The Poverty Discourse and the Poor in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is cited as an exemplary case of direct poverty alleviation because of a long history of social welfare and high values in quality of life indices. Notwithstanding, anti-poverty measures in Sri Lanka founded on the international discourse of poverty and development do not serve the interests of poor people. This discourse begins by locating poor people in a distinct poverty sector and proceeds to examine its characteristics. Several attributes of that discourse make it intellectually incapable of seeing how poverty is socially constructed in a diffused nexus of production relations that extends far beyond the so-called 'poverty sector'. An alternative 'substantive approach to poverty' is presented. The arguments are illustrated using the theme of food production in Sri Lanka.     

16世纪威尼斯的贫困与济贫问题

16世纪的欧洲经历了一场普遍的贫困危机,欧洲各国政府纷纷采取了各种济贫措施,以缓解贫困问题对社会造成的压力,天主教城市共和国威尼斯也不例外。通过颁布济贫法和改革大兄弟会等旧式救济组织,威尼斯引导宗教慈善组织朝着世俗化方向发展,从而建立起行之有效的近代济贫制度,有效地缓解了贫困问题造成的压力。威尼斯的经验表明,在推动近代早期欧洲济贫活动世俗化的诸因素中,最重要的因素是社会环境,而非传统上认为的宗教因素。     

Dosang Who Assists the Poor to Get Rid of Poverty

Dosang, living in Qoidain Rango Village in Lungren Town of Damxiong County, is a herder-turned-businessman. When hewas a child, his family was very poor.With the help of fellow villagers, he wasable to join the Chinese People's Libera-tion Army in 1970. After retiring from thearmy in 1975, he stayed in Lhasa to work.Some years later, he resigned from his joband started his own business. Since he hadlearned to drive as well as other skills inthe army, he has been able to run an auto-mobil…     

Capitalizing on Desire: Reconfiguring ‘the Social’ and the Government of Poverty in the Philippines

Tracing the contours of ‘the social’ is of critical importance today, since there is a widely shared understanding that ‘the social’ has been undergoing a fundamental mutation under the encroaching influence of globalization and neoliberalism. This mutation means that a population and its risks are increasingly administered and managed through the nurturing of free subjects, productive citizens and active communities. By focusing on conditional cash transfers as a poverty‐alleviation programme in the Philippines, this study examines how the contemporary government of poverty attempts to realize social inclusion through the nurturing of desires, habits and dispositions that are conducive to an ‘investment in human capital’. The study argues that such regimes produce various forms of exclusion and counterclaims by the beneficiaries, and that these counterclaims, which reflect the popular notions of patronage and clientelism, have serious implications for envisioning the alternative configuration of ‘the social’.     

Voices from the Margins: Street Children's Subcultures in Indonesia

Indonesia has a proliferation of children living on the streets of its larger cities. To the state and dominant society, they are perceived as committing a social violation. In response to their marginalisation and subordination, street children in Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia, have developed a 'repertoire of strategies' in order to survive. These include the appropriation of urban niches within the city, in which they create collective solutions for the dilemmas they confront in their everyday lives. This paper discusses a street boy community that exists within these marginal spaces: the Tikyan subculture of Yogyakarta. It presents the Tikyan subculture as a technique for street children to resist the negative stereotypes which are given to them by mainstream society. As they get older and become increasingly alienated by society, the Tikyan actively reject their 'deviant' label, and decorate street life so that it becomes agreeable in their eyes. This is achieved by deviating from dominant styles of dress and conventional behaviour, and through the development of a specific symbolic identity. These symbolic challenges to the dominant culture are communicated and dispersed within the social group and conveyed to the world via the subculture's 'specialised semiotic': their style of dress; their acts of bodily subversion or dissent (in the form of tattoos, body piercing and sexual practices); the music they play and listen to; and their use of drugs and alcohol. I describe these practices as the Tikyan 's obligatory performances, and the expected ways of behaving in order to remain accepted by the group.     

Assessing Poverty and Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from West Bengal

Recent interest in poverty and poverty relief has included debates that have moved beyond narrow concerns of consumption and income generation. Sen's research on entitlements and capabilities revolutionized approaches to poverty in the 1980s, and his work has itself been open to critical appraisals that have stressed empowerment and vulnerability as issues of equal importance. Some of these theoretical debates are briefly reviewed here, after which the frameworks for analysis that they suggest are applied to the study of rural poverty in West Bengal. The two tasks that the paper then sets itself are to illustrate the empirical value of broader conceptualizations of poverty, and to highlight the methodological difficulties that they raise.     

Voices from the sea ice: the reception of climate impact narratives

This paper argues that indigenous peoples' responses to climate change are better understood in relation to emerging notions of citizenship than to climate change crisis narratives. The latter, like development narratives, are often used to license the intervention of experts in debates about resource management and conservation. Dominant climate change narratives about the Arctic emphasise the power of global climate systems to threaten northern communities by situating them as being intrinsically ‘at risk’. These narratives envisage Arctic citizenship within very narrow parameters which have largely masked the voices of northern citizens. Definitions of ecosystem resilience, while providing a framework for comparing disparate cultural and ecological contexts, are predicated on avoiding systemic collapse. It is argued that such definitions heighten the sense of risk implicit in climate change impacts. This may ultimately impede the development of different aspects of civic participation by northern citizens with climate change policy opportunities. Policy responses across a range of diverse geographical contexts require new narratives that put communities back into the calculus of risk and decision-making. One way to be more critical about the language of climate change narratives is to evaluate the extent to which they can account for, and mitigate, growing inequalities of power and wealth. Studies in the historical reception of science narratives are proposed as a better approach for making grounded comparisons of the discursive strategies with which climate change narratives are made to work. This also helps to bridge discussions of climate change across regions like the Arctic and Africa, which share much in common, but are too often studied in isolation.     

Political Obstacles to Decentralization: Evidence from Argentina and the Philippines

Decentralization has swept across the developing world in recent years. Although the speed and scope of the shift toward more decentralized practices is striking, decentralization is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Rather, it faces enormous political obstacles and can be subject to serious setbacks. This article accounts for attempts by national politicians to thwart decentralization in two countries that recently adopted some of the most significant decentralizing changes in their respective regions: Argentina and the Philippines. Based on fieldwork in each country, it suggests that even after the political decision to decentralize has been made, national politicians may face deep‐seated incentives to preserve centralized control over fiscal policy. In Argentina, President Carlos Menem partially reversed the previous decentralization of revenue because fiscally‐independent provincial governors were a challenge to his political interests and capabilities. In the Philippines, legislators attempted to reverse and then circumvent decentralization since it threatened their status as brokers claiming personal credit for negotiating fiscal transfers from the centre. The article identifies an intermediate outcome in both countries, according to which decentralizing policies are neither entirely reversed nor implemented as initially designed.     

Framing the Poor: Media Coverage and U.S. Poverty Policy, 1960–2008

Public policy toward the poor has shifted from an initial optimism during the War on Poverty to an ever‐increasing pessimism. Media discussion of poverty has shifted from arguments that focus on the structural causes of poverty or the social costs of having large numbers of poor to portrayals of the poor as cheaters and chiselers and of welfare programs doing more harm than good. As the frames have shifted, policies have followed. We demonstrate these trends with new indicators of the depth of poverty, the generosity of the government response, and media framing of the poor for the period of 1960–2008. We present a simple statistical model that explains poverty spending by the severity of the problem, gross domestic product, and media coverage. We then create a new measure of the relative generosity of U.S. government policy toward the poor and show that it is highly related to the content of newspaper stories. The portrayal of the poor as either deserving or lazy drives public policy.     

Voices from the Kibbutz: Four Mothers,New Profile,and Women in Black

If there is any social organization that has provided a powerful illustration of the permeable boundaries between social politics—defined by Stephen M. Buechler as “forms of collective action that challenge power relations without an explicit focus on the state”—and social movements, and the role of collective identity in transforming either, as defined for women by Betty Friedan—it would be the Israeli kibbutz movement. The research presented here on grassroots Israeli women activists, a significant proportion of whom had grown up or had lived in a kibbutz, suggests that the social politics of everyday life on a kibbutz facilitated women's participation in larger social movements for peace, but also placed constraints on their activism. Many of these women had left or were in the process of leaving the kibbutz between 1989 and 1999, when this research was conducted. Those who had already left, and anchor women who organized urban demonstrations, saw the kibbutz as a conservative anti-woman force. Nonetheless, evidence gathered from qualitative interviewing with them suggests that the kibbutzim supported women who were politically active on national issues. Several women-led social protest movements illustrate how the kibbutz geared its members to think about the interplay of the moral and social orders in the small spaces of everyday life.     

Writing the History of Archaeology in the Pacific: Voices and Perspectives

ABSTRACT

In histories of world archaeology to date the Pacific is all but missing. There has been some investigation into the history of archaeology in Australia and New Zealand, and other piecemeal work focusing on single countries or biographies of individuals, but much remains to be done. We offer a critical overview of general literature on the history of archaeology in the Pacific and stress the potential for a deeper knowledge of archaeology's histories in the region to transform current archaeological theory and practice. We then suggest important avenues for further investigation, including the historiography of Pacific archaeology, diverse national and linguistic traditions, international linkages between scholars and practitioners, pre-World War II excavations, theories about trans-Pacific contacts, and the often-hidden importance of women and Indigenous scholars and interlocutors in the field. Each of these themes is addressed by one or more of the papers in this special issue.