The Definition of Poverty

The first two articles of the semester revolved around defining poverty. The first paper revolved around the introduction of poverty following World War II. The author suggests that following World War II, poverty was defined almost arbitrarily, and as such, many countries were labeled as poor arbitrarily without giving any real thought to the cultures of the people and their ways of live. This is especially true as many of these countries were still undergoing colonization prior to WWII, and as such were brand new countries at the time they were labeled poor. Also according to the paper, following WWII and into the Cold War, several Latin American countries insisted on receiving economic guidance and aid from the United States. The author implies, however, that the author simply used scare tactics regarding communism to increase militarization instead of giving any sort of economic guidance. Even after the US acknowledged this was a problem, they said they would be unable to provide any sort of wide-spread assistance similar to the Marshall Plan in Europe. This led to a disparity in the economies of Latin America compared to the Western World, and led to the idea that Latin America was simply a resource that the United States exploited for its own benefit. In hindsight, I think this was a huge mistake. As our closest geographic neighbors (other than Canada), it would’ve been extremely beneficial from an economic (moral is another story all together) standpoint to us if there were flourishing economies in Latin America. Having multiple trading partners that are very close geographically reduces the cost of trade tremendously. It’s certainly a shame we didn’t go this route. I found the second article to be much more interesting. I found the entire concept of development as a sort of evolution to be a really fascinating idea. I find it very closed minded to simply assume that all development paths follow a “savagery to civilization” type route. They then talked about the idea of social evolution and how about two hundred years ago, anthropologists looked at Blacks as an inferior race and needing assistance from the superior races (Whites). Luckily, this isn’t believed by most educated people in today’s world. The article then proceeds to talk a great deal about ethnocentrism, which has certainly been beaten to death for me as an anthropology major. Obviously, it is extremely important to be aware of other people’s cultures, and to not assume that our Western culture is in any way better than any non-Western culture. This connects to the first article in the sense that it is crucial to not assume that because a society looks and functions a bit different than us, that they need assistance from us and need to be labeled as “poor”.