Some quotes from Escobars Problematization of Poverty”



Some quotes from Escobar’s “Problematization of Poverty”

Creation of a new geographical imaginary (a “new” place) and new subjects of control

[In the post World War II era,] “The discourse of war was displaced into the social domain and to a new geographical terrain: the Third World.” (p. 21)

“As in the case of the trope of the “less developed country,” a generic village is produced by discourse:

It follows that the generic village is inhabited by generic villagers… People in development planning ‘know’ that villagers have certain habits, goals, motivations and beliefs … The ‘ignorance’ of villagers is not an absence of knowledge. Quite the contrary. It is the presence of too much locally-instilled belief… The problem, people working in development will tell each other and a foreign visitor, is that villagers ‘don’t understand things.’ To speak of ‘people who don’t understand’ is a way of identifying people as ‘villagers.’ As long as development aims to transform people’s thinking, the villager must be someone who doesn’t understand. (Pigg 1992…) (p. 48-49)”

“… the nascent order of capitalism and modernity relied on a politics of poverty the aim of which was not only to create consumers but to transform society by turning the poor into objects of knowledge and management.” (p. 23)

Creation of the Poor as the Other

Procacci describes features associated with pauperism (p. 23):

|Mobility |Promiscuity |

|vagrancy |ignorance |

|independence |frugality |

|refusal to accept social duties |refusal to work |

|refusal to submit to the logic of the expansion of “needs”| |

Quote from Kolko, a “student of US foreign policy”:

…senior U.S. officials increasingly dismissed [Latin America] as an aberrant, benighted area inhabited by helpless, essentially childish peoples. [George Kennan, head of State Department policy planning] described the “unhappy and hopeless” background there… “because their Latin American Character inclines toward individualism and undiscipline”… Pursuing the motif of the “childish nature of the area, he condescendingly argued that if the United States treated the Latin Americans like adults, then perhaps they would have to behave like them. (p. 29-30)

They are what we are not…

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