[🇵🇰] Culture of poverty

[Old School]

Source : https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12048-3

The ‘culture of poverty’ is a concept popularized by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis during the 1960s in his best-selling ethnographic realist books on family life among the urban poor. Drawing from Freudian culture and personality theory, which dominated US anthropology in the post-World War II period, Lewis listed over 50 traits that he claimed were shared by approximately 20% of the poor, including ‘orality,’ ’strong present-time orientation,’ and a ‘high tolerance for psychological pathology.’ These traits were said to be transmitted cross-generationally within families and prevented individuals from taking advantage of economic opportunities. Despite Lewis’s social democratic politics, his culture of poverty concept resonated with the moralistic condemnation of the unworthy poor deeply ingrained in US popular ideology. It spawned a polemical response from social scientists who criticized its blame-the-victim and psychological reductionist implications. Lewis himself was not concerned with theory, and did not particularly believe that his ethnographic work documented the culture of poverty. The vituperative debates during the 1970s through to the 1990s over whether or not a culture of poverty really exists were not fruitful theoretically. They tend to degenerate into political name calling or into an empirical denial of the lived experience of social suffering among the persistently poor. The uses and misuses of the culture of poverty illustrate how research on social inequality reflects societal biases. They also demonstrate the inadequacy of the culture concept when it is used to explain hierarchy in an essentializing, atheoretical vacuum that ignores history and structural power dynamics.