What Causes Poverty?: A Postmodern View

eople are considered poor when they are unable to satisfy their basic needs for P food, clothing, shelter, and health. Using minimum costs of food and other necessities as poverty criteria, the World Bank estimated in 1988 that 1,133 million, or 29.7 percent of the total population in developing countries, were poor (World Bank 1992:30). According to the same estimate 49 percent in South Asia and 47.8 percent in sub-Sabaran Africa were poor. It is widely believed that such poverty reflects economic underdevelopment of nations whose poorly developed production forces such as land, capital, and labor have hampered economic growth; naturally, economic development is viewed as the obvious solution. By this logic, investments in development projects, infrastructure, modernized agriculture, and expanded exports would alleviate poverty by creating jobs and providing income. We call this the axiom of economic development. The principal hypothesis of the paper is the following: the material deprivation experienced by the poor is a form of socially constructed scarcity. Poverty does not reside exclusively in the external world independent of academic discourse that thinks about it; discourse is deeply implicated in creating poverty insofar as it conceals the social origins of scarcity. AIthough the experience of hunger and malnutrition is immediately material, “poverty” exists in a discursive materialist formation where ideas, matter, discourse, and power are intertwined in ways that virtually defy dissection. To study such formations, we must first transcend the limits, assumptions, and language of social science. I contend that a postmodern discursive approach yields a more satisfactory view of the poverty problem: 1) it reveals a multiplicity of causative relations; 2) it points the way to multiple possibilities of action; 3) it moves beyond the realm of poverty experts to identify numerous agents of social change; and 4) it yields a new understanding of the power we possess to act in the world. The paper is organized into four parts. In the first part I try to establish a link between postmodern discourse theory and the theoretical framework of the nexus of production relations. Next I describe the concept of socially constructed scarcity, an idea that underlies my entire argument. In the third section I adapt two Foucaldian notions of power-“disciplinary” power and “nonsovereign” power-to think about nontraditional “solutions” to poverty. Finally, I use this postmodern view of poverty to locate my own work as author.