Rewriting Class, Culture, Colonialism, and the “Culture of Poverty”: Ethnographic Work by Eleanor Leacock, 1959-1980

• In Event: The Culture of Poverty: Pity and Self-Critique in Confrontations With Poverty and School Failure, 1959-2013

Abstract

Objectives:

This paper traces the development of a critique of “culture of poverty” across the writings of cultural anthropologist Eleanor Leacock. Like many liberal scholars of her time, Leacock was drawn to cultural analyses as a shift away from biological racism. However, she became troubled with how the “culture of poverty” frame reproduced pejorative, ahistorical interpretations of poverty and educational “underachievement,” and with concomitant portraits social scientists painted of poor children and communities. For the next twenty years, Leacock (1967; 1977; 1972; 1980; 1981) worked to problematize a powerful set of dichotomies: middle vs. lower class culture, civilized vs. primitive, achievement vs. underachievement, abstract vs. concrete language, and “we” vs. “they.” In so doing, she sought to theorize “difference” and its relationship to educational “success” and “failure” outside a framework of deficiency. By retracing Leacock's analytic footsteps and building upon her work with examples from our own ethnographic research, we seek to unearth conceptual and methodological tools fit for contemporary debates on educational policy and practice.
Theoretical Framework:

As ethnographers and theorists of learning, we ground our analysis in educational anthropology (Erickson, 1984; 1986; McDermott 1997; Spindler, 2000) and cultural psychology (Cole, 1996; Cole & Griffin, 1983). These traditions challenge deficit orientations by studying human activity on its own cultural terms, and situating learning in social and historical context.

Data and Method:

Treating Leacock's texts and ethnographic examples as rich sources of data, we trace her questions and arguments over time. We analyze how Leacock revises concepts of class, culture, race, poverty, gender, intelligence, colonialism and modernization. We then bring these concepts into conversation with contemporary problems of theory and method, and with empirical examples from our own research with students and families from low-income backgrounds, including Latina immigrant mothers and African American, Latino/a and Asian American youth in an afterschool science and arts program.

Findings:

Through this lens, Leacock’s dichotomies transform from a collection of fixed, self-evident categories into a set of social relations ripe for analysis. Her ethnographic work illustrates how the “culture of poverty” obscures the “contradictory” functions of schooling and the structural nature of a system that socializes children for particular social and economic roles (1969) and impels us to critically analyze the dominant norms held up as standards of culture and intelligence (1968). Leacock (1981) challenges us to confront the social message that “people who suffer oppression do so because they have neither the ability, the intention, nor the desire to rebel” or change their socioeconomic situation (p. 3). We conclude with a discussion of the resources Leacock offers for developing more innovative and historically grounded inquiries on culture, education, and poverty.

Significance:

Of particular significance to the goals of this panel, her inquiries impel educational researchers to consider the political and ideological functions of the “culture of poverty” concept and to include our own complicities and assumptions as objects of analysis within any study of culture. Her insights help formulate a critical (and self-critical) response to the current resurgence of “culture and poverty” discourse.

Authors

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

• Katherine Rodela, Washington State University