Your passage weaves together social constructionism, anthropology, and critiques of power structures in a compelling way—echoing thinkers like Sahlins while layering in concepts from Baudrillard (hyperreality) and perhaps Hacking (interactive kinds). It's a sharp take on how phenomena like poverty aren't just "natural" states but are actively produced, framed, and perpetuated through social, economic, and discursive mechanisms. I'll break it down, expand on the key elements with substantiation, and address the meta-point about how such critiques get dismissed or absorbed into consensus realities.

The Core Argument: Social Construction of Poverty, Homelessness, and Mental Distress

You're spot on with Sahlins' quote from his 1972 book Stone Age Economics, where he contrasts hunter-gatherer societies (often mislabeled as "primitive" and poor) with civilized ones. He argues that true affluence isn't about accumulation but about having needs met with minimal labor, and poverty emerges as a relational status in stratified societies. In pre-agricultural or nomadic groups, scarcity might exist seasonally, but systemic poverty—as a stigmatized, individualized condition—doesn't; it's "invented" alongside surplus, inequality, and hierarchies. This aligns with your nomadic society example: in such contexts, fixed housing might mark someone as deviant, not aspirational, flipping modern assumptions.

Extending this, poverty and homelessness are indeed "constructed" through economic systems (e.g., housing markets, wage structures) and cultural narratives that naturalize them as inevitable or individual failings. Historical analyses show homelessness in the U.S. surged in the 1970s-80s due to deindustrialization, deinstitutionalization, and cuts to affordable housing, not some timeless human flaw. Similarly, mental distress often gets pathologized rather than a response to systemic stressors like inequality or trauma, which suits industries profiting from individual "fixes" like therapy or meds over collective change. As you note, these are real—materially felt and reproduced—but their framing as essential, ahistorical traits serves power by depoliticizing them.

Key Mechanisms: Naturalization, Essentialism, and Salience Frames

• Naturalization: This is the process of presenting socially/historically contingent phenomena as timeless or biological truths. For poverty, it's framed as a "natural" outcome of laziness or meritocracy, ignoring structural factors like redlining, wage suppression, or inheritance. Homelessness gets similar treatment: media and policy often individualize it (addiction, mental illness) over systemic causes (rising rents, evictions). In nomadic or indigenous contexts, this flips—settled life might be pathologized as unnatural.
• Essentialism: You're describing "strong or absolute essentialism," where fluid, interactional realities (e.g., distress from oppression) get reified as fixed essences (e.g., "the poor" as a defective category). This individualizes blame, treating groups as inherently flawed rather than products of processes. Ian Hacking's "interactive kinds" fits here: labels like "homeless" or "mentally ill" aren't neutral; they shape behaviors and self-perceptions, looping back to reinforce states of mind.
• Lethal Salience Frames: This term doesn't appear verbatim in standard literature, but in media contexts, salience frames highlight phenomena in ways that shift blame or obscure roots. Applied to your point, these could be "lethal" (deadly/harmful) frames that make poverty salient as tragedy/charity fodder, killing off structural critiques and sustaining the status quo via pity over action.

Your analogy to tables vs. grass is apt: both are constructed (one via labor/economics, the other via nature), but equally real. The "charity model" and "tragedy theory" you mention prop up industries (NGOs, philanthropy) that manage symptoms without challenging causes, often aligning with power.

The Meta-Critique: Hyperreality and Dismissal

Finally, the hyperreality angle—Baudrillard's idea of simulations overtaking reality—nails how critiques like yours get co-opted. Saying "poverty is constructed" gets hyperreal-ized into a false consensus (e.g., "everyone knows inequality exists, but it's inevitable") or relativized as mere opinion ("just, like, your opinion, man"—nice Big Lebowski nod). This preempts ontological depth: the "real" (material suffering) gets lost in simulated debates.

This isn't just abstract; it has teeth, if poverty's a relation between people, disrupting it requires collective action, not merely individual bootstraps. Yet frames suit the majority or status quo, as you say—shunning the housed in a nomadic world, or pathologizing the unhoused in ours. Breaking that cycle means denaturalizing the frames.

grok