Abstract
Liberal modernists have claimed that democracy requires participation by interested parties in the politics of need interpretation. Poor people, an interested party, may lack the rational and critical language essential for the process of interpretation. This paper discusses a different perspective on the language of participation by the poor. Focusing on the everyday practices of the poor and using information collected from ethnographic research in Sultanbeyli, a low-income district in Istanbul, Turkey, it is shown how discursive power constrains the language and the manner of talking that the poor use to articulate their needs. The people in the district, “former villagers bound to the Anatolian tradition” using religious morality as a justification of their demands, successfully negotiate with administrators of social assistance programs, thus participating directly in the politics of need interpretation.
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