Iara Cury
Anthropology of Development
28/04/2011
Culture of Poverty
Is poverty destiny? With widespread poverty in developing countries, entrenched poverty
in affluent countries and rising levels of inequality, the question is on the table. Possibly the
worst nightmare of the development establishment, the suggestion that the poor might
involuntarily forego the opportunity for education, employment, and social and political
participation based on certain internalized “adaptive mechanisms” constitutes the concept
of the “culture of poverty”. Originally articulated by Oscar Lewis, the idea has stirred much
controversy, embedded as it is in the political dimension through a juxtaposition of
anthropological, social, and policy problems. Despite its prolonged unpopularity as a topic
of debate over the past few decades it has become clear that investigating the validity and
implications of the culture of poverty remain imperative if the connection between culture,
development and self-determination is to be better understood. On top of that, examining
the concept of the culture of poverty places pressure on the continuing development of
current social theories of agency, challenging us to better conceptualize the constraint of
social and economic power structures on individuals.
Through the publication of his ethnographic studies of poor families in Mexico and Puerto
Rico, Oscar Lewis questioned the dichotomous and unrealistic view of the poor as “blessed,
virtuous, upright, serene, independent, honest, kind, and happy” or “evil, mean, violent,
sordid and criminal” (1994, p.270). Carried out in the 1950s and 60s, his fieldwork focused
on the details of the life in poverty of “the great mass of peasants and urban dwellers of the
underdeveloped countries who constitute almost eighty per cent of the world’s population”
(1959, p.1). In particular, Lewis attempted to understand more about what poor people
think and feel, how they react to external constraints and how they make decisions. What
Lewis proposed was that poverty engendered a culture—that is, patterns of behavior—that
transcended regional, rural-urban, and national differences. For him, these patterns were
evidence of “similarities in family structure, interpersonal relations, time orientation, value
systems, and spending patterns” (1994, p.270) of the poor. Ultimately, however, Lewis’
controversial contribution was to assert that this culture tended to perpetuate itself across
generations. He stated that by the time poor children were “age six or seven they have
usually absorbed the basic values and attitudes of their subculture and are not
psychologically geared to take full advantage of changing conditions or increased
opportunities” (p.271).
Lewis’s work achieved prominence in a “heated political environment” (Small et. al, 2010,
p.7), becoming entangled with the controversial effects of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965
report entitled “The Negro family: The case for national action”. These and other studies
quickly attracted the indictment that they essentially exempted society from resolving
social problems in that they blamed the poor for their poverty through their portrayed the
culture of poverty as self-generating and self-perpetuating. Amid political battles over what
entailed appropriate social policy, in 1968 Charles Valentine published the book, Culture
and Poverty: Critique and Counter-Proposals, “remembered by many as the watershed
“refutation of Lewis’s work” (Harvey and Reed, 1996, p.468). Valentine accused Lewis of
promoting an ideology, through the concept of a culture of poverty, which amounted to “a
lightly veiled Social Darwinism” (1969, p.181). For him, Lewis disproportionately focused
on the disorganization and pathology of poor people rather than on severe structural
problems, “assigning first priority to doing away with the ‘culture of poverty,’ not poverty
itself” (idem).
Following Valentine’s attack on the culture of poverty, many studies have been presented
both in favor of and against the culture of poverty, particularly with respect to whether
poor people have fundamentally different values from society. Valentine himself takes
Elliot Liebow’s 1967 book, Tally’s Corner, as the prime example of how the poor do ascribe
to middle class values. According to Valentine, Liebow discovers that the men he studied
“experience their lives as devoid of success or satisfaction...precisely because they share
the standards and criteria of the wider culture” (1968, p.97). Leo Howe’s 1998 article,
“Where is the culture in the ‘culture of poverty’”, similarly makes the point that the poor do
not ascribe to a different set of values by looking at the social and moral discourses
surrounding the unemployed status of a group of Belfast men. He states, “the values and
practices supposedly characteristic of the poor…are rather attributions imposed on them
by other sections of society”; at the same time, “the category of the ‘deserving’, ‘reputable’
poor enables individuals to use these imposed cultural distinctions in their own personal
interests” (1998, p.87).
Along the same lines, Small et al., in a 2010 overview of the resurgence of the culture of
poverty debate, cite Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’ extensive study of low-income
mothers. According to them, low-income women were apt to be single-mothers because
“they held marriage in such high esteem that they were reluctant to marry until they
believed that both they and their partners were emotionally and financially prepared”
(2005, cited in Small et. al, 2010, p.12). In the same article, however, Small et al. make
reference to Prudence Carter’s work on the experience of poor and working-class children
at school. Her conclusion is that there exists a serious “mismatch between the cultural
signals favored by middle-class institutions and those necessary for inclusion, identity and
social support in poor urban communities (2005, cited in Small et al., 2010, p.19). Instead
of arguing for the correspondence between lower-class and middle class values, Carter
brings to fore the possibility that poor people might have to navigate through binary sets of
values. Ulf Hannerz supports this position by proposing the usefulness of the “idea of a
bicultural situation among the poor”, that is, the recognition that the poor are acutely
aware of mainstream values, constantly comparing their own lives to that of their
contemporaries in other segments of society (1969, p.186).
As can be gathered from the diversity of cases and factors involved in discussions about the
culture of poverty, thoroughly dealing with this controversial concept seems to be not
relevant but rather essential to refining our understanding of both theoretical and
pragmatic issues regarding poverty, social and cultural change, and issues of structure
versus agency. Yet much has changed in the conceptualization of culture, poverty, and in
anthropological theory in general since Oscar Lewis’s time. The assumption of social
homogeneity, a static perspective of culture, and a lack of cultural reflexivity are some of
the matters that anthropologists have attempted to amend, as will be considered below.
One of the frequent points of attack from his critics was that Lewis essentialized the poor
as well as the middle class, promoting a sense of homogeneity in values and attitudes
where heterogeneity was the norm. Eleanor Leacock denounces the subtle degeneration of
differences or variation to polar opposites (1971, p.25), questioning the validity of the
clean and clear, yet thoroughly misleading, dichotomies constructed within the discipline
to frame complex social problems. She manifests this by highlighting the many “variations
according to the specific histories and circumstances of different regions, nationalities,
religious groups, occupational groups, and residence styles (rural-urban)” present within
and across cultures (1971, p.26), which do not fit a continuum or polarized model. In any
case, the acceptance of the heterogeneity of social groups does not invalidate the
investigation of patterns of responses to the structural constraints of poverty. If anything,
the “significant variation in behavior, decision making, and outcomes among people living
in seemingly identical structural conditions” (Small et al., 2010, p.9) provides rich ground
for anthropological exploration.
Small et al. also emphasize the extent to which anthropologists currently view culture as
much more fluid, dynamic, interconnected, and heterogeneous than previous
conceptualizations led us to imagine. Here, issues of the transmission and malleability of
culture play their part. While Lewis argued that by the age of seven poor children had
already irrevocably absorbed the culture of poverty of their parents, Leacock challenges
this assessment on the grounds of new findings in developmental psychology (1971, p.13).
For her, the “process of adaptation continues actively throughout an individual’s lifetime;
individuals are not simply set in motion as children to respond automatically for the rest of
their lives” (p.16). While Leacock’s statement might appear infinitely more attractive to
believers in free will and individual agency, advances in cognitive science and
developmental psychology do not yet (and might never) provide enough evidence to settle
the score either way.
Another blazing topic of criticism of the culture of poverty was that the “discourse of
poverty, and the policies resulting from that discourse, are themselves cultural products,
subject to the whims, predilections, prejudices, beliefs, attitudes, and orientations of policy
elites” (Small et al, 2010, p.12). Granted that much of the global development establishment
indeed suffers from ethnocentric, moralist, modernist and elite biases—a reality
thoroughly chronicled by postmodern scholars and the post-development movement—it
does not necessarily follow that we must subscribe to an academic nihilism. Even without
an absolute and universal standard of objectivity, in fact, only after such a framework has
been discarded, can we hope to begin to generate revised and revisable theories of the
workings of power within the complex, specific contexts of world affairs.
In fact, the question of perspective brings to fore the “problems” of rationality, one of which
being the ever-present accusation or presumption that the poor act irrationally. Whereas to
middle class spectators poor people’s attitudes and behavior might seem senseless, many
of these practices, when seen within the context of people’s limited choices, make sense for
survival (Goode, 1996, p.280). Indeed, these practices can be termed positive adaptive
mechanisms inasmuch as they ease the pain of living poor, making the unbearable bearable
step by step (Harvey and Reed, 1996, p.482). Yet allegations of the irrationality of “others”
are not limited to lower class segments of Western society; anthropologists have
extensively dealt with the ethnocentrism of standards of rationality, putting to rest the
notion that non-Westerners think in different and deficient ways. Adding the social and
cultural dimension to economic theories of the rational agent, scholars have revealed that
human decision-making processes are always complex and multifaceted.
One of the key problems of the last decades in anthropology has been how to theorize the
imaginary triangle between society, culture and individual, and the debate on the culture of
poverty seems to fit right in the domain of practice theories. Determining what is culture
and social structure’s influence on the individual and how does the individual in turn
influence these is one important side of the equation; understanding how power is enacted
through social relations, practices and ideologies is the other side (Howe, 1998, p.87).
Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus and Foucault’s treatment of discourses and the
production of knowledge seem highly relevant for further research on the connection
between poverty and culture.
Overall, the classic questions of whether there is such a thing as the culture of poverty, how
widespread is it and what are its implications remain valid points of inquiry alongside
attempts at resolving the structural dimensions of poverty. Furthermore, anthropologists
and other social scientists continue to focus on understanding the ways in which children
are affected by poverty, particularly how permanent and incapacitating are these effects—
physically, cognitively and emotionally. In fact, even with respect to adults certain difficult
questions must be asked: is the culture of poverty a transitory, positive collective adaptive
mechanism or does it represent a self-destructive cultural or psychological configuration?
In light of the much wider context of development work over the past several decades, it
has become clear that however one phrases it, culture cannot be divorced from social
inequality and must be taken into account in the design and implementation of poverty
relief and development programs. Interestingly enough, discussions about colonialism,
globalization and the rise of a hegemonic Western economic and cultural system also have
an underlying connection with Lewis’s formulation of the culture of poverty. According to
him, “the culture of poverty develops when a stratified social and economic system is
breaking down or is being replaced by another” (1996, p.271). Margaret Mead, in her
foreword to Lewis’s Five Families, likewise speaks of a “malaise” originating from the
replacement of “old, physically satisfactory, primitive existence” by an “unsatisfactory,
impoverished existence” as people are drawn into the globalized world (1959, p.x). Can it
be that by voluntarily or involuntarily contributing to the disintegration of local cultures
Western powers might be escorting much of the population of the world into some sort of
culture of poverty? Was Lewis right in equating a “poverty of culture” with the “culture of
poverty”?
Yet despite the profound significance and uncertainty of these questions, one thing is
certain: we cannot but benefit from the belief that given their rightful share of
opportunities poor people across the globe will surprise us with their response. Our part in
the game is to cease to be oppressive through ethnocentric and elitist judgment and
expectations.
Bibliography
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