southern Tanzania, and its ensuing ‘poverty’, owes much to game protection policies of successive colonial and postcolonial governments which have created and maintained one of the largest game reserves in Africa right in the middle of what was until the early twentieth century the economic heartland of the region (Seppala, 1998; Green, 2003).

13. According to the 2001 World Development Report, ‘the life expectancy of African Americans is about the same as that in China and in some states in India’ (World Bank, 2001: 46).

14. ‘Like most other people in the US, drug dealers and street criminals are scrambling to obtain their piece of the pie as fast as possible. In fact, in their pursuit of success they are even following the minute details of the classical Yankee model for upward mobility. They are aggressively pursuing careers as private entrepreneurs; they take risks; work hard and pray for good luck’ (Bourgois, 2003: 326).

15. Prior to the introduction of the workhouse, parish relief in England was quite generous towards the destitute and was unconditional (Fogel, 2004).

16. For a contemporary account of the conditions inside workhouses at the start of the twentieth century, and for insights into Victorian attitudes towards poverty, see the novelist Jack London's The People of the Abyss, originally published in 1903 (1998).

17. Aid, Mary Anderson (1999: 55) points out, and the way in which it is delivered conveys implicit and explicit ethical messages.

18. In the form of contracts, large scale, resource transfers, opportunities for employment, travel and study tours, capacity and institution building, seating allowances and so on.

19. For an overview of poverty in Tanzania in the context of PRS see Ellis and Ntengua (2003).