Dignity through Discourse : Poverty and the Culture of Deliberation in Indian Village Democracies

Employing a view of culture as a
communicative phenomenon involving discursive engagement,
which is deeply influenced by social and economic
inequalities, the authors argue that the struggle to break
free of poverty is as much a cultural process as it is
political and economic. In this paper, they analyze
important examples of discursive spaces - public meetings in
Indian village democracies (gram sabhas), where villagers
make important decisions about budgetary allocations for
village development and the selection of beneficiaries for
anti-poverty programs. They examine 290 transcripts of gram
sabhas from South India to demonstrate how they create a
culture of civic/political engagement among poor people, and
how definitions of poverty and beneficiary-selection
criteria are understood and interrogated within them.
Through this examination, they highlight the process by
which gram sabhas facilitate the acquisition of crucial
cultural capabilities such as discursive skills and civic
agency by poor and disadvantaged groups. They illustrate how
the poor and socially marginalized deploy these discursive
skills in a resource-scarce and socially stratified
environment in making material and non-material demands in
their search for dignity. The intersection of poverty,
culture, and deliberative democracy is a topic of broad
relevance because it sheds light on cultural processes that
can be influenced by public action in a manner that helps
improve the voice and agency of the poor.