1. But there are exceptions. See for example Farmer (2003 Farmer, P. 2003. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, Berkeley: University of California Press.  [Google Scholar]), Passaro (1996 Passaro, J. 1996. The Unequal Homeless: Men on the Streets, Women in Their Place, New York: Routledge.  [Google Scholar]) and Scheper Hughes (1992 Scheper Hughes, N. 1992. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, Berkeley: University of California Press.  [Google Scholar]).

2. See the Bank's website for the full mission statement and accounts of how the Bank works with the poorest people in the poorest countries and its aspirations to be the primary source of knowledge about development (http://www.worldbank.org).

3. Once poverty reduction becomes a goal for public policy then poverty must be turned into something tangible that can be measured and about which correlates can be identified.

4. For a comparative example in the west see O'Connor (2001 O'Connor, A. 2001. Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History, Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), who shows that while early poverty studies in the UK and US were influenced by an activist agenda poverty knowledge since the 1960s, certainly in the US, has been largely policy determined.

5. James Ferguson (1990 Ferguson, J. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  [Google Scholar]: 27) remarks of such statements apparently based on empirical research which find their way into development documentation and which are contradicted by more academic studies, which are not cited, that ‘It must be recognized that which is being done here is not some sort of strangely bad scholarship, but something else entirely.’

6. Hence Chambers' (2001 Chambers, R. 2001. The world development report: concepts, content and a chapter 12. Journal of International Development, 13: 299–306. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 306) rhetorical suggestion that the World Development Report 2010 be titled ‘Challenging wealth and power’.

7. See for example Baumann's (1998 Bauman, Z. 1998. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, Buckingham: Open University Press.  [Google Scholar]) description of the new ‘poor’ in consumer societies whose poverty is manifested through inability to share in the purchase of the consumer items through which identity is articulated.

8. For a discussion of the relation between subjection and agency in academic representations of the ‘Other’ see Prakash (1994 Prakash, G. 1994. Subaltern studies as postcolonial criticism. American Historical Review, 99(5): 1475–1490. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]).

9. The book is concerned with averagely educated adults in urban communities in the US, who have not had anything other than elementary education in mathematics. Lave shows how most think of themselves as unable to ‘do math’, but in practice are adept at managing essential calculations in daily life, a kind of popular mathematics.

10. Riles' (2001 Riles, A. 2001. The Network Inside Out, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.  [Google Scholar]) ethnography of transnational activist networks leading in up to a UN summit is another pertinent example.

11. Devereux's (2003 Devereux, S. Conceptualizing destitution. IDS Working Paper 217. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies.  [Google Scholar]) distinction between poverty and destitution is pertinent here, in highlighting the social nature of destitution as a situation where people are rendered dependent on others through social and economic constraints which render their livelihoods unsustainable.

12. Similarly, the economic stagnation of much of southern Tanzania, and its ensuing ‘poverty’, owes much to game protection policies of successive colonial and postcolonial governments which have created and maintained one of the largest game reserves in Africa right in the middle of what was until the early twentieth century the economic heartland of the region (Seppala, 1998 Seppala, P., ed. 1998. The Making of a Periphery. Economic Development and Cultural Encounters in Southern Tanzania, Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota.  [Google Scholar]; Green, 2003 Green, M. 2003. Globalizing development in Tanzania. Policy franchising through participatory project management. Critique of Anthropology, 23(2): 123–143. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]).

13. According to the 2001 World Development Report, ‘the life expectancy of African Americans is about the same as that in China and in some states in India’ (World Bank, 2001 World Bank. 2001. World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty, Oxford: Oxford University Press.  [Google Scholar]: 46).

14. ‘Like most other people in the US, drug dealers and street criminals are scrambling to obtain their piece of the pie as fast as possible. In fact, in their pursuit of success they are even following the minute details of the classical Yankee model for upward mobility. They are aggressively pursuing careers as private entrepreneurs; they take risks; work hard and pray for good luck’ (Bourgois, 2003 Bourgois, P. 2003. In Search of Respect. Selling Crack in El Barrio, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  [Google Scholar]: 326).

15. Prior to the introduction of the workhouse, parish relief in England was quite generous towards the destitute and was unconditional (Fogel, 2004 Fogel, R. W. 2004. The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100. Europe, America and the Third World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  [Google Scholar]).

16. For a contemporary account of the conditions inside workhouses at the start of the twentieth century, and for insights into Victorian attitudes towards poverty, see the novelist Jack London's The People of the Abyss, originally published in 1903 (1998).

17. Aid, Mary Anderson (1999 Anderson, M. B. 1999. Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace – or War, Boulder: Lynne Rienner.  [Google Scholar]: 55) points out, and the way in which it is delivered conveys implicit and explicit ethical messages.

18. In the form of contracts, large scale, resource transfers, opportunities for employment, travel and study tours, capacity and institution building, seating allowances and so on.

19. For an overview of poverty in Tanzania in the context of PRS see Ellis and Ntengua (2003 Ellis, F. and Ntengua, M. 2003. Livelihoods and rural poverty reduction in Tanzania. World Development, 31(8): 1367–1384. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]).