A Global Vision of Local Poverty: A Comment.

AuthorSerels, Steven

Introduction

There is no universally accepted definition of poverty. It does not exist. Debating the merits of various definitions has driven the field of Poverty Studies for the last half-century. Numerous monographs and articles have sought to list and compare various definitions. Economists, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians have shown that every definition identifies a different group as poor. For example, a 2003 study by Caterina Ruggeri Laderchi, Ruhi Saith and Frances Stewart (2003) that used four different definitions to model poverty in India and Peru found that the definitions overlapped by as little as 50 percent. A similar study in the late 1980s applied eight different definitions of poverty to a sample of 12,000 households in the Netherlands and found that they produced poverty rates ranging from as high as 23.5 to as low as 5.7 percent (Hagenaars and de Vos 1988).

These and other comparison studies are even more revealing than their obvious findings suggest. They demonstrate that the definition of poverty is immaterial to awareness of poverty's existence. People know that poverty exists even if they do not know how to precisely identify its specific features. As a result, several scholars have concluded that any definition of poverty must conform to lay understandings to be accepted and, therefore, considered adequate. As Martin Ravallion wrote in a 2010 World Bank report comparing official country-specific definitions of poverty--'all national poverty lines must be considered socially relevant in the specific country. If a proposed poverty line is widely seen as too frugal by the standards of society then it will surely be rejected. Nor will a line that is too generous be easily accepted.' (Ravallion 2010: 12) A metric that appears scientifically sound but does not meet societal expectations will not be 'socially relevant' and, therefore, cannot form the basis for defining poverty.

'Socially relevant' is a loaded term; it smuggles in so much with it. Determining relevance begs the question 'To whom?' and any answer necessitates an act of boundary setting. It requires determining those whose opinions about relevance are counted and those who are ignored. Edward J. Bird has shown that this process has been explicitly political, at least in the 'developed' world. In these countries, 'poverty perceptions are considered part of the ongoing political and social debate. The process that determines poverty perceptions seems little different from the process that determines poverty policy' (Bird 1999: 274). As a result, the knowledge of the politically marginalized is often either explicitly or implicitly deemed 'socially irrelevant' in the intertwined processes that simultaneously establish a politically viable definition of poverty and determine poverty alleviation policies.

There is another factor that, more broadly, leads to the exclusion of some voices--social inclusion is costly. It is expensive because it requires access to resources. Some goods are socially necessary because command over them is a prerequisite for full inclusion. The determination of which goods, in what quantities and under what circumstances is negotiated at the community level. Anyone who lacks access to these goods in the right quantities at the right time is considered, by definition, on the margins of or completely outside of the community.

Clothing is an illustrative example of a socially necessary good. The ownership of certain clothing, either for fashion or modesty reasons, has been a key prerequisite of social inclusion in most societies. In 1776 Adam Smith noted that 'in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct' (Smith 1776: Book 5, Chapter 2, Article IV). Late eighteenth-century Europe was not unique in this regard. Similar phenomena have been identified for Kangas in twentieth century Zanzibar and Saris in contemporary India, to name just two of countless examples (Fair 2004; Guha 2018).

Perhaps more fundamental than the cost of self-presentation is the cost of exchange associated with community formation. In his seminal work The Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss argues that the reciprocal exchange of goods outside of the market economy is central to creating and maintaining societal bonds. For Mauss, reciprocity is key to full inclusion in society. As he states in the essay's conclusion: 'The unreciprocated gift still makes the person who has accepted it inferior, particularly when it has been accepted with no thought of returning it... The invitation must be returned, just as courtesies must' (Mauss 1925: 83-4). David Graeber builds on the near century of research into gift-exchange inspired by Mauss by showing that a gift that is not repaid is a debt and that debtors and lenders are not coequals. As Graeber puts it: 'During the time the debt remains unpaid, the logic of hierarchy takes hold' (Graeber 2011: 121). Repaying debts and reciprocating gifts is...

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