ABSTRACT
Development theories routinely conceptualize poverty in rational, abstract, and cognitive terms as an effect or cause of one or the other form of “lack” – for instance, lack of health, income, resources, well-being, education, or capabilities. Such theories overwhelmingly emphasize economic rationales, whereby a freely choosing individual becomes the vehicle for the acquisition, allocation, or distribution of resources and capabilities. As such, they foreclose the possibility of getting to grips with the subjective dramas of multiple actors populating “poverty situations”, and they also widely employ mechanical, spatial, and hydraulic metaphors – up/down, below/above, centre/periphery, inside/outside, and inclusion/exclusion – to quantify or qualify the phenomena of poverty, which is therefore largely described negatively – the meaning of poverty implies below, down, periphery, outside, and exclusion. These cognitive theories arguably reflect the epistemology of the researching subject rather than the researched subject, and construct poverty as an abstract measure of some sort of lack signifying a negative status rather than seeing the phenomenon in relational terms, as an inter-subjective experience.
