Introduction

In his now-famous account of the making and unmaking of the Third World, Arturo Escobar argues not only that an era of developmentalism was inaugurated by President Truman in his Point Four speech of 29 January 1949, but also that the aid programmes which followed were justified by ‘the discovery of mass poverty’ in the less economically accomplished countries (Escobar 1995: 21). In making these claims Escobar directs us to the production of poverty as part of a wider (geo)political discourse, and this is a central theme of this chapter. The production of poverty as a failing, or as an incomplete set of capabilities, is linked to the production of persons who can be labelled as poor, and who can either be reproached for being the bearers of certain pathologies – the illiterate man who has to be educated, the overly fecund woman whose body has to be disciplined – and/or acclaimed as people who deserve the help of others. Whether or not members of rural society are unaware of their poverty before they are labelled as such by outsiders, as Lakshman Yapa maintains was the case for him, growing up in Sri Lanka, is something we consider later. But it is clearly the case that the production of poverty by various government and other agencies creates many of the spaces within which ‘poorer people’ are bound to see ‘the state’.