Unruly Domestication: Poverty, Family, and Statecraft in Urban Peru, Kristin Skrabut, 2024, University of Texas Press
At a time of swirling debate about the merits or otherwise of Nobel prizes, there are of course great thinkers who truly deserve this recognition for their piercing insight—and none more so than the Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen.
It was when Sen went beyond the mathematics of economics to consider the field with an innovative social and ethical lens that he produced some of his most important contributions to the academy.
For inserting—or perhaps restoring—a more human dimension to economics, and in particular the study of poverty, Sen was awarded the Nobel prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1998.
Poverty argued Sen, should not be defined and measured in numbers as a matter of averages, but has many dimensions that can confound statistical analysis: humans are simply too diverse and hence the favoured “poverty lines” of the international development community too crude to apply in every circumstance.
Sen argued that being poor does not mean living below an imaginary poverty line, such as income, but lacking an income level that allows an individual not only to cover certain basic necessities, taking into account a given environment, but also to achieve a form of social emancipation in that context.
What is important is that insufficient income levels cannot simply be reducible to the systematic disparities in the freedoms that men and women enjoy in different societies. Indeed, global poverty statistics are compiled in ways that allow for comparison by institutional statisticians representing the world’s most powerful interests, but not necessarily for an adequate understanding of the problem at hand.
Instead of measuring poverty by income or other such metrics, we need to calculate how much an individual can achieve with that income given their social context and individual faculties.
Author Kristin Skrabut takes this sensitivity and applies it to Peru, having spent almost a decade (2007–2017) observing the state’s ongoing lucha contra la pobreza (war on poverty) conducted in “extreme poverty zones”.
At one level this had been highly successful, with the result that, until the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Peru had experienced one of the largest and most sustained poverty declines in Latin America.
Official poverty rates had plummeted from approximately 58 per cent of the population in 2004 to just over 20 per cent in 2019, according to the World Bank.
Yet behind the visible aspects of poverty and programmes to reduce it—for example, low-cost lunch programmes and breakfast clubs for children—its attribution continued to reflect an invisible array of private and political inequalities, state-society relations, and profound questions about who in fact comprise the “deserving poor”, that are simply missed by statistics, what the author calls the “unruly domestication” of poverty.
This is a bold and interesting effort to rethink poverty in Peru through a largely ethnographic approach to poverty “stories”, especially in the focus of this study, Pachacútec, a settlement at the edge of metropolitan Lima-Callao.
The author makes valuable observations about the targets of state assistance; the fluid, complex and inadequate notion of who deserves help and who does not; and how aggregation based on such notions can have unintended consequences.
She notes, for example, how an array of government programmes to fight poverty through the formalisation of the hitherto invisible poor—through, say, the Right to Identity Campaign, women’s workshops, and the provision of housing and land titles—can have the opposite effect.
Skrabut writes: “… these programmes are often enacted in marginal areas already inundated with paper and statelike practices that have marked socioracial meaning. As a result, formalisation programmes can end up perpetuating and exacerbating the very inequalities, illegibilities, and unruliness they seek to redress.
“In the context of Peru’s racialised postcolonial state, formalisation programmes become civilising projects, and the distinction between formality and informality becomes a guise through which long-standing patterns of racial discrimination persist.”
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Categories: Peru, South America