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Old Tuesday, May 05, 2020
Aleeha Sheikh Aleeha Sheikh is offline
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The culture of poverty concept was developed in the USA during the 1960s primarily through the best- selling ethnographic realist publications of the cultural anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who tape-recorded eloquent life histories of the urban poor. He reprinted numerous versions of his definition of the term ‘culture of poverty’ in short journal articles and also in the introductions to his books on family life among Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans living in shanty towns and ghettos (Lewis, 1961, 1966a,b, 1967). Lewis’s culture of poverty struck an academic identity politics nerve, and at the turn of the millennium the concept remained enmired in a bitter polemic over how to analyze and engage politically the persistence of poverty in the midst of postindustrial plenty.

The Cultural Deprivation or Culture of Poverty Explanation
Cultural deprivation and culture of poverty theorists believe that low-income students achieve poorly in school because the socialization in their families and communities does not equip them with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and cultural capital essential for academic success in mainstream society. Unlike genetic theorists such as Herrnstein and Murray (1994), who believe that low-income students and ethnic-minority students do not achieve well in school because of their genes, these theorists believe that low-income students can achieve if they are provided with early childhood experiences that will compensate for their family and community socialization.

A cultural deprivation curriculum intervention prototype is the DISTAR program developed by Bereiter and Englemann (1966). It is designed to help low-income students develop reading and writing skills using behavioral modification teaching techniques. The Culturally Deprived Child by Riessman (1962) was an influential book that exemplifies the cultural deprivation explanation. The culture of poverty concept is epitomized in La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty by Lewis (1965). The cultural deprivation and culture of poverty explanation has re-emerged today as ‘children at risk.’

Critics of the cultural deprivation/culture of poverty explanation describe how it essentializes the characteristics of specific groups, blames the victims for their marginalized status, and does not focus on the ways in which these groups are victims of political and socioeconomic structures. It focuses on changing students rather than changing schools or the sociopolitical structure.

Culture of Poverty: Critique
While the phrase ‘culture of poverty’ is firmly associated with Oscar Lewis' work, as well as with the policies of the Johnson era, it can easily be placed in a long tradition of conceptualizing the poor and imagining policies to help and control them. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Malthus and Mayhew had provided the intellectual justification for viewing poverty as a problem to be controlled (Himmelfarb, 1971, 1983). They developed many of the methods and starting points later embraced by Lewis. This included descriptive statistics of the distribution of ‘traits’ (rate of prostitution, alcoholism, unwed motherhood, etc.) across populations and correlations often interpreted as causations. This paralleled much nineteenth-century social theory purporting to explain other differences in human populations on biological or evolutionary bases.

This content is copied from sciencedirect. I have shared this beacuse I found it useful and it is explained well.
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