Culture of Poverty (Anthropology)

Introduction

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.

Journals

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.
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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.
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City and Society
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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.
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Critique of Anthropology.
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This is an international peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the development of anthropology as a discipline that subjects social reality to critical analysis.
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Ethnology.
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This a quarterly journal devoted to offering a broad range of general cultural and social anthropology. It publishes only articles.
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Journal of Children and Poverty.
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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.
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Journal of Poverty.
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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.
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Journal of Poverty and Social Justice.
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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.
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Poverty and Public Policy: A Global Journal of Social Security, Income and Aide and Welfare.
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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.
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Race, Poverty, and the Environment.
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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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Media Sources

Culture of poverty is not a conceptual framework that is explicitly found in visual media, although poverty is. However, the 1974 film Claudine (Berry 1974) presents a cogent example of how ideologies of culture of poverty operate. The documentary Waging a Living (Weisberg and Harris 2005) challenges some of the precepts of culture of poverty. National Public Radio has produced a program called The Culture of Poverty in conjunction with two academics.

Berry, John, dir. 1974. Claudine. DVD. 2002. Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.
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This movie explores the inner-city experience of a single mother and her six children living in poverty at the intersection of the welfare rights and civil rights movement. While the film could have focused on the pathology of black single motherhood, instead it reveals the family’s struggles and resiliency.
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The Culture of Poverty. 2009. Talk of the Nation, 23 March.
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A thirty-minute NPR radio show that examines the meaning of culture of poverty with sociologists Sudhir Venkatesh and William Julius Wilson. The conversation centers on whether culture of poverty is a result of behavioral problems
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Weisberg, Roger, and Pamela Harris, dirs. 2005. Waging a Living. DVD. New York: Docurama.
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Chronicles the lives of four low-wage workers and how they struggle to escape poverty.
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General Overviews

The term culture of poverty was initially used in 1959. In just seven years, it gained considerable legitimacy as an explanation for the cause of poverty primarily in urban areas in the United States. It has been both lauded as an important contribution to understanding what causes poverty and criticized for the unintended consequence of denigrating poor blacks living in urban areas. While there has been vibrant engagement with the culture of poverty framework, it has also been refuted for fostering a blame-the-victim perspective. This section covers Foundational Texts, Empirical Evidence, Informing Policy.

Foundational Texts

The term culture of poverty was first used by anthropologist Oscar Lewis in his book Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (see Lewis 1959). Lewis refined the term in an article in the journal Scientific American (Lewis 1966a), and further developed the framework in La Vida (Lewis 1966b). By the 1960s, culture of poverty was in widespread use among academics, but not because of Lewis, whose framework came to fruition primarily in the academic community. Widespread nonacademic interest came after sociologist Michael Harrington used the term, albeit with a somewhat different emphasis, in Harrington 1962. Related to the culture of poverty thesis was that it became linked to race, urban space, and poverty policy, as evidenced in Glazer and Moynihan 1963. Later, the focus on subcultures, that is, that poor people have a separate culture from middle-class people, came to be associated with Moynihan 1965, in which he argued that the black family represented a tangle of pathology, not a culture of poverty. Although over the years, culture of poverty and tangle of pathology have been used interchangeably, some scholars have used the culture of poverty framework as the primary explanatory factor in understanding poverty. Murray 1994 uses statistics to make the case that social policy did little to alleviate poverty, thus a culture of poverty exists, and Freeman 1998 draws on the culture of poverty to explain a phenomenon such as longevity in residential patterns among those living in public housing.

Freeman, Lance. 1998. Interpreting the dynamics of public housing: Cultural and rational choice explanations. Housing Policy Debate 9.2: 323.
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A paper examining the link between income and mobility to shed light on public housing residency. Examines the duration of dependence on public housing and the ability to move out of public housing in relation to the culture of poverty thesis.
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Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel P. Moynihan. 1963. Beyond the melting pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City. Boston: MIT Press.
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A contentious book that argues that “ethnic” groups develop a powerful sense of group identity as a result of being excluded by the dominant society.
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Harrington, Michael. 1962. The other America: Poverty in the United States. New York: Scribner.
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This widely read book served as the intellectual foundation of the War on Poverty launched by the Johnson administration. Harrington’s use of the term culture of poverty made the point that American poverty represented a different way of life.
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Lewis, Oscar. 1959. Five families: Mexican case studies in the culture of poverty. New York: Basic Books.
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Based on interviews, this anthropological study laid out the seventy characteristics leading to a culture of poverty.
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Lewis, Oscar. 1966a. The culture of poverty. Scientific American 215:19–25.
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In this article, Lewis contradicts his earlier assertion that poverty and its attendant weak value system is passed down generationally. Instead, he argues that welfare state capitalism and free enterprise have perpetuated a culture of poverty.
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Lewis, Oscar. 1966b. La vida: A Puerto Rican family in the culture of poverty—San Juan and New York. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
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An ethnographic portrait of a family in which Lewis tested and refined the culture of poverty concept by comparing the US case to his earlier Mexican case.
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Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. 1965. The Negro family: The case for national action. Washington, DC: Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor.
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Lengthy discussion of the black family as a tangle of pathology, which became ideologically linked to the term culture of poverty. However, Moynihan did not use the term.
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Murray, Charles A. 1994. Losing ground: American social policy, 1950–1980. New York: Basic Books.
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A powerful book showing that social programs have not helped alleviate poverty; claims that government assistance has contributed to a culture of poverty.
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Empirical Evidence

Some scholars found the culture of poverty framework useful. Banfield 1970, for example, reinforced many of the cultural or behavioral characteristics that Lewis said existed. While aspects of the culture of poverty thesis were met with intellectual interest, other aspects required elaboration and refinement. One of the critiques was that culture of poverty was not grounded in empirical evidence owing to the methodology that Lewis employed in his first book, namely, interviews. The argument was that interviews were not enough to provide a deep analysis leading to a theory of culture of poverty. Although theoretically culture of poverty was viewed as a plausible explanation for understanding poverty, methodologically more data were necessary to support the framework’s validity. Both Graves 1974 and Rodman 1971 confirm that a culture of poverty exists among the subjects of their respective studies—Graves with urban Indians and Rodman with Negroes in Trinidad. Interpretive differences abounded in the culture of poverty debate. That is, while some scholars agreed behavioral differences existed between the poor and middle-class values, they did not support the thesis that these value differences caused poverty; Abell and Lyon 1979 and Billings 1974 were in this camp. Then there were scholars whose scholarship led to new developments as a result of some of the concepts. For example, they agreed that there are behavioral differences between the poor and the middle class, but they did not accept the perspective that the behavior was only pathological. Gans 1962 finds that the poor have pathological behaviors, but views those behaviors as an adaptation to structural barriers to success. Similarly Liebow 1967 argues that pathology exists in the black family but then concludes that those pathologies are adaptive. Finally, elaborating on the initial idea of culture of poverty, specifically the pathological behavioral elements, Wilson and Herrnstein 1985 argues that culture of poverty is linked to genetic features.

Abell, Troy, and Larry Lyon. 1979. Do the differences make a difference? An empirical evaluation of the culture of poverty in the United States. American Ethnologist 6.3: 602–621.
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This article confirms Lewis’s original hypothesis that some behaviors differentiate lower and middle class, but they are not the primary reason for the perpetuation of poverty.
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Banfield, Edward. 1970. The unheavenly city: The nature and the future of our urban crisis. New York: Little Brown.
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The argument in this book focuses on poor people’s pathology, claiming that social programs will not eliminate the values the poor have that are different from those of the middle class.
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Billings, Dwight. 1974. Culture and poverty in Appalachia: A theoretical discussion and empirical analysis. Social Forces 53.2: 315–323.
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While the persistence of poverty is attributed to cultural forces, this article argues that cultural explanations cannot completely account for economic depravity.
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Gans, Herbert. 1962. The urban villagers: Group and class in the life of Italian-Americans. New York: Free Press.
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This sociological account of urban life makes the case that the behavior of poor people is an adaptation to structural inequities.
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Graves, Theodore D. 1974. Urban Indian personality and the “Culture of Poverty.” American Ethnologist 1.1: 65–86.
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An interesting discussion that compares psychometric procedures and indices of economic achievement among Navajo Indians. It shows that the barriers to economic success are related to psychological traits.
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Liebow, Elliot. 1967. Talley’s corner: A study of Negro streetcorner men. New York: Little, Brown.
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A classic ethnography that argues that poor people’s behavior is an adaptive mechanism to their circumstances.
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Miller, David B. 1976. A partial test of Oscar Lewis’s culture of poverty in rural America. Current Anthropology 17.4: 720–723.
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This article explores one element of the culture of poverty thesis, namely, the related barriers to social mobility in rural areas.
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Rodman, H. 1971. Lower-class families: The culture of poverty in Negro Trinidad. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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In a slight theoretical modification of the culture of poverty “thesis” this book claims that lower-class black Trinidadians have middle-class values as well as their own values (making them a subculture).
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Wilson, James Q., and Richard Herrnstein. 1985. Crime and human nature. New York: Touchstone Books.
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An interesting analysis linking the culture of poverty concept to biological determinism. The authors posit that criminal behavior is a complex interplay between genetic and environmental factors.
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Informing Policy

One of the major outcomes of the culture of poverty concept is that it has served as the rationale for reducing federally mandated social programs to poor and low-income people. The argument is that if culture of poverty is a “design for life” and representative of a “tangle of social pathologies,” then there is little point in supporting programs that will not change people’s circumstances. Herrnstein and Murray 1994 and Niskanen 1996 take the position that the behaviors or pathologies of poor people are not going to change, therefore government programs, such as welfare, should be limited or eliminated. On the other hand, questions about the appropriateness of using culture of poverty to make policy decisions is taken up in Coward, et al. 1974 and Gladwin 1967. It is Rainwater 1970, however, which argues that despite pathology, policies should still be in place that reinforce income equity.

Coward, Barbara E., Joe R. Feagin, and J. Allen Williams Jr.. 1974. The culture of poverty debate: Some additional data. Social Problems 21.5: 621–634.
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This article reports on a study in which the empirical dimensions of culture of poverty were questioned as a basis for policy decisions.
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Gladwin, Thomas. 1967. Poverty, U.S.A. New York: Little, Brown.
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This applied anthropological treatment of poverty attempts to examine the culture of anthropology thesis and its implications for policymaking.
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Herrnstein, Richard, and Charles Murray. 1994. The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. New York: Free Press.
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A very contentious book in which the authors suggest that class differences stem from genetic limitations that result in shortcomings that cannot be affected.
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Niskanen, William A. 1996. Welfare and the culture of poverty. Cato Journal 16.1.
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A report examining the links between six social pathologies and welfare use. Provides a policy suggestion to change pathological behaviors by limiting or eliminating welfare to all but certain categories of people.
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Rainwater, Lee. 1970. Behind ghetto walls: Black families in a federal slum. Chicago: Aldine.
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This important book argues that while poor blacks have pathologies, it is still important to develop policy focusing on income equity.
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Critiques

This section reviews early criticisms of the culture of poverty, ethnographic neighborhood studies, and theoretical refutations of the culture of poverty. By the 1970s, culture of poverty was the subject of heated debate and critique. It was viewed as reductionist and it was thought to shed little, if any, light on the causes of poverty. In fact, among many scholars, the individualistic nature of the concept was harmful because not only did it reinforce negative racial/ethnic stereotypes about poor people, but also it did not contextualize the experience of poverty in terms of the structural barriers that might contribute to the persistence of poverty. Beginning in the 1970s the push back against the culture of poverty led to a lacunae in poverty research.

Early Criticisms

Several scholars were extremely critical of the culture of poverty discourse. Among them, Leacock 1971 challenges culture of poverty through applied anthropology. Roach and Gursslin 1967 makes a similar argument that of Valentine 1968, which is that attention should be paid to the material or structural conditions that cause poverty. In all of the works identified above, the central theme is that culture of poverty is reductionist. Winter and Glazer 1971 reflects concern with not only the inadequacy of empirical data to support culture of poverty, but also the detriment that the concept will pose to poor people. By the late 1960s and into the 1970s the intellectually volatile combination of culture of poverty and Moynihan’s thesis of the black family as a tangle of pathology led to ethnographic work focused on blacks that proposed that what appeared to be non-normative behaviors of blacks were, in fact, adaptive (Hannerz 1969).

Hannerz, Ulf. 1969. Soulside: Inquiries into ghetto culture and community. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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A classic ethnography of a black ghetto in Washington, DC, that criticizes culture of poverty discourse. The argument advanced is that poor people’s behaviors are adaptive rather than pathological.
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Leacock, Eleanor Burke. 1971. The culture of poverty: A critique. New York: Simon and Schuster.
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An edited volume in which the primary contributors are anthropologists who unequivocally agree that the culture of poverty concept was ill-conceived.
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Roach, Jack L., and Orville R. Gursslin. 1967. An evaluation of the concept “culture of poverty.” Social Forces 45.3: 383–392.
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An evaluation of the culture of poverty concept, pointing out theoretical deficiencies.
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Valentine, Charles. 1968. Culture and poverty: Critique and counter proposals. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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An evaluative treatment of a number of interpretations and frameworks used to understand poverty and culture.
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Winter, J. Alan, and Nathan Glazer. eds. 1971. The poor: A culture of poverty or a poverty of culture? Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.
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This edited volume examines the potential negative effects of the culture of poverty concept on social policy and is based on a 1969 conference at Temple University.
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Urban Ethnography/Neighborhood Studies

The year 1962 witnessed the civil rights movement, the War on Poverty, and the publication of Harrington’s book (see Harrington 1962 cited under Foundational Texts). These three elements precipitated interest in urban spaces. However, vociferous debates over the culture of poverty framework actually impeded critical enquiry into the meaning of poverty such that, by the 1980s, researchers were pushed into other domains, specifically analyzing the structural nature of poverty and poverty policy in primarily urban (read: black) communities, with little attention paid to culture. One way to address the long-standing problematic of focusing on individual behavior as the cause of poverty was to bring back the study of neighborhoods. The rise of the ethnographic method to study poor and working-class neighborhoods resurfaced in the 1990s. Cumulatively, they provide ethnographic evidence that poor and working poor people do not uniformly embody the negative characteristics associated with poverty or culture of poverty. Stack 1974 explores the adaptive strategies poor people deploy in a midwestern city, while Bourgois 1996 and Sharff 1997 both are the result of research conducted in urban communities of color in order to shed light on how poverty is lived. The subjects of the research were, respectively, Latinos living in East Harlem and in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Kofie 1999 and Newman 1999 argue that to understand poverty one must examine the institutional practices that keep people poor. Sanchez-Jankow 2008 shows another side of poor neighborhoods, namely, that they are not the chaotic spaces typically associated with inner-city urban areas. They are communities with functioning exchange networks and institutions. Offering harsh criticism of urban ethnography, Wacquant 2002 seeks to ensure that ethnographers critique their own methods, impulses, and goals in the ethnographic production of urban life and poverty.

Bourgois, Philippe. 1996. In search of respect: Selling crack in El Barrio. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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An ethnography that attempts to reframe the “blame-the-victim” stance associated with culture of poverty discourse. Although the culture is still presented as pathological, it serves as a medium for the internalization of structural influences.
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Kofie, Nelson F. 1999. Race, class, and the struggle for neighborhood in Washington, DC. New York: Garland.
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An examination of the historical, structural, and institutional forces that perpetuate poverty in an African-American neighborhood in Washington, DC.
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Newman, Katherine. 1999. No shame in my game: The working poor in the inner city. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
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An eye-opening challenge to the idea that poor people lack a work ethic. Advances the argument that, in fact, most poor people do work and, while they do not earn enough money, they take pride in the work they do.
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Sanchez-Jankow, Martin. 2008. Cracks in the pavement: Social change and resilience in poor neighborhoods. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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This study of neighborhoods in New York and Los Angeles shows how, instead of being rife with the chaos that is associated with poor neighborhoods, institutions are in place that operate to help residents survive poverty.
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Scharff, Jagna. 1997. King Kong on 4th Street: Families and the violence of poverty on the Lower East Side. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
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A chronicle of residents living in poverty for more than fifteen years. While it does not directly discuss culture of poverty, it documents the condition of poverty without the theoretical inflection of the culture of poverty paradigm.
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Stack, Carol. 1974. All our kin: Strategies for survival in a black community. New York: Harper and Row.
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This seminal ethnography documents the coping strategies that poor people in the Flats use to survive poverty. Explicitly states that it seeks to revise the dominant ideology of the black family as a tangle of pathology.
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Wacquant, Loic. 2002. Scrutinizing the street: Poverty, morality, and the pitfalls of urban ethnography. American Journal of Sociology 107.6: 1468–1532.
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A critique of three urban ethnographies; instructive in revealing how ethnographers might provide truncated accounts of their subjects, such that they sanitize the experiences of poverty and low-wage life.
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Theoretical Refutations of the Culture of Poverty

Although the idea that people were poor because they were part of a separate subculture, that is, they had different values, had been debated and essentially rejected by the 1970s and 1980s, many aspects of the culture of poverty discourse continued to circulate in the popular sphere. Ideologically, the framework continued to work its way into policy and research, forcing ethnographers to respond to an idea that, while they rejected it, had never really lost its saliency in public spheres. A number of academics across a range of disciplines moved ahead with theoretical critiques of culture of poverty. Kelley 1998 railed against social scientists for perpetuating the myth of black dysfunction; Goode 2001 sought to push a coping strategies agenda in the ethnographic enterprise as a way to counter myths about poor people. The continued persistence of culture of poverty as a framework embedded in policy is undertaken in Ortiz and Briggs 2003. Included in this section is Ladson-Billings 2006, a speech by Gloria Ladson-Billings that exemplifies the entrenched nature of the culture of poverty “thesis” in the field of education.

Goode, Judith. 2001. How urban ethnography counters myths about the poor. In Urban life: Readings in the anthropology of the city. Edited by George Gmelch and Walter P. Zenner, 279–295. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
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An insightful discussion of what Oscar Lewis meant by culture of poverty and an argument advancing that good urban ethnography can shed light on the coping strategies that the urban poor develop.
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Kelley, Robin D. G. 1998. Yo mama’s disfunktional!: Fighting the culture wars in urban America. Boston: Beacon Press.
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Chapter 1 is an astute critique of how social scientists have used culture in the most demeaning way to discuss poverty among blacks in urban America. Widespread misinterpretations have contributed to bad social policy intended to address urban poverty.
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Ladson-Billings, Gloria. 2006. It’s not the culture of poverty, it’s the poverty of culture: The problem with teacher education. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 37.2: 104–106.
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A critique of the lack of anthropological inclusion in teacher training curricula, which leads to inappropriate utilization of the terms culture and culture of poverty.
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Ortiz, Ana Teresa, and Laura Briggs. 2003. The culture of poverty, crack babies and welfare cheats. Social Text 21.3:39-57.
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Interesting discussion about the intersection of the culture of poverty, the crack-baby scare, and welfare cheats, underscoring how culture of poverty has denigrated children who are not white who are born in the United States of America.
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From a Culture of Poverty to Welfare Reform

Due to its definitional weakness and rigid focus on characteristics that many argued had not been substantiated empirically or contextually, use of the term culture of poverty waned. However, as the concept lost its cachet in academic writing (but not in public discourse nor in the eyes of policymakers), a new term emerged to explain poverty’s persistence, that is, the underclass. Just as with the culture of poverty, the underclass framework met with critiques. As the gap between the rich and the poor intensified, poverty studies looked more substantively at the ideological implications of new forms of poverty. And in the wake of neoliberalism, the safety net of federal approaches to address poverty were weakened and welfare reform took hold. This section covers foundational texts examining the underclass concept, critiques of the underclass framework, and exploration of the new poverty studies, and it concludes with texts that examine welfare reform.

The Underclass

The underclass is the term used to describe a class of people so underprivileged that they are excluded from the dominant society. The term was first used by Rainwater 1970 (see Informing Policy), but refined in Auletta 1982 to identify those who are persistently poor. In academe, Wilson 1987 provided sociological substance to the term. Some scholars claim that the rise of the concept and term the underclass replaced culture of poverty because it is less polarizing (Morris 1989). Mincy, et al. 1990 developed a quantifiable definition of the concept, but not all scholars are convinced that the underclass is the equivalent of the culture of poverty; for example, Maxwell 2003 makes this point. Yet, it appears that the term the underclass was more acceptable due to its interpretive and theoretical flexibility as both structuralists and behavioralists are able to use the theory to describe a category of people. By using the term the underclass, attention was redirected away from negative behavioral characteristics toward capturing the way in which people were structurally disadvantaged. The concept was linked to race in many works, for example, Kasarda 1989 identifies the group, the “black underclass” as the ones who will be disadvantaged in terms of inclusion in the service and information sector. Massey 1993 also racializes the underclass in a work in which the author argues that blacks living in urban communities—not Latinos— are members of the underclass. Venkatesh 2006 is a study of the underground economy in which the author notes that characteristics associated with the underclass, such as social isolation, will allow such an economy to flourish.

Auletta, Ken. 1982. The underclass. New York: Overlook Press.
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A journalistic account of the 20% or so who make up the “hardened” members of the underclass in an attempt to gain the characteristics, such as a work ethic, that will allow them to pull themselves out of poverty.
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Kasarda, John D. 1989. Urban industrial transition and the underclass. ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 501.1: 26–47.
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This article posits that as the US economic system changes, the black underclass will be negatively impacted. Lack of education and residential limitations join to make it difficult for underclass blacks in the cities to participate in the information and service sectors.
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Massey, Douglas S. 1993. Latinos, poverty and the underclass: A new agenda for research. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 15.4: 449–475.
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The underclass are racialized in this article, which claims that the model was developed to describe the situation of blacks living in inner cities, not to understand the problems faced by Hispanic groups in the United States.
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Maxwell, Andrew H. 2003. The underclass, social isolation and concentration effects: The culture of poverty revisited. Critique of Anthropology 13.3: 231–245.
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X9301300303Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An examination of Wilson’s conceptualization of the underclass, which has community-level effects, and its differentiation from the culture of poverty, which is based on individual and familial behaviors.
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Mincy, Ronald B., Isabel V. Sawhill, and Douglas A. Wolf. 1990. The underclass: Definition and measurement. Science 248.4954: 450–453.
DOI: 10.1126/science.248.4954.450Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This popular article offers a quantifiable definition of the underclass concept, which the authors argue lacked a clear definition although it is commonly used by journalists and social scientists.
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Morris, Michael. 1989. From the culture of poverty to the underclass: An analysis of a shift in the public language. American Sociologist 20.2: 123–133.
DOI: 10.1007/BF02691850Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article focuses on the decline of the term culture of poverty and the rise in use of the less polemic term underclass.
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Venkatesh, Sudhir. 2006. Off the books: The underground economy of the urban poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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This book examines the flourishing underground economy in a Chicago neighborhood. Venkatesh argues that the economic exchange networks that exist among those engaged in the underground economy will continue to thrive because residents lack human capital, are poor, and are socially isolated.
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Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass and public policy. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Wilson elaborates on Auletta’s term the underclass in an attempt to shift away from the culture of poverty concept. Conceptually the underclass merges structural and cultural analyses of poverty with emphasis on the racial dimensions of poverty.
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Critiques of the “Underclass” Framework

There have been major challenges to the framework of the underclass. Early on, Katz 1993 and Darder 1992 examined the problematic of the inherent power that academics have when labeling subordinate subjects. Smalls and Newman 2001 and Tienda 1989 contribute to the underclass debate by redirecting discussions of poverty as being caused by behavior to structural barriers. Alex-Assensoh 1995 challenges the racialization of the underclass framework as does di Leonardo 1998, which undertakes a critical analysis of how culture of poverty is linked to the underclass. And, like culture of poverty, the underclass has various meanings and implications, an issue taken up in Lister 1996.

Alex-Assensoh, Yvette. 1995. Myths about race and the underclass: Concentrated poverty and underclass behaviors. Urban Affairs Review 31.1: 3–19.
DOI: 10.1177/107808749503100101Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article is based on a study of neighborhood poverty and argues that although underclass behaviors are associated with African Americans, whites and African Americans have similar behaviors.
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Darder, Antonia. 1992. Problematizing the notion of Puerto Ricans as “underclass”: A step toward a decolonizing study of poverty. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 14.1: 144–156.
DOI: 10.1177/07399863920141008Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Article challenges the power relations inherent in labeling subordinate groups such as through use of the term underclass. Argues that poverty research should be grounded in an emancipatory vision of community empowerment.
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di Leonardo, Micaela. 1998. Exotics at home: Anthropologies, others and American modernity. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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A very critical discussion tracing the development of the culture of poverty concept and its rebirth as the “urban underclass.”
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Katz, Michael, ed. 1993. The “underclass”: Views from history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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This edited volume problematizes labeling poor people and historicizes poverty.
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Lister, Ruth. 1996. Charles Murray and the underclass: The developing debate. London: The IEA Health and Welfare Unit in association with the Sunday Times.
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The essays respond to Charles Murray’s two major papers on the underclass in Britain. The authors seek to understand the various meanings of the term and its political and academic implications.
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Smalls, Mario Luis, and Katherine Newman. 2001. Urban poverty after The Truly Disadvantaged: The rediscovery of the family, the neighborhood, and culture. Annual Review of Sociology 27:23–45.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.23Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A critical assessment of the works on urban poverty after Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) (cited under The Underclass) and examines the importance of structural changes in the economy to explain urban poverty.
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Tienda, Marta. 1989. Puerto Ricans and the underclass debate. ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 501.1: 105–119.
DOI: 10.1177/0002716289501001007Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An examination of the structural constraints to Puerto Ricans of economic distress in comparison to that of Mexicans and Cubans.
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The New Poverty Studies

As the term underclass gained currency in the social sciences, neoliberal ideology and practice took root in the sphere of social policy, particularly as it related to welfare programs. Many of the revisions in the welfare state in the 1990s were the result of the confluence of shifts in the economy and deepening disparities between the rich and the poor. The works in this section examine articulations of poverty that are linked to the theoretical lineage of the culture of poverty and the underclass, which many believe led to welfare reform in the first place. These works seek to understand poverty in the context of economic practices and ideology, and to critique the dismantling of the welfare state. Susser 1996 is a very thorough review article in which the author examines the widening social inequality as a cause of poverty. Williams 1992 shows that the pathology embraced as part of the underclass debates is not an accurate depiction. Alternatively, Connolly 2000 examines the representational practices that have fixed discussions about poor mothers. This interesting ethnography explores the intersection of culture and racial dynamics in the lives of poor women. Edin and Lein 1997 offers explanations about the negative interpretations concerning women on welfare. Morgen, et al. 2010 ruminate on the politics of welfare and poverty research as does Goode and Maskovsky 2002, which situate poverty in the context of neoliberalism. Still engaged in the pathology debate, Farmer 2005 and Gunewardena 2009 develop strong arguments against pathological causes of poverty in favor of a structural analysis.

Connolly, Deborah R. 2000. Homeless mothers: Face to face with women in poverty. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
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This ethnography examines the cultural, racial, class, and gender dynamics that influence negative perspectives of homeless mothers.
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Edin, Kathryn, and Laura Lein. 1997. Making ends meet: How single mothers survive welfare and low-wage work. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
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An illuminating interrogation of how women on welfare meet their expenses and the strategies they use to compensate for the low amount of money they receive from welfare.
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Farmer, Paul. 2005. Pathologies of power: Health, human rights and the new war on the poor. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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An insightful alternative framework for understanding the structural and institutional forces that shape poverty using the pathologies of power concept.
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Goode, Judith, and Jeff Maskovsky, eds. 2002. The new poverty studies: The ethnography of power, politics and the impoverished people in the United States. New York: New York Univ. Press.
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This edited volume questions the culture of poverty argument and the pathology that supposedly accompanies it. Instead, it focuses on how poverty is the result of economic restructuring and neoliberal policies.
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Gunewardena, Nandini. 2009. Pathologizing poverty: Structural forces versus personal deficit theories in the feminization of poverty. Journal of Educational Controversy 4.1.
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This article rejects theories of pathology as an explanatory factor of poverty and posits that such arguments mask the various intersections of marginalization that impact the lives of women in general and poor women of color in particular.
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Morgen, Sandra, Joan Acker, and Jill Weigt. 2010. Stretched thin: Poor families, welfare work and welfare reform. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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The book examines how research on poverty and welfare must inquire into the political economy and culture of the late 20th century.
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Susser, Ida. 1996. The construction of poverty and homelessness in US cities. Annual Review of Anthropology 25:411–435.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.25.1.411Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This important review article makes the point that widening social inequalities are the determining factors of poverty.
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Williams, Brett. 1992. Poverty among African Americans in the urban United States. Human Organization 51.2: 164–173.
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This work explores how Wilson’s perspective of pathology is not borne out in her ethnographic research.
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Welfare Reform

Many have argued that the theoretical lineage of the culture of poverty and the underclass led to welfare reforms in the United States. The works in this section examine the politics of welfare reform and its implications. Kingfisher 1996 makes an argument for poor women’s agency in the face of welfare reform. Morgen 2002 explores the politics of doing welfare research, Coelho 2003 explores the politics of control practices in welfare-related institutions. Davis 2006 and Lyon-Callo 2008 turn attention to the nexus between neoliberal ideology and living its policy initiatives.

Coelho, Karen. 2003. Timed out: Temporal struggles between the state and the poor in the context of U.S. welfare reform. Arizona Anthropologist 15:72–98.
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This article argues that the welfare state bureaucracy practices a powerful politics of temporal control in the lives of women receiving public assistance.
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Davis, Dana-Ain. 2006. Battered black women and welfare reform: Between a rock and a hard place. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press.
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An ethnography that challenges the culture of poverty thesis, by examining the structural elements of poverty. Specifically it explores how black women who are battered and living on welfare experience increased economic vulnerability in the face of welfare reform.
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Kingfisher, Catherine. 1996. Women in the American welfare trap. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
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An exploration of men’s role in women’s economic lives, low-wage women’s aspirations, and the possibilities for women to work collectively to change the welfare system.
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Lyon-Callo, Vincent. 2008. Inequality, poverty and neoliberal governance: Activist ethnography in the homeless sheltering industry. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press.
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This ethnography in the tradition of activist anthropology examines the structural violence of systemic dysfunction and neoliberal governance in the lives of homeless people.
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Morgen, Sandra. 2002. The politics of welfare and poverty research. Anthropological Quarterly 75.4: 745–757.
DOI: 10.1353/anq.2002.0063Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An interesting discussion on the gulf between research indicating the negative impact of welfare reform policy and the narrow policy debate and legislative action that has taken place.
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The Return

In January 2009, in a volume in the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Massey and Sampson 2009 reflects on the impact of the Moynihan Report. Small, et al. 2010 examines the culture of poverty concept. In the latter, the editors blame the culture of poverty model and the black family for limiting research on poverty focused on poverty. This special issue notes that scholars began reconsidering culture and poverty after William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (see Wilson 1987 cited under The Underclass), a subject that was reported on in the National Poverty Center 2010. Small, et al. 2010 argues that a new cadre of scholars are willing to reengage with the culture debate, after wresting the term culture from the stronghold held by Lewis (see Lewis 1959, Lewis 1966a, Lewis 1966b cited under Foundational Texts). They argue that attention must be paid to culture and poverty. Cohen 2010 has instigated a public debate about the culture of poverty after the author wrote a New York Times article asserting that culture of poverty was not only the right framework, but also that it had come back into use in the social sciences. In reality, a distinction must be made between a culture of poverty and culture and poverty. The former term depends on a narrow definition of culture as behavior and postulates that those behaviors are the cause of poverty. The latter term does not seem to assume that culture alone is a priori related to poverty, but rather, in the construction of the term, aims to understand if culture and poverty need to be researched in tandem and, if so, how.

Cohen, Patricia. 2010. “Culture of poverty” makes a comeback. New York Times, 17 October.
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The article argues that culture of poverty is viewed as a legitimate framework to understanding poverty, based primarily on sociologists, economists, and political scientists.
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Massey, Douglas S., and Robert J. Sampson. 2009. The Moynihan Report revisited: Lessons and reflections after four decades. ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621.1.
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An edited volume examining the impact of Moynihan’s analysis with several articles that update the tangle of pathology perspective in the context of the current economy. Also available as a published book titled The Moynihan Report revisited: Lessons and reflections after four decades (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2009).
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National Poverty Center. 2010. Reconsidering culture and poverty. National Poverty Center, Policy Brief no.21. June.
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A summary of academic research findings that have implications for policy.
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Small, Mario Luis, Davis Harding, and Michele Lamont, eds. 2010. Reconsidering culture and poverty. ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 629.1.
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This edited volume makes the case that theoretically informed and empirically grounded study of culture should be a permanent feature of poverty research.
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Steinberg, Stephen. 2011 Poor reason: Culture still doesn’t explain poverty. Boston Review, 31 January.
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This response to both Cohen 2010 and Small, et al. 2010 argues that, while many are concerned that culture has been erased from poverty discourse, racism and poverty have been erased from political discourse.