Both authors have been active in the ‘international development’ sphere, now spanning about 75 years since the initial UN declared ‘development decades’ and since US President Truman’s 1949 ‘Four Point’ speech, the fourth point being that “we must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.” Both of us have witnessed the questionable effects inflicted on local communities on so many levels by the rather thoughtless ‘boldness’ with which that ‘program’ has been and continues to be rolled out by a plethora or global actors, supported by the impositions of generalised and overwhelmingly ‘Western’ academic knowledge, including social science and anthropological ‘know what – know how – and know why.’ French anthropologist Pierre Clastres already suggested 50 years ago that the limitations of anthropology were a consequence of its habit of following the road mapped by its own world, which would apply to most social science and academic knowledge as well. Acknowledging the legacies of colonisation, imperialism and the systemic reinforcement of Eurocentric ideas in globally dominant academic, research and ‘development’ circles, we take a critical look at the use of the notion of ‘poverty.’ We examine how the generalised ‘academic’ knowledge about its presence, absence or degree is usually deductively derived from existing Western understandings of what it means in its embodied material, social and personal aspects. ‘Poverty’ is too often still quantified as ‘earned dollars per day,’ overlooks local context, knowledge and relationalities, and intending to ‘reduce’ poverty, ignores systemic processes ‘producing’ it (Oyen, 2003). Meanings ‘lost in translation’ or deliberate epistemicide (De Souza Santos, various) of local understandings of the ‘good life’ need to be recognised and their revalidation should become a purpose of a knowledge restoration process.