Contextual Poverty

Throughout the ages, poverty has occurred in different climes in various ways, based on its type, length, intensity, gender dimension, group and race experience, monetary classification, and macro and micro manifestations, leading to different approaches to its understanding and different attempts at its alleviation. Although its primary meaning—the lack of the basic necessities of life—remains the same, the developmental aspirations [Page 292]of mankind and their eventual manifestations have altered this basic definition and generated new meanings and new responses to its intensity and spread. Thus, there have been several references to the poor in the literature as slaves, peasants, serfs, natives, the rural majority, the masses, the proletariat, the grassroots, the powerless, and, in recent times, subalterns. In today’s reality, the way a widow experiences ...