Western perceptions on global poverty

The word ‘poverty’ is, no doubt, a key word of our times, extremely used and abused by everyone, above all in the Third World context. Huge amounts of money are spent in name of poor countries. Thousands of books and expert advice continue to offer solutions to their problems. But where does the current discourse on poverty come from?

Interested in writing an essay on the anthropology of poverty, I read the book Encountering development. The making and unmaking of the Third World by Arturo Escobar (1995). According to the author, poverty on a global scale was a discovery of the post-World War II period. Before this date, during colonial times, the concern with poverty was conditioned by the belief that even if the natives could be enlightened by the presence of the colonizer, their capacities for science and technology – the basis for economic progress – were nil. Therefore, any attempt by the colonizer to help the poor to improve its conditions by its own means would be senseless. It was, in fact, the decolonization phenomena factor that allowed the ex-colonizers to reconsider their views on the poorest countries.

The modernization of the poor was increasingly seen as a social problem that, without the intervention and guidance of the West, would not be possible to solve. The invention of a politics to balance global poverty became central to the world order. The representation of the Third World as a child in need of adult guidance was not an uncommon metaphor and led to what Escobar has called the secular theory of salvation. In order to understand the European construction of reality regarding the poor, I need to first “anthropologize” the West and the domains that they have granted as universal. In order to do so I would like to explore how other academics have approached this topic.

The first author than promptly comes to my mind is Edward Said and his studies on Orientalism. I log into IBSS and enter ‘Orientalism’ in the title field and ‘Said’ in the author one. Six results are returned, corresponding to the six different revisions that Edward Said has done to his work since 1978. For my purpose on the study of the European stereotypes, I choose the first option ‘Orientalism once more’ published in 2004. I decide to search again under the term ‘Orientalism’, but this time adding another subject term ‘otherness’ in order to contrast other academic contributions to this topic. This brings up eighty two records. Since not all the records are relevant to my topic, I do a quick scanning and I am immediately interested in the article by Jean Ferreux ‘The other as an historical invention’, included in the book ‘Imagining the Arab other: how Arabs and no-Arabs see each other’ edited by T. L. Djedidi (2008). Further down in the list I found an article more directly relevant to the subject I am interested in; the historically built discourse on otherness and poverty. This in an article written by Michal Buchowski (2006) titled ‘The specter of orientalism in Europe: from exotic other to stigmatized brother’, which combined with the M. Haldrup, L. Koefoed and K. Simonsen (2006) article on ‘Practical orientalism – bodies, everyday life and the construction of otherness’, will give me a good start for the first section of my essay.

In order to cover the second section of my essay, I need to look for what other academics have said about the Western paternalistic approach to global poverty. This time I look for the subject terms ‘paternalism’ and ‘poverty’ in the IBSS database. I have a promising list of eighteen records, from which I decide to have a close look at four of them: L. M Mead’s (2000) works on ‘The new paternalism: supervisory approaches to poverty’ and ‘Telling the poor what to do’ (1998); N. Jesurun-Clements (1992) article on ‘Paternalism and the alleviation of poverty’; finally, as an interesting contribution to my essay, I select the article of F.Manji and C. O’Coill (2002) ‘The missionary position: NGOs and development in Africa’, which focuses on how the current NGO are perpetuating the work of former colonial missionaries in terms of poverty alleviation and westernization (and therefore, preventing the emancipation) of local societies.