Culture of poverty

The culture of poverty is a social theory that expands on the cycle of poverty. Proponents of this theory argue that the poor are not simply lacking resources, but also have a unique value system. According to Oscar Lewis, "The subculture [of the poor] develops mechanisms that tend to perpetuate it, especially because of what happens to the world view, aspirations, and character of the children who grow up in it.” (Moynihan 1969, p. 199).

The term "subculture of poverty" (later shortened to "culture of poverty") made its first prominent appearance in the ethnography Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (1959) by anthropologist Oscar Lewis. Lewis struggled to render "the poor" as legitimate subjects whose lives were transformed by poverty. He argued that although the burdens of poverty were systemic and therefore imposed upon these members of society, they led to the formation of an autonomous subculture as children were socialized into behaviors and attitudes that perpetuated their inability to escape the underclass.

Lewis gave some seventy characteristics (1996 [1966], 1998) that indicated the presence of the culture of poverty, which he argued was not shared among all of the lower classes.

The people in the culture of poverty have a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependency, of not belonging. They are like aliens in their own country, convinced that the existing institutions do not serve their interests and needs. Along with this feeling of powerlessness is a widespread feeling of inferiority, of personal unworthiness. This is true of the slum dwellers of Mexico City, who do not constitute a distinct ethnic or racial group and do not suffer from racial discrimination. In the United States the culture of poverty that exists in the Negroes has the additional disadvantage of racial discrimination. People with a culture of poverty have very little sense of history. They are a marginal people who know only their own troubles, their own local conditions, their own neighborhood, their own way of life. Usually, they have neither the knowledge, the vision nor the ideology to see the similarities between their problems and those of others like themselves elsewhere in the world. In other words, they are not class conscious, although they are very sensitive indeed to status distinctions. When the poor become class conscious or members of trade union organizations, or when they adopt an internationalist outlook on the world they are, in my view, no longer part of the culture of poverty although they may still be desperately poor. (Lewis 1998)

Although Lewis was concerned with poverty in the developing world, the culture of poverty concept proved attractive to U.S. public policy makers and politicians. It strongly informed documents such as the Moynihan Report (1965) and the War on Poverty more generally.

The culture of poverty also emerges as a key concept in Michael Harrington's discussion of American poverty in The Other America (1962). For Harrington, the culture of poverty is a structural concept defined by social institutions of exclusion which create and perpetuate the cycle of poverty in America.

Since the 1960s critics of culture of poverty explanations for the persistence of the underclasses have attempted to show that real world data do not fit Lewis' model (Goode and Eames, 1996). In sociology and anthropology, the concept created a backlash, pushing scholars to abandon cultural justifications and negative descriptions of poverty, fearing such analysis may be read as "blaming-the-victim"(Bourgois, 2001). Since the late '90s, the culture of poverty has witnessed a resurgence in the social sciences, although most scholars now reject the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty and attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation (Small M.L., Harding D.J., Lamont M., 2010). Despite decades of this criticism by prominent sociologists, anthropologists and other academics who argue that descriptions of the poor as being culturally unique have little explanatory power, the culture of poverty concept persists in popular culture.

See also

• Cycle of poverty
• When Work Disappears

References

• Goode, Judith and Edwin Eames (1996). "An Anthropological Critique of the Culture of Poverty". In G. Gmelch and W. Zenner. Urban Life. Waveland Press. 
• Harrington, Michael (1962). The Other America: Poverty in the United States. Simon & Schuster. 
• Lewis, Oscar (1996 (1966)). "The Culture of Poverty". In G. Gmelch and W. Zenner, eds. Urban Life. Waveland Press. 
• Lewis, Oscar (1969). "Culture of Poverty". In Moynihan, Daniel P.. On Understanding Poverty: Perspectives from the Social Sciences. New York: Basic Books. pp. 187–220. 
• Lewis, Oscar (January 1998). "The culture of poverty". Society 35 (2): 7. doi:10.1007/BF02838122. 
• Mayer, Susan E. (1997). What money can’t buy : family income and children’s life chances. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674587332. http://lccn.loc.gov/96034429. Retrieved 2009-11-09. 
• Duvoux, Nicolas, "The culture of poverty reconsidered", La vie des idées : http://www.laviedesidees.fr/The-Culture-of-Poverty.html
• Patricia Cohen (2010-10-17). "‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html. Retrieved 2010-10-20. 
• Bourgois, Phillipe (2001). "Culture of Poverty". International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Waveland Press. 
• Small M.L., Harding D.J., Lamont M. (2010). "Reconsidering culture and poverty". Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science month= 629 (1): 6–27. doi:10.1177/0002716210362077. http://ann.sagepub.com/content/629/1/6.full.pdf+html.