Oscar Lewis is remembered in anthropological circles for three things –
(1) his ethnographic restudy of a community in Mexico which came to
quite different conclusions than an earlier study of the same community
by Robert Redfield, (2) the engaging quality of his ethnographic writing
in general, whether he was writing of rural or urban Mexico, Puerto
Ricans in San Juan or New York, or communities in India (Lewis is
probably the only anthropologist to have an ethnography adapted into a
Hollywood movie – The Children of Sanchez, starring Anthony
Quinn), and (3) his most important theoretical contribution to
anthropology and social science, the concept of the “Culture of
Poverty.”
Today, the idea of the culture of poverty tends to be
looked at with distrust at best. The use of the concept often brings
charges of “blaming the victim.” This is largely the result of (I think
well intentioned) misapplications of the concept in association with the
U.S. federal government’s “War on Poverty” in the mid to late 1960s.
This is most famously the case with the Moynihan Report,
associated with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (otherwise a politician
with solid liberal credentials – the problem with the report is not the
senator’s intentions, or even necessarily the empirical facts reported
in it, so much as a misapplication of Lewis’ concept and a problem with
the interpretation of the facts). The key problem with the Moynihan Report
was that it confused the symptoms of poverty with its causes. In doing
so, it did “blame the victim” by positing subcultural patterns
empirically associated with persistent poverty as the causes of poverty
(most problematically with a preoccupation with matrifocal family
dynamics among poor black Americans), rather than seeing these patterns
as effects of living in poverty and/or as short term coping mechanisms
for living in poverty in certain contexts. (In some ways, it might have
been better had it been, say, the Strom Thurmond Report – that at least
would have made it easier for generally liberal scholars to reject the
interpretations and conclusions of the report without regarding the
concept it used as tainted.).
Lewis’ concept didn’t “blame the
victim.” Instead, it involved recognizing that poverty doesn’t entail
simply not having enough money, but also often entails the necessity for
adaptive strategies for dealing with persistent poverty, which in turn
create subcultural differences in patterns of living and perspectives
and worldview. Such subcultural strategies and practices often do have
the unfortunate effect of contributing to the reproduction of poverty
(and so must be addressed as part of any overall strategy for dealing
with poverty – with this the key reason to reassess Lewis’ concept), but
they are not the ultimate cause of poverty, and addressing these
symptoms of poverty alone will do little to affect endemic poverty.
Lewis first mentioned the culture of poverty in Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (1959), though with more sustained discussion in The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family
(1961). The book overall presents the personal narratives of members of
the Sanchez family in their own words, but the introduction discusses
the general context of their narratives and lives, and introduces the
notion of the culture of poverty. In a few paragraphs in The Children of Sanchez, and in a longer discussion in La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty – San Juan and New York
(1965), Lewis lays out some of the features the culture of poverty
(recognizing also that exact details will change from context to
context).
Some of the main things typically occurring as part of
the culture of poverty include patterns to cope with the economic
realities of poverty, as well as patterns to cope with the economic,
social, physical, and emotional and other psychological stresses of
extreme and persistent poverty.
Some of these follow
straightforwardly from the fact of not having sufficient resources. If
you don’t have much money, you can only buy foodstuffs and other
important economic goods in small quantities, which means you have to
buy them often, which in turn means both that you can’t take advantage
of buying in larger quantity at lower per unit prices (which further
means that a basic economic fact of poverty requires the poor to pay
more for basic goods than those better off – which means that even the
basic economic facts of poverty tend to reinforce poverty) and that much
time and mental and physical energy is persistently focused towards
meeting basic needs. This tends to inhibit the ability of the poor to
plan for the future in any long term way, or even to develop the mental
skills for long term planning, typically leading to a highly
present-time orientation.
Persistent poverty is also highly
stressful, and many of the particular examples cited by Lewis are
examples of people attempting to cope with the stresses of poverty – or
the consequences of those attempts to cope. These can include again the
daily attempt to get by (requiring investment of much mental and
physical energy) and a generally present or short term time focus, but
also low education levels, frequent pawning of personal goods and/or
turning to local money lenders at high interest rates (i.e. “loan
sharks”), poor housing conditions and crowding and the stresses
accompanying them, “the absence of childhood as a specially prolonged
and protected stage in the life cycle” (La Vida, p. xlvii), a
tendency toward mother-centered families and/or free unions, high rates
of alcoholism or other substance use, lack of privacy, intrafamilial
competition for limited goods and affection, etc.
Finally, Lewis
also stresses that people living in a culture of poverty have quite low
participation rates in national life, e.g. participation in politics,
use of department stores, museums, art galleries or other institutions
of high or national culture, or even systematic use of social services.
Even within the impoverished community, most interaction is integrated
mainly at the familial level, with community wide organization taking as
often as not unstable and even violent form, with things like street
gangs. Lewis says (La Vida, p. xlvii): “Most primitive peoples
have achieved a higher level of socio-cultural organization than our
modern urban slum dwellers.”
One important result of all of the
patterns described by Lewis is a general lack of sense of integration or
belonging to something larger than the self and immediate family, a
lack of a sense of self-fulfillment, and a lack of a sense of hope or a
sense that things can or are likely to get better.
This is an
ugly picture of life in persistent poverty, but then poverty is in fact
an ugly thing. I’d like to emphasize two things about Lewis’ delineation
of the particular traits of the culture of poverty: (1) This part of
Lewis’ discussion involves empirical description. The characteristics he
describes are either actually present or not in a particular
impoverished setting. Over the years, I’ve heard a number of
anthropological colleagues over the years criticize Lewis’ writings for
over-generalizing on the basis of information from a specific community,
or sometimes even from a single family. That may be (I think it is,
insofar as there is an unsubstantiated insinuation of typicality for,
say, the Sanchez family), but that doesn’t invalidate the theoretical
concept as much as call for careful attention to the specific details of
subcultural patterns associated with any particular example of a
culture of poverty. (2) The fact that Lewis paints an ugly picture does
not in any way mean that he is blaming the poor for their condition.
Instead, in La Vida, he carefully lays out the sorts of
circumstances in which a culture of poverty is likely to develop as a
set of mechanisms to cope with conditions, which is to say he lays out
the conditions in which some are victimized by poverty. He also presents
examples of contexts of poverty where the negative patterns of a
culture of poverty are much less likely to develop.
Lewis writes (La Vida,
pp. xliii – xliv): “The culture of poverty can come into being in a
variety of historical contexts. However, it tends to grow and flourish
in societies with the following set of conditions: (1) a cash economy,
wage labor and production for profit; (2) a persistently high rate of
unemployment and underemployment for unskilled labor; (3) low wages; (4)
the failure to provide social, political and economic organization,
either on a voluntary basis or by government imposition, for the
low-income population; (5) the existence of a bilateral kinship system
rather than a unilateral one; and finally, (6) the existence of a set of
values in the dominant class which stresses the accumulation of wealth
and property, the possibility of upward mobility and thrift, and
explains low economic status as the result of personal inadequacy or
inferiority.” Ironically, the Moynihan Report used a variation on this last theme, by positing a sort of cultural inadequacy or inferiority as the cause of persistent poverty.
For
Lewis, a culture of poverty develops when persistent poverty exists and
when the poor are thrown back upon their own resources, because little
else is done to help them – and in fact they’re liable to be blamed for
their own condition, but where their resources are typically
insufficient to escape poverty. Instead, individuals, each acting as
logically and rationally as people in any other sociocultural context,
in their efforts to adapt to an extreme situation, end up engaging in
patterns of practice which can easily reinforce themselves and can be
often psychologically and socially dysfunctional, but where such
patterns, which constitute a subculture of poverty, are the product
rather than the cause of persistent impoverishment (even though once
established, such patterns do contribute to the reproduction of poverty –
but even this caveat should not be taken to imply blame to the
practitioners of these patterns, for the culture of poverty does provide
an adaptive strategy for some conditions, albeit also a dysfunctional
one).
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Oscar Lewis and the Culture of Poverty
Labels:
culture of poverty,
Mexico,
Moynihan Report,
Oscar Lewis,
poverty,
Puerto Rico
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Respected Sir, Thanks for your article on Oscar Lewis on Culture of Poverty. It is very useful and helpful.
Anil Kumar
in fact I study the result of the different studies of this men, one of the most important is about the impact of Viagra Online over the population of those countries, and why this cultures solves their problem throught this service.
PLS. DO FOLLOW OUR BLOG.. hope you’ll spare your time with us
thebigmacproductions.blogspot.com
Post a Comment
Links to this post
Create a Link