The culture of poverty is a concept in social theory that asserts that the values of people experiencing poverty play a significant role in perpetuating their impoverished condition, sustaining a cycle of poverty across generations. It attracted policy attention in the 1970s, and received academic criticism (), and made a comeback at the beginning of the 21st century. It offers one way to explain why poverty exists despite anti-poverty programs. Early formations suggest that poor people lack resources and acquire a poverty-perpetuating value system. Critics of the early culture of poverty arguments insist that explanations of poverty must analyze how structural factors interact with and condition individual characteristics (). Further discourse suggests that Oscar Lewis's work was misunderstood.
Overview
De Antuñano (2019) states the theory of the culture of poverty was popularized in 1958 by anthropologist Oscar Lewis, following his research in Mexico City.
Early formulations
The term "culture of poverty" (previously "subculture of poverty") made its first appearance in Lewis's ethnography Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. 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 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 identified 70 characteristics that indicated the presence of a culture of poverty, which he argued was not shared by all 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 of African Americans 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.
Although Lewis (1998) was concerned with poverty in the developing world, the culture of poverty concept proved attractive to US public policy makers and politicians. It strongly informed documents such as the Moynihan Report (1965) as well as the War on Poverty.
The culture of poverty emerges as a key concept in Michael Harrington's discussion of American poverty in The Other America. For Harrington, the culture of poverty is a structural concept defined by social institutions of exclusion that create and perpetuate the cycle of poverty in America.
She writes, citing Hylan Lewis, another critic of Oscar Lewis's Culture of Poverty:
Further discourse
Hill (2002) states that some recent scholars believe the work of Oscar Lewis on the culture of poverty was misinterpreted.
See also
- Attributions for poverty
- Poverty in the United States
- History of poverty in the United States
- Cycle of poverty
- Involuntary unemployment
- Causes of income inequality in the United States
- Wealth inequality in the United States
- Welfare's effect on poverty
- When Work Disappears
- Economic inequality
- Desert (philosophy)
- Pauperism
- Social inequality
- Unemployment
- Social stigma
- Deprivation index
- Working-class culture