The introduction begins with the author’s account of his family’s actual life in poverty. In contrast to the genre of “poornography,” the author’s life conforms more to the vision of the endo-writer, for whom ordinary concerns with living displace the somewhat prurient attention to squalor characteristic of the exo-writer. The popularity of poornography is explained in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century spectatorial practices like slumming. Related to the rise of realism, these activities gave middle-class readers the sensation of viewing a world more “real” than their own. But endo-writers present the reader with a very different view of “the real,” including the pleasures of their lives, contextualizing the grittiness that exo-writers seem to prefer. Veena Das suggests that rather than superficially looking at the lives of the poor, one should “dwell with” those lives, and Clifford Geertz proposes that “local knowledge” has a value over the removed observer’s vision.