The discourse of poverty has often been reduced to the talk of households? income and
expenditure as a reflection of the quality of the standard of living with little attention to the
social interaction context, within which the daily lived experiences take place (Miller, 1996;
Jones, 2006). Households do not exist in a vacuum, but in social contexts that could have
significant consequences for the quality of their social reproduction. The engagement with
poverty, focused on income and expenditure of family/households, is narrow and limiting
because it fails to properly connect the productive, individual and collective consumptions
that are imperative for the social reproduction of a society. While the family/household is
central in the organisation of human society, the nature of consumption within the household,
to facilitate social reproduction, can best be understood in relation to other modes of
consumption within the broader society (Dickinson & Russell, 1986).
A distinction can be made between poverty and well-being in relation to social reproduction
of a society. Sen (2008:276) was of the view that:
“the well-being achievement of a person can be seen as an evaluation of the „well-ness? of the
person?s state of being (rather than, say, the goodness of her contribution to a country, or her
success in achieving her overall goals). The exercise, then, is that of assessing the constituent
elements of the person?s being, seen from the perspective of her own personal welfare. The
different functioning of a person will make up these constituent elements”.