Inaugural Lecture Desperately seeking security

✍ Scribed by Geof Wood

• Book ID: 102350765
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 83 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.762

✦ Synopsis

Imagine the situation of a woman in a village in Kurigram, a district in Northern Bangladesh. Her best sari cannot cover her modesty, making her encounter with me an instant problem of shame. She does not know if she will cook that evening. That will depend on whether her husband has found work during the day. He left before dawn to join others like him in the search for casual work in villages several hours walk away. He may have been lucky. If so, he will bring rice back for the only meal of the day for his family. Among the many problems associated with their poverty is the central issue of uncertainty ± not knowing, not being able to predict the availability of food for this and other days during the lean part of the agricultural season.

This scenario can be applied to many parts of South Asia, as well as elsewhere in the world. The woman in Kurigram is an extreme example of a general condition of poverty, where uncertainty prevails. Such people have a desperate need for security, and they enter into all kinds of behaviour and strategies in pursuit of this security.

I have been working over the last 30 years in some of the poorest conditions in South Asia, with some side visits to SE Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. I should therefore acknowledge, at the outset, my gratitude to my family and the University for enabling me to do this ± often involving extended absences from other duties and responsibilities.

I should also acknowledge that much of what I have observed abroad applies with force at home too: that the poor bear the shame of dependency in their pursuit of security. It is perhaps no more than chance and perversity that I have focussed my attempts to understand these processes in societies other than my own. Somehow I have been caught up in a long process of de-colonization which has established in the UK a strong applied academic tradition of development studies or international development. At Bath, we are going through an exciting period of bringing together many lines of enquiry from economics to social policy to extend our analysis of poverty worldwide and propose potential solutions to eradicate it. I therefore also acknowledge the contributions to my thoughts of colleagues in the two departments of Economics and International Development, and Social and Policy Sciences, including many graduate students from the early 1980s to date.