Reclaiming “Culture”: Critiquing the “Culture of Poverty” and “Culture and Poverty” Research Agendas

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

Abstract

Objectives:

This paper will place recent “culture and poverty” (Harding, Small and Lamont 2010; Wilson 2010; Lamont 2006) research into historical context by reading it against the foundational “culture of poverty” texts (Thomas and Znaniecki 1918-1922; Frazier 1939; Lewis 1959-1966; Deutsch 1960). In doing so, similarities in the operationalization of "culture" as an analytic category in the respective programs will be explicated and critiqued, and the policy implications of the current call to put culture and poverty "back on the research agenda" will be worked through.

Theoretical Framework:

A critical analysis of the category "culture" as deployed in the work of Lewis (1966) and Harding, Small and Lamont (2010) will be undertaken by way of a comparative analysis of the texts key to the respective programs. The critical frame through which analysis will flow is anchored in the processual conception of culture originating in Boasian anthropology, which takes as its starting point not the mental state of individuals, but the coordinated bundle of social relations required to create and maintain a state such as "poverty."

Data Sources & Method:

Data will be drawn from the theoretical texts comprising the conceptual development and operational justifications for the “traits that characterized the culture of poverty” (Lewis 1966) and the “seven different concepts—values, frames, repertoires, narratives, symbolic boundaries, cultural capital, and institutions”—identified by Small, Harding and Lamont (2010) in framing their program of research into “culture and poverty”: texts purporting to explain, not simply describe, the transmission and continuation of poverty.

Findings:

The continuity between “culture of poverty” and “culture and poverty” points to unexamined continuities between the respective programs in narrowly operationalizing “culture” as an analytic category working in the minds and habits of isolated and impoverished individuals. Through a comparison with the Boasian tradition the limitations and dangers of operationalizing culture will be demonstrated and a new conceptualization taking into account the complex interactions of the ensemble of actors and materials required to create and maintain the state of “poverty” will be put forward.

Significance:

In sum, the recent call to "put poverty back on the research agenda" reproduces the same mistake(s) that plagued culture of poverty research. It is imperative that new concepts are developed within educational research to capture the complexity and contingency of social relations. Moving the locus of our inquiry from the mental state of autonomous individuals to the ensemble of actors and materials, which create and maintain states such as "poverty," can move us from a state of pity to the possibility of positive change.

Authors

• Michael Scroggins

• Herve Varenne, Columbia University