Verônica Morais Ximenes - Psychosocial Implications of Poverty: Diversities and Resistances

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This book is the result of a series of trajectories by authors committed to fighting poverty, working within the field of Social and Community Psychology. These trajectories may be characterized by the context in which they were carried out. Brazil and some Latin American countries have specific characteristics, produced by a historical and colonial social inequality that is part of the Latin American context. This sociohistorical perspective is essential to understand how poverty is understood. First, the Americas are products of colonization. This means that the continent underwent a process of invasion, slavery, and forced migration of African population; genocide of the Latin peoples of America; and the creation of a colonial difference that persists even today in Western society. This difference marks the bodies of the poorest as less valuable, but it is also used to depreciate and delegitimize the knowledge produced in Latin America.

This book is an affirmation that the production of Latin American knowledge is valid, especially with respect to the phenomenon of poverty. Our history of suffering, violence, and stigmatization has taught us that we must constantly resist in order to survive and live a life with dignity. From the resistance strategies of the colonial period with the quilombos and the indigenous struggles, to the contemporary social movements, there is a context for the development of the Social Sciences and Humanities based on a critical perspective. The Liberation Paradigm was one of the main comprehensive and diffuse movements that guided the production of knowledge aimed at popular majorities, since most of the population in Latin America is poor.

Within this Liberation Paradigm, we cannot analyze poverty without having as focus the sociohistorical dimension of its production. Poverty, in various widespread conceptions, is viewed solely as a state of income deprivation. This condition is measured with a monetary poverty line, as is usually done by the World Bank. Thus, poverty is reduced to paucity of money. Another criterion that has been employed is the use of a series of deprivation indicators, as done by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) with the Multidimensional Poverty Index. Indeed, understanding poverty in a multidimensional framework is necessary. However, despite the progress of this indicator, which expands the understanding of poverty beyond a monetary perspective, there is still no debate on the sociohistorical causes of poverty. In this sense, people experiencing poverty may be held responsible for their situation, being individualized and blamed. For this reason, it is necessary to expand the understanding of poverty to the social sphere, based on its broader cultural development. It is now clear that poverty can be a tool for maintaining social inequality.

Moreover, one of the characteristics of the Liberation Paradigm is the inseparability of theory and practice. Hence, we understand poverty in a critical and multidimensional way, but we also point out strategies to face it. However, this confrontation should be guided by a psychosocial perspective that focuses on the potentialities of groups in poverty. Thus, we have another counterpoint to the studies on poverty that focus on its negative aspects. It is necessary to understand the negative aspects, but also to identify the existing potentialities and the processes of resistance. Although Latin America is historically inserted within a context of social inequality and chronic poverty, the poorest population generally employs various survival strategies to deal with it. People experiencing poverty, from a psychosocial perspective, are individuals with potential and capacity for agency.

In this sense, this book adopts the psychosocial perspective to understand the phenomenon of poverty. Generally, Social Psychology can be divided into two major subfields: psychological and sociological. The psychosocial dimension brings the two strategies into contact, understanding them in a dialectical way. The psychological dimension is constituted by the social dimension, with the subject being viewed as a tool to change the context and society. This context is perceived mainly at the community level. In Community Psychology, which is also embedded in the Liberation Paradigm, the community is conceived as individuals locus of emancipation, as well as the space where the macrosocial dynamics of oppression appear. This psychosocial perspective is present in the first part of the book. We perceive a process of intense stigmatization of poverty and criminalization of poor people, which maintains realities of social inequality. In this sense, the psychosocial implications of poverty are situated in a matrix of domination, in which the related psychosocial categories are fatalism, shame, humiliation, stigma, violence, drug abuse, and psychological suffering. The second part of this book contains chapters that are situated in a matrix of confrontations and resistances. In this section, we highlight ways to deal with poverty from the psychosocial perspective, with a focus on agencies, community dynamics, and the collective.