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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Culture of Poverty

Introduction.

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Foundational Texts
Empirical Evidence
Informing Policy
Early Criticisms
Urban Ethnography/Neighborhood Studies
Theoretical Refutations of the Culture of Poverty
The Underclass
Critiques of the “Underclass” Framework
The New Poverty Studies
Welfare Reform

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Culture of Poverty by Dana-Ain Davis LAST REVIEWED: 11 January 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 11 January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0004

The term culture of poverty emerged in 1959 to explain why people were poor. The culture of poverty concept delineates factors associated with poor people’s behaviors, and argues that their values are distinguishable from members of the middle class. The persistence of poverty can presumably be explained by the reproduction of this “lifeway,” because the values that the poor have are passed down generationally. Initially the term was primarily applicable in Third World countries and in those nation-states in the early stages of industrialization. Culture of poverty proposed that approximately 20% of poor people are trapped in cycles of self-perpetuating behavior that caused poverty. More specifically, 70 behavioral traits or characteristics are identified with those who have a culture of poverty. These characteristics include weak ego structure, a sense of resignation and fatalism, strong present-time orientation, and confusion of sexual identification. Alternately, intellectual support has been found for various aspects of the culture of poverty concept and for criticisms leveled against the explanatory power of the framework. As it pertains to explaining poverty in US-based urban areas, ensuing research has focused on several areas, including the presentation of empirical evidence that identifies and explicates the absence, or presence, of some of the characteristics found among the poor. These include: social participation, pathological family structure, social isolation, and individual behavioral traits, among others. While the term did have its supporters, the degree of support varied. For example, some argued that while a culture of poverty did exist, the definition of culture was not adequate enough to use the framework effectively. The concept also had detractors, and, in fact, it has served to polarize poverty research scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. Some scholars find the concept ill-conceived because it is not empirically or politically contextualized. Others have found that the concept, which centers on individual behaviors, overlooks the interaction of behavior and structure. Still others claim that the urban-centric focus that came to be associated with the concept both subsumed the reality of poverty in urban areas and simultaneously racialized poverty as it became associated with African Americans.

A great number of journals address the subject of poverty, but none is specifically focused on the culture of poverty concept. Anthropology is far from the only, or even the primary, discipline to elaborate or critique the framework. Across disciplines, one will find the issue of poverty covered in a number of peer-reviewed/refereed journals, as well as those that are not peer-reviewed. Many of the journals are focused on policy and research, such as the Journal of Children and Poverty , the Journal of Poverty , and Poverty and Public Policy . However, other journals are more interdisciplinary, such as Race, Poverty, and the Environment and the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice . No anthropological journals are dedicated exclusively to the subject of poverty; however, major journals, such as Critique of Anthropology , American Anthropologist , Ethnology , and City and Society have each attended to poverty issues and culture of poverty debates over the years.

American Anthropologist .

This is the premier journal of the American Anthropological Association. The journal advances the association’s mission by publishing articles that add to, synthesize, and interpret anthropological knowledge.

City and Society

This is the journal of the Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. The journal is intended to foster debate and conceptual development in urban, transnational anthropology.

Critique of Anthropology .

This is an international peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the development of anthropology as a discipline that subjects social reality to critical analysis.

Ethnology .

This a quarterly journal devoted to offering a broad range of general cultural and social anthropology. It publishes only articles.

Journal of Children and Poverty .

This journal serves as a forum for research and policy initiatives in the areas of education, health and public policy, and the socioeconomic causes and effects of poverty.

Journal of Poverty .

This a quarterly journal dedicated to research on poverty that goes beyond narrow definitions of poverty based on thresholds. It takes the view that poverty is more than the lack of financial means; rather, it is a condition of inadequacy, lacking, and scarcity. Published by Haworth Press.

Journal of Poverty and Social Justice .

The Journal of Poverty and Social Justice covers poverty-related topics as they are connected to social justice located in the United Kingdom. Contributors include researchers, policy analysts, practitioners, and scholars. Published by the Policy Press.

Poverty and Public Policy: A Global Journal of Social Security, Income and Aide and Welfare .

This is a new global journal that began publishing in 2009. It publishes policy research on poverty, income distribution, and welfare. It begins with the assumption that progress is possible and policy has a role to play in alleviating global poverty. Published on behalf of the Policy Studies Organization.

Race, Poverty, and the Environment .

This twenty-year-old journal is concerned with social and environmental justice. When it was founded, the goal was to strengthen the connections between environmental groups, working people, poor people, and people of color.

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Culture of Poverty: Critique

2015, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition)

This article recounts the historical, theoretical, and empirical basis of the culture of poverty program as it was developed in the writings of Oscar Lewis and examines the anthropological critique of his work that developed immediately upon the heels of Lewis' final publications. Further, this article examines the recent emergence of the culture and poverty program and notes its confluences with and points of departure from the culture of poverty program.

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The culture of poverty.

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A culture of poverty?

While doing field research in the country’s poorest areas, my team came across a community where some residents, when asked why there were so many poor people in their area, matter-of-factly said it’s because many of their neighbors are lazy. We also interviewed the project staff of a national government poverty reduction program; when asked why there were so many poor people in their province, their response was, again, because many of them are lazy. Regional heads of national government agencies that we gathered in a focus group discussion chorused that the reason there are many poor people in their region is that most of them are—you guessed it—lazy.

Poor people who are seen to be devoid of aspirations and initiative, and thereby unable to extricate themselves out of poverty, have come to be described as having a “culture of poverty.” American anthropologist Oscar Lewis, to whom the phrase was first attributed, argued that the poor possess a culture of poverty that transcends generations as well as national boundaries. In research that documented the lives of slum dwellers, he contended that cultural similarities occur among the poor in different places, and they are “common adaptations to common problems.” Lewis held that the culture of poverty is “both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor to their marginal position in a class-stratified, highly individualistic, capitalistic society.”

Are the Filipino poor afflicted with a culture of poverty? The notion manifests itself in several corollary assertions. One argues that the poor will inevitably subvert any intervention to improve their welfare. Similar to this is the argument that the poor are resistant to any change for the better, often made with reference to small farmers. Another holds that biological, cognitive, psychological, cultural and even racial factors lie behind the inability of the poor to liberate themselves from poverty.

With such notions seemingly permeating different levels of society, it’s hard to expect interventions toward poverty reduction to gain much ground, as the belief could get in the way of their effective design and implementation. In particular, it leads one to the tempting conclusion that most poverty-reduction initiatives cannot have any lasting impact, as it’s impossible to help those who will not help themselves. At worst, the notion manifests itself in the sentiment that the poor ultimately deserve their fate.

Well over a century ago, Dr. Jose Rizal wrote “On the Indolence of the Filipino.” Much of the circumstances he observed then on the controversial notion remain applicable today to the similarly contested “culture of poverty” among the Filipino poor. While he recognized that indolence indeed existed among Filipinos, he did not see this to be an inherent flaw of the country and its people, but rather, as the effect of circumstances experienced by the country, including the hot climate. It’s for this reason that the Spaniard is more indolent than the Frenchman, who in turn is more so than the German—an observation he seemed to take as empirical fact. But beyond climate, Rizal also saw man-made “social disorders” to be the culprit. These included abuse and discrimination, government inaction, rampant corruption and red tape, misplaced Church doctrines, and bad examples from some Spaniards who led lives of indolence—all ultimately leading to the deterioration of Filipino values.

All sound familiar? With minor tweaking, the above could just as accurately describe the plight of today’s “lazy” Filipino poor, whose lack of motivation could be traced to any or all of the above. A foreign colleague once told me of his conversation with the little son of his hired driver. When he asked the boy what he wanted to be when he grows up, the child replied that he wanted to be a driver just like his father. My colleague found it amazing that the child would not aspire for more, and went on to surmise that this could be a reason poverty remains prevalent in the Philippines.

A tempting inference, perhaps, but Marian Pastor-Roces, herself a culture studies expert, argues that when premised on the existence of such culture of poverty, government initiatives for poverty reduction are likely to be misguided. For example, it underlies, consciously or unconsciously, the tendency for overly centralized decision-making in government, or recurrent temptations to recentralize already decentralized functions. One also sees it in national and local government officials’ all-too-common distrust of civil society organizations that are otherwise eager to help uplift the lives of the poor. It leads to a tendency to put little regard for, if not totally ignore, historical and sociocultural factors in addressing rural poverty from the national and regional perspectives. (Poverty in rural Mindanao, for example, requires very different approaches from poverty in Northern Luzon, for obvious reasons.) There is also a tendency to overlook, if not dismiss, the potential value of local knowledge and traditional problem-solving approaches in the design of antipoverty programs and projects. Getting poverty reduction right, it seems, would start with overcoming this notion that a culture of poverty stands in the way.

Rizal, in the end, summed up the main causes of Filipino indolence: the limited training and education Filipinos received, and the lack of national sentiment and unity among them. To him, education was key to “curing” Filipino indolence. He could have just as well said it today, in prescribing a cure for modern-day Filipino poverty.

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Michael Harrington: Warrior on Poverty

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By Maurice Isserman

June 19, 2009

If there is a heaven, and it has a place for virtuous skeptics, I imagine Michael Harrington is looking down, amused by the recent cover of Newsweek proclaiming, “We Are All Socialists Now,” not to mention Newt Gingrich’s lament that the United States is seeing “European socialism transplanted to Washington.” Back in the 1960s, Harrington had some experience trying to “transplant” some socialist ideas to Washington — and the results were rather different from what he had hoped.

Fifty years ago this July, Commentary magazine (at the time a journal of bracingly liberal sentiments) ran Harrington’s article “Our Fifty Million Poor,” in which he sought to overturn the conventional wisdom that the United States had become an overwhelmingly middle-class society. Using the poverty-line benchmark of a $3,000 annual income for a family of four, he demonstrated that nearly a third of the population lived “below those standards which we have been taught to regard as the decent minimums for food, housing, clothing and health.”

Harrington’s own knowledge of poverty was decidedly secondhand. Born in 1928 in St. Louis and educated at Holy Cross, Yale Law School and the University of Chicago, he moved to New York City in 1949 to become a writer. In 1951 he joined Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement as a volunteer at its soup kitchen. Within a few years he left the Catholic Worker (and the Roman Catholic Church) and joined the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth affiliate of the battered remnants of the American Socialist Party.

In researching the Commentary essay, Harrington picked up the notion of the “culture of poverty,” a casual bit of intellectual borrowing with fateful consequences. The phrase was coined by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who contended that being poor was not simply a condition marked by the absence of wealth; rather, poverty created “a subculture of its own,” and those raised within it were unlikely to escape. However different their places of origin, he argued, poor people in Mexico might have more in common with their counterparts in New York than with better-off people from their own countries.

Echoing Lewis, Harrington argued that American poverty constituted “a separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life.” He elaborated on this idea in “The Other America: Poverty in the United States,” published in the spring of 1962. It was a short work with a simple thesis: poverty was both more extensive and more tenacious than most Americans assumed. An “invisible land” of the poor existed in rural isolation or in crowded slums where middle-class visitors seldom ventured. “That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them,” Harrington wrote. “They are not simply neglected and forgotten. . . . What is much worse, they are not seen.”

Harrington argued that poor Americans were “people who lack education and skill, who have bad health, poor housing, low levels of aspiration and high levels of mental distress. . . . And if one problem is solved, and the others are left constant, there is little gain.” Instead of relying on a rising tide of affluence to lift all boats, he argued, America needed a broad program of “remedial action” — a “comprehensive assault on poverty.”

Harrington said he would be happy if “The Other America” sold 2,500 copies. Instead, it sold 70,000 within a year (and well over a million in successive editions). Among the book’s readers, reputedly, was John F. Kennedy, who in the fall of 1963 began thinking about proposing antipoverty legislation. After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson took up the issue, calling in his 1964 State of the Union address for an “unconditional war on poverty.” Sargent Shriver headed the task force charged with drawing up the legislation, and invited Harrington to Washington as a consultant.

In February 1964 Harrington helped write a background paper, working with the radical writer Paul Jacobs and a Labor Department aide named Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an old drinking partner from the Greenwich Village days. The memo argued that “if there is any single dominant problem of poverty in the U.S., it is that of unemployment.” The solution was a return to the model of the New Deal, creating massive public works projects to end unemployment and redistribute income to those most in need.

But of what relevance was the concept of the “culture of poverty” if all that was needed to counter it was jobs? In “The Other America,” Harrington used the concept interchangeably with “vicious circle of poverty” — by which he meant poor living conditions leading to poor health, poor attendance at school or work, and so on. Nothing in this “vicious circle” was culturally rooted in the sense that Oscar Lewis had argued — so at any point additional income would suffice to break the circle.

Jobs programs, however, were expensive: the Works Progress Administration had cost $5 billion in 1936, and Johnson had made it clear that appropriations for his “unconditional” war on poverty had to be brought in under a billion dollars for the coming year. The strategy was to help the poor to improve themselves — a “hand up, not a handout,” as Shriver put it. The resulting legislation, passed in August 1964, provided funds for preschool education, community action agencies, legal services and the like, but did little directly to provide jobs and income for the poor.

Harrington’s active involvement with the war on poverty came to an end after his month of consulting. But Moynihan continued to fight for their alternate strategy from his Labor Department post. His famous 1965 position paper, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” better known as the Moynihan Report, was bitterly attacked from the left for describing the urban black family as a “tangle of pathology.” Less noted was his continued advocacy of an expanded federal jobs program.

Indeed, that aspect of Moynihan’s and Harrington’s thinking was roundly rejected by the group of thinkers who ultimately carried the day on poverty. In the 1970s, neoconservatives — former liberals disillusioned with the welfare state (Harrington himself popularized the term in a 1973 article) — neatly turned the argument of “The Other America” on its head, arguing that welfare programs only strengthened the culture of poverty by encouraging single-parent families and discouraging work. The poor, in their view, would be better served by dismantling the welfare state and instituting tougher neighborhood policing than through further meddling by would-be social engineers. When Bill Clinton ran for office pledging to “end welfare as we know it,” it was clear who had won the political argument.

In 1999, Time magazine named “The Other America” one of the 10 most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. But how relevant does it remain today? As social theory, it is deeply flawed. Harrington’s culture-of-poverty thesis was at best ambiguous, at worst an impediment to making the case for what he regarded as the real solution. (In later books, he made no use of the term.)

But what remains fresh and vital in “The Other America” is its moral clarity. Harrington argued that Americans should be angry and ashamed to live in a rich society in which so many remained poor. “The fate of the poor,” he concluded, “hangs upon the decision of the better-off. If this anger and shame are not forthcoming, someone can write a book about the other America a generation from now and it will be the same or worse.”

Today the poor are no longer invisible, thanks to writers like William Julius Wilson, Alex Kotlowitz and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and to a popular culture that has young people in middle-class suburbs emulating the styles of the inner city. But Harrington’s prediction is otherwise correct. For all the changes ushered in by the 2008 election, a renewed war on poverty does not seem to be in the offing.

Maurice Isserman is a professor of history at Hamilton College and the author of “The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington.”

A Culture of Poverty

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