CHAPTER 2 THE DEFINITIONS OF POVERTY （第二章的定义贫困）.pdf

CHAPTER 2 THE DEFINITIONS OF POVERTY Don’t ask me what poverty is because you have met it outside my house. Look at the house and count the number of holes. Look at my utensils and the clothes that I am wearing. Look at everything and write what you see. What you see is poverty . —A poor man, Kenya 1997 Poverty is humiliation, the sense of being dependent on them, and of being forced to accept rudeness, insults, and indifference when we seek help. —Latvia 1998 This chapter explores poor people’s definitions of poverty as documented in the PPAs. We use an inductive approach to uncover dimensions of poverty that are important to poor people and to capture their characterizations of poverty. This required us to set aside our prejudices and assumptions about what is important for poor people, about the importance of particular sectors in reducing poverty, about regional or gender differences, and about the best conceptual framework for understanding poverty. Hence, the organization of this chapter and the concepts we use were determined by what emerged from our analysis of definitions of poverty. There are five main findings. First, many factors converge to make poverty a complex, multidimensional phenomenon. Second, as expected, poverty is routinely defined as the lack of what is necessary for material well-being — especially food but also housing, land, and other assets. Poverty is the lack of multiple resources leading to physical deprivation. Third, poor people’s definitions reveal important psychological aspects of poverty. Poor people are acutely aware of their lack of voice, power, and independence, which subject them to exploitation. Their poverty also leaves them vulnerable to rudeness, humiliation, and inhumane treatment by bot