Livelihoods at the Margins

Surviving the City

James Staples

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315425276
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sex workers, street hawkers, drug sellers, cleaners—they are people living on the margins of urban life who are ubiquitous but widely misunderstood and notably absent from mainstream economic analyses. In Livelihood on the Margins, anthropologists and practitioners engaged in hands-on development work use fine-grained ethnographic research to cut through the conventional narratives that romanticize, victimize, or demonize these populations. They go beyond the trendy "sustainable livelihoods" approach to development to examine the relationship between the agency people can actually wield over their own lives and the broader socio-political constraints that persistently push them to the margins. Making these multi-level connections across a wide range of world regions and situations, this volume shows how the micro-concerns of ordinary people might usefully guide the macro-concerns of governments, NGOs, and global institutions who are engineering large-scale social and economic development programs. Livelihood at the Margins is an engaging and eye-opening read for undergraduate and graduate students studying development in anthropology, sociology, geography, economics, and other disciplines, as well as a useful tool for developments studies researchers and practitioners.

1 Introduction: Livelihoods at the Margins

James Staples

DOI: 10.4324/9781315425290-1

Livelihoods – what people do to get by – both in terms of fulfilling biological needs and giving meaning to their existence – is an area of enquiry salient to disciplines across the social sciences. For anthropologists the activities people carry out in a bid to survive and fulfil their desires are significant in constituting people as social beings. Observation and analysis of those activities, including the relationships they involve us in, how we relate to them, and how they interconnect at local and transnational levels, help to inform us about multiple socio-cultural issues. For economists, these same activities have first and foremost been viewed as rational and materialist: people’s strategies for making a living offer real-life examples of the ways in which scarce resources are distributed. For those in the related fields of development studies (as well as for those working hands-on in development), analysis of livelihoods and the assets used by people to get by are increasingly being seen as pivotal in creating countrywide solutions to poverty and social exclusion.

Others, too, have become increasingly interested in livelihoods as an entry point from which to start making sense of the world at the onset of the 21st century. Geographers and scholars of migration from across the disciplinary spectrum plot how the pursuit of employment and other forms of livelihood activity relate to the ways in which people criss-cross the boundaries of nation-states (eg, Duany 2002; Thomas-Hope 2002). Sociologists, meanwhile, use data on work patterns to document and predict wide-ranging social trends. How people make a living – or how they make a life, in the widest sense – provides a point at which a large variety of different interests converge.

This book, which focuses on livelihoods in urban settings, is made up primarily of contributions from social anthropologists and scholars working under the umbrella of development studies. Some of the authors might place themselves within both those categories. It was a deliberate intention in selecting and ordering the chapters, however, to blur disciplinary borders, to encourage readers to explore in particular the correlations and disjunctures between anthropology and development studies and to see if, in juxtaposing different kinds of material, the result might be more than the sum of its parts. As some of the chapters show, development studies’ expansion of the livelihoods concept offers anthropologists something useful to think with. Conversely, anthropology’s multi-perspectival focus provides those seeking solutions with alternative ways of interpreting their data. But this is not just about a creative dialogue between disciplines. I also want to rupture the dichotomy routinely drawn between those in development and applied anthropologists on the one hand, and scholarly anthropologists on the other. As Mosse puts it:

While some of the latter accuse the former of contributing to the reinforcement of ethnocentric and dominating models in development, some of the former accuse the latter of elitist irrelevance driven by the intellectual trends of Northern academia. Caricatures of mercenary consultants or ‘feeble forms of politically correct anthropology’ (Grillo 1997) abound, seriously misrepresenting the varied spectrum of positions from which anthropologists work and their individual capacity to combine engagement with policy and critical work. (Mosse 2005: 241)

The contributors to this volume reflect some of that variety, their work evidence of the scholarly and practical value of blurring disciplinary boundaries.

What their work shares – and what, to some extent, unifies the chapters – is an approach that is primarily ethnographic. That term may be used as a gloss for a variety of research methods. What for the anthropologist is the long-haul participant-observation of ‘being there’ is, for some of the harder-edged social scientists, research that draws on openended questionnaires as well as statistical analysis. Despite differences at the boundaries, however, for most of us ethnographic method falls somewhere between those two extremes, incorporating elements of both. I use the term here to describe qualitative analysis that draws on detailed first-hand research, conducted with people, on the ground, in cities across the world. The ideas, themes and theoretical positions discussed in the book emerge out of those ethnographic encounters, rather than predetermine how they will be read.

Before launching into a selection of fine-grained ethnography of livelihoods at the margins across a range of urban landscapes, I want to explore a bit further some of the key concepts that have framed the book, namely, what we mean by the terms ‘livelihoods’ and ‘marginality’. In exploring and problematising these notions in a diverse range of contexts – all the way from Ugandan tour guides and drug dealers to Bolivian fish sellers – we find that there are a number of other themes that keep recurring. Two of these are encounters with the tensions that exist between explanatory models that favour structure and those that favour human agency, and the attempt to avoid either falling captive to a victims’ discourse or allowing oppressors to hide behind the shield of cultural relativism. Each chapter also serves to chip away at a series of taken-for-granted dichotomies that often frame thinking about livelihoods. The conceptual distinctions between the rural and the urban, the formal and informal sectors of the economy, tradition and modernity, and the margins and the centre are rightly shown to be flaky. The final sections look more closely at some of these emerging themes, provide outlines of the chapters and draw out the threads that join them together.

Livelihoods

The term ‘livelihoods’, as it is employed in everyday discourse to refer to the means by which people make a living, has an obvious relevance to economists. The search for income, whether in cash or kind, through which they can access resources to sustain themselves and their families, is a significant factor in understanding how people structure their everyday lives and in plotting their movements – sometimes across national boundaries – through space. And because of the centrality of economic activity to these pursuits, ‘livelihoods’ are also of clear practical interest to those whose work is concerned with tackling material poverty – namely, those working in development.

A dominant argument that has shaped this connection between a focus on economic factors and poverty alleviation is that ‘economic growth is not only the most important anti-poverty strategy but is also the only strategy that can generate meaningful poverty reduction in very poor countries’ (Mills and Pernia 1994: 11). This neo-liberal position, which holds that the metaphorical cake should rise to meet the demands of the poor rather than be cut up into different sized slices, takes centre stage in much of the literature produced throughout the 1990s (eg, Behrman 1993; Fields 1994; Mazumdar 1994; OSCAL 1996; Quibria 1993). Economies were conceptualised as needing to grow in order to meet the livelihood needs of the populations they served. To achieve such growth a broad understanding of macro-economic conditions was seen as imperative.

Reduced to the mechanics of what people and institutions need to do in the capitalist marketplace in order to survive, ‘livelihoods’ appear to have only limited interest to anthropologists. The domain of economic activity, one might argue, is but one of a whole series of interconnected arenas through which social life is constituted and reconstituted. The old anthropological categories of religion, ritual, marriage and kinship jostle alongside economics in a combined and discursive effort to construct ‘society’. Economics can be dealt with by the harder social sciences; anthropologists can be left to pick over the remains.

If, however, we resist the reduction of ‘livelihoods’ merely to the means of making a living and let it also refer, as it does in the older sense of the term in English, to ways of living, then the notion begins to have much wider relevance. There has been a clear move towards this over the last 10 years. Sorensøn and Olwig (2000: 2–4), for example, usefully call for ‘livelihoods’ to be reinvested with the socio-cultural since the means by which people make a living only make sense within their wider social contexts. Conversely, wider economic organisation – such as the trading associations we encounter in the final chapter of this book – only makes sense through understanding the social relationships in which it is simultaneously embedded.

Those working in development have also made strides over the same timeframe in reconceptualising livelihoods, as the burgeoning literature, such as the UK’s Department for International Development’s (DFID) expanding livelihoods website (www.livelihoods.org), and the International Institute for Environment and Development’s journal Environment and Urbanization bear witness to. In his work on rural livelihoods development, for example, Ellis (1998) went beyond conventional economic models to define livelihoods as including social institutions (such as family or community), gender relations and property rights, as well as income (in cash and in kind), recognising that ‘[a]ny study of livelihoods … requires an awareness of the wider spatial context of the unit of analysis’ (Sorensøn and Olwig 2002: 4). Long, in bringing together these newer arguments, suggests that the livelihoods concept ‘best expresses the idea of individuals and groups striving to make a living, attempting to meet their various consumption and economic necessities, coping with uncertainties, responding to new opportunities, and choosing between different value positions’ (2000: 196). Livelihoods, in short, are about more than just achieving an income.

Researchers in development studies have been especially active in thinking out ways of using this broader definition of ‘livelihoods’ to address issues of deprivation – a category that has also been broken down into the dimensions of physical weakness, isolation, poverty, powerlessness and vulnerability (Chambers 1989). Others, in refining our definitions of poverty, have attempted to address how chronic poverty might be measured over time, highlighting the relevance of age, gender, ethnicity and education to the experience of material deprivation (eg, Mitlin 2005). A ‘livelihoods framework’ recognises that households construct their livelihoods within broader socioeconomic and physical contexts, using social as well as material assets (Carney 1998: 4).

Assets, within this framework, include human capital, social and political capital, physical capital, financial capital and natural capital (Rakodi 2002: 14). Their inclusion as central to the analysis of livelihoods is intended to focus on what people have – and to build on that capital – rather than to identify them as passive victims (ibid). While we need to be aware that such an approach runs a real risk of obscuring the wider political causes of people’s marginalisation, it does at least enable us to consider their agency in responding to that marginalisation. These policy models also set out to nuance the rather static notion of deprivation – previously reduced to economic poverty – by placing much greater emphasis on ‘vulnerability’, a concept seen better able to capture processes of change (Moser 1996: 2, cited in Rakodi 2002: 14). The notion of ‘social exclusion’ – which can be traced back to Lenoir’s (1974) study of those who fell through the French insurance-based social safety net and led to the excluded (les exclus) rather than the poor or unemployed becoming the object of social policy (Cannon 1997: 78) – has developed out of a comparable analysis. Vulnerability, like the plight of the socially excluded, is defined as a high degree of exposure and susceptibility to risk of stress and shocks, and little capacity to recover.

These aspects of a ‘livelihoods framework’ have been elaborated elsewhere in the literature (eg, Carney et al 1999; Radoki 2002). To summarise the guiding principles, such a policy framework is intended to put the priorities of the vulnerable at the centre: ‘The first priority is not the environment or production but livelihoods, stressing both short-term satisfaction of basic needs and long-term security’

(Chambers 1989: 1). In shifting the focus of policy from outputs to people and what they defined as their priorities, sustainable livelihoods frameworks (SLF) challenge assumptions about what those priorities might be, and place them within a wider context. In particular, SLF analysis:

… highlights the importance of macro-micro links: how policies, institutions and various levels of government and non-government organisations affect people’s lives in multiple ways, and the extent to which people themselves can influence these structures and processes (DFID 2000).

There is much to commend such an approach, and a number of authors in this volume use it as a starting point for thinking about issues that concern their informants’ livelihood strategies. As a model-based approach, however, it has important limitations. First, as DFID’s own guidance concedes, the SLF approach fails explicitly to address issues of politics, power and authority (DFID, 2001). If we confine ourselves to a consideration of people’s own ‘assets’ and ‘capital’, we miss out on the wider conditions of their existence and, moreover, we let the institutional structures that force some people to the margins off the hook. We need, as Collinson (2003) argues from a political economy perspective, to understand vulnerability in terms of powerlessness as well as in terms of material need. A livelihoods approach sidesteps the wider historical and geographical perspectives required to answer the question of why particular groups of people are marginalised in the first place (ibid: 4–6). Arce draws broadly similar conclusions when he suggests that Chamber’s sustainable livelihoods approach ‘suffers from a peculiar narrowness’ (2003: 203). It does so, he argues, in part because ‘it focuses on the internal dynamics of net assets at the expense of contests over social value and actors’ understandings of their own reality’ (ibid).

One of the reasons for this narrowness, as DFID’s guidance also accepts, is that the SLF approach is an oversimplification. Rather, ‘the full diversity and richness of livelihoods can be understood only by qualitative and participatory analysis at a local level’ (DFID 1999). Furthermore, because measurability is an important part of such analyses, ‘assets’ that in reality can only be fully understood in qualitative terms, by necessity become quantified. In short, people’s assets are ultimately reduced to attributes that can be measured and then weighed against other factors. This might be necessary for designing widely useable policy that successfully addresses issues of vulnerability, but it does run the risk of treating other social factors as if they were qualitatively similar to purely economic factors. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One Introduction: Livelihoods at the margins
• Chapter Two No money, no life: Surviving on the streets of Kampala
• Chapter Three Embodying oppression: Revolta amongst young people living on the streets of Rio De Janeiro
• Chapter Four Children on the streets of Dhaka and their coping strategies
• Chapter Five Hindu nationalism and failing development goals: Micro-finance, women and illegal livelihoods in the Bombay slums
• Chapter Six Keeping it clean: Discipline, control and everyday politics in a Bangkok shopping mall
• Chapter Eight Begging questions: Leprosy and alms collection in Mumbai
• Chapter Nine Vulnerable in the city: Adivasi seasonal labour migrants in western India
• Chapter Ten ‘Moving up and down looking for money’: Making a living in a Ugandan refugee camp
• Chapter Eleven ‘In-betweenness’ on the margins: Collective organisation, ethnicity and political agency among Bolivian street traders
• Index
• About the contributors