Re-thinking "Poverty"

(from the Bolivian Andes to Southern Appalachia)

by Jack Herranen, August 2007

One of the greatest challenges in my adult life-as an artist, activist, and son of southern Appalachia- has been the experience of growing into the life of a rural farming village in the foothills of the Bolivian Andes and the ways in which I've had to radically rethink the very notion of "poverty". From UN reports to leftist journalism, Bolivia is almost always described as "a dirt poor, landlocked, primarily indigenous country in South America". Yet when I walk down to my friend don Ramiro's house to pick up my son Camilo, after a day of playing with his nine kids, I oftentimes literally feel giddy due to the abundance and sense of generosity surrounding me. Any well-intentioned development specialist would look out upon our village and think, "How can we elevate these poor people out of their stagnant and regressive lives?". I've learned to ask (myself first and now others),'What Western myths need to be debunked to affirm the dignified life here [in Totorkawa]?" Interrogating the confused Western notion of "poverty", the lynchpin of the whole Western development discourse, lies before me as a central task in the collective struggle to recuperate human dignity.

I have often interacted with people in southern Appalachia leading extremely impoverished existence, yet are swimming in goods, services, modern amenities, and technological trinkets of all sorts. It could be more precisely, responsibly, defined as "scarcity" although the application of this term seems misplaced at first. When walking down any one aisle at a typical grocery store in the United States,"scarcity" may be the last word that comes to mind. One's thinking gets jarred when striving to illuminate and understand all of the subtle aspects residing within the blanket term "poverty". In the chapter titled "Production", in The Development Dictionary (Zed Books, 1992), Jean Robert offers this insight into the violence and degradation residing within these subtleties :

"Perhaps the modern economy is essentially a way of organizing reality in a way that actually transforms both people and nature into waste. For modern production to function, the economy must first establish a system in which people become dependent upon goods and services produced for them; and to do this, it must devalue historically determined patterns of subsisting and corrupt cultural webs of meaning. The mass production of modern goods, services and images demands cultural blight through the spread of disvalue, that is, the systematic devaluation of the goods found in traditional cultures. Disvalue, to the extent that the economy is productive, entails a degradation which touches everything and everyone affected by or involved with this modern mode of organizing reality. A person is less a person, the more he or she is immersed in the economy. And less a friend. Less a participant in leisure- that is, in culture. The air is less pure, the wild places fewer, the soil less rich, the water less sparkling."

Many would beg to differ with this viewpoint, that one's humanity is eroded the more they become involved in the economy. As a matter of fact, many would say that "the poor" will only be freed by lifting them up out of their villages and placing them into the labor force. Ask a Chinese miner, an unemployed Nigerian tapping oil pipelines under the cover of night, or a southern Appalachian miner's son clocking in for his shift as guard -"over-seeing" primarily African-American and Latino men- at the new Supermax prison about the "freedom" and "dignity" they've found in the global economy. Wolfgang Sachs' (along with others such as Ashis Nandy and Ivan Illich) disentangling of notions of scarcity, destitution, and frugality from the blanket term of "poverty" can greatly assist in the recuperation of our critical faculties inside of imperial strongholds. Below is a segment from Sachs' writings that is helpful in getting out from underneath the suffocating blanket term of "poverty". It is a grave injustice to define a whole people, a whole country, as "dirt poor". It is an imposition and a violent assumption that wounds everyone involved. It behooves us, especially Westerners suffering through an accelerated process of social and cultural degeneration (inextricably linked to our widespread ecological degradation), to hold this notion up to the light.