The following is something I wrote for the blog I keep for a course I teach, "Peoples and Cultures of the World." I wrote it in response to an in-class discussion I had with students, but I thought it might be interesting here, too:
In “Love Unites Them and Hunger Separates Them,” Susan Brown’s mid-1970s study of family organizational patterns and women’s agency in rural, impoverished sectors of the Dominican Republic (from the collection Toward an Anthropology of Women), Brown argues that many of the choices made by women regarding their households (such as to enter into serial monogamous relationships in a matrifocal household, rather than the more highly valued formal marriage) were not irrational or dysfunctional as they had often been represented by earlier (mostly male) scholars, but involved rational choices to make the best of things in the context of extreme poverty.
Men in this poverty sector don’t come off looking so good in Brown’s account. They seem mainly a lot of drinking, gambling, philandering, cock-fighting, macho lay-abouts. The main criticism I have of Brown here is the lack of a sense of proportion. We’re left with no sense of whether this description characterizes all, most, many, or few of the actual men. Still, it seems from the impressions of women and the choices they make that we’re talking about some sizeable number of men that could be so described, regardless of their proportion to the larger set of men in general.
Part of this pattern, which I’ll simply call “irresponsibility,” lacking a more convenient label, can no doubt be written down to the effects of coping with the physical and mental stresses of extreme poverty, and not always coping in the most functional way possible.
I’d like also to suggest, though, that, just as with Brown’s arguments that women are making choices that may seem superficially dysfunctional but are actually functional in the circumstances, despite the apparent and obvious dysfunctionality of much of what many of the men are doing, for at least some, there may be a rational and functional strategy at play.
It’s useful to keep in mind some of the dynamics of Latin American peasant communities. Eric Wolf described two basic types of Latin American peasant communities (as well as several other minor varieties): the closed and open peasant communities.
A closed peasant community is definitely not what we’re dealing with with Brown’s study community. Closed communities tend to occur in highly isolated areas, e.g. in rugged rural terrain in places like Mexico or Peru. While not completely isolated from regional market systems and state intervention (or else they’d be “subsistence farmers” and not “peasants”), they produce primarily for their own subsistence and tend to promote an ideology of social harmony and equality within the community (but see also the enormous literature focusing on such communities and relation between harmony ideology and practice, the idea of limited good and social equality and tension, etc.).
Open peasant communities, as the name suggests, are more “open,” specifically more open to regional, national, and even global economic networks. Making a living more often involves a combination of subsistence farming, small cash crop farming, and wage labor when it’s available. (With the irregularity of wage work typical in such contexts, many men are “shifty” in part because they must always be “shifting.”) Social inequality, and the open expression of it, is also more part of community life than in closed communities.
The route to upward mobility, even slight improvement of livelihood, is difficult, especially in an environment when, especially prior to Grameen Bank and the micro-loan experiment, access to external capital (to buy another plot of land to farm, to buy a truck, etc.) is generally absent.
The route to upward mobility, at the same time, is fairly clear for men – to cultivate loyalty among other men of the community so that one can draw on their labor (in capitalist terms, to be able to extract surplus value from their labor). How is this done? Largely through active socializing, buying drinks generously, and a variety of other “irresponsible” activities – a strategy that will inevitably fail for most, often at the price of deepening poverty, but that for a few is not only not a dysfunctional strategy, but one of the few that will pay off in expanded production and an enhanced standard of living.
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Monday, February 25, 2008
Thursday, July 19, 2007
A Review of Recent News on the Web
Globalization, Protectionism, and the Global Poor
In an insightful article in Prospect Magazine, “Protecting the Global Poor,” Ha-Joon Chang argues that developed countries’ push toward global free trade may increase total economic development, but without necessarily doing a lot to alleviate poverty in developing countries. Chang gives a useful overview of the past few centuries’ economic history and the role of protectionism in the economic development of almost all of the currently developed countries’ histories. For anyone who’s read much economic history or world systems theory, this will be review, but a concise and nicely written review.
Importantly, Chang is not against globalization and increased trading among all countries. He recognizes that trade is critical for economic development and that economic development is necessary, if not sufficient, for the alleviation of poverty. It’s just that Chang also recognizes that unfettered free trade tends to disproportionately benefit more developed and wealthier nations. It’s no coincidence that the British were protectionists when the Dutch were the dominant mercantile power and became free-traders after becoming the dominant economic power themselves.
Chang also usefully points out a rhetorical strategy often employed by free-trade advocates, which is to conflate opposition to free trade in some form or another with opposition to trade generally. Chang writes:
“But there is a huge difference between saying that trade is essential for economic development and saying that free trade is best. It is this sleight of hand that free-trade economists have so effectively deployed against their opponents—if you are against free trade, they imply, you must be against trade itself, and so against economic progress.”
Mexican Cuisine
I’ve recently encountered two interesting articles on Mexican food. The first, “Mexico’s long chilli (sic) love affair,” reports on recent archaeological findings of systematic use of chiles in Mexican cooking at least 1500 years ago. As the article points out, the cultivation of chiles implies a well developed tradition of seasoning and cookery. (There is some research indicating possible antiseptic qualities to chiles, but as food, chiles are grown more as seasoning than for caloric sustenance.) The finding of use of both dried and fresh chiles indicates familiarity with the distinct quality of chiles in different preparations, and to me implies even longer familiarity and use of chiles than is directly indicated by the archaeological evidence.
The second article, “A Crash Course in Mexico’s Varied Cuisine,” simply presents a savory overview of “Mexico’s varied cuisine.” For those only passingly familiar with Mexican food, much less its regional diversity, there will probably be several surprises. For those who are familiar with Mexico’s regional cuisines, there probably won’t be any surprises – but if you’re thoroughly familiar with the range of regional cuisine diversity in Mexico or anywhere else, you probably like reading about food like I do.
Burying the N-Word
A week or so ago, the NAACP held a mock funeral to bury the “N-word.” In my local newspaper, The Pensacola News Journal, columnist Reginald Dogan presented his response to this event in “NAACP campaign to ‘bury’ N-word overlooks the bigger picture.”
Dogan writes:
“I wasn't as troubled by the mock funeral to bury a word as I was by NAACP officials saying ending the use of the N-word is one of their main goals.
“I cannot believe that of the myriad problems facing black people in America, the NAACP sees the N-word as the root of all troubles.”
See also Dogan’s follow-up column, “Racism is not the cause of all ills that plague black people.”
Florida and Climate Change
Also about a week ago, Florida’s governor made surprising announcements regarding plans for the state on energy and carbon emissions. An article in Grist magazine summarizes the announcement:
“His plans include adopting California's strict vehicle-emissions law, making Florida the first Southeast state to go that route; calling for a 40 percent reduction in statewide greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025; and requiring state agencies to prioritize fuel efficiency when buying or renting vehicles and to hold events in facilities certified as green by the state Department of Environmental Protection. Crist is also asking state utilities to produce 20 percent of their power from renewables, and creating a Florida Governor's Action Team on Energy and Climate Change.”
Optimal Foraging
An article on Science Daily, “Monkeys don’t go for easy pickings,” has the following to say:
“Animals’ natural foraging decisions give an insight into their cognitive abilities, and primates do not automatically choose the easy option. Instead, they appear to decide where to feed based on the quality of the resources available and the effect on their social group, rather than simply selecting the nearest food available.”
In other words, monkeys at least do not simply always forage the closest resources, but also forage partly on the basis of nutritional quality of food resources. That alone is easily understood in terms of something like optimal foraging theory. What I find particularly interesting is that monkeys seem to take into account non-nutritional qualities of food resources, specifically potential social effects (presumably things like the different effects likely to result from foraging fruits that are large but less common versus smaller but more common and dispersed), when selecting foraging strategies. This could also be understood in terms of optimal foraging – it’s just that what’s “optimal” becomes a bit more complex to include factors in addition to use of physical space and nutritional qualities of foods.
In an insightful article in Prospect Magazine, “Protecting the Global Poor,” Ha-Joon Chang argues that developed countries’ push toward global free trade may increase total economic development, but without necessarily doing a lot to alleviate poverty in developing countries. Chang gives a useful overview of the past few centuries’ economic history and the role of protectionism in the economic development of almost all of the currently developed countries’ histories. For anyone who’s read much economic history or world systems theory, this will be review, but a concise and nicely written review.
Importantly, Chang is not against globalization and increased trading among all countries. He recognizes that trade is critical for economic development and that economic development is necessary, if not sufficient, for the alleviation of poverty. It’s just that Chang also recognizes that unfettered free trade tends to disproportionately benefit more developed and wealthier nations. It’s no coincidence that the British were protectionists when the Dutch were the dominant mercantile power and became free-traders after becoming the dominant economic power themselves.
Chang also usefully points out a rhetorical strategy often employed by free-trade advocates, which is to conflate opposition to free trade in some form or another with opposition to trade generally. Chang writes:
“But there is a huge difference between saying that trade is essential for economic development and saying that free trade is best. It is this sleight of hand that free-trade economists have so effectively deployed against their opponents—if you are against free trade, they imply, you must be against trade itself, and so against economic progress.”
Mexican Cuisine
I’ve recently encountered two interesting articles on Mexican food. The first, “Mexico’s long chilli (sic) love affair,” reports on recent archaeological findings of systematic use of chiles in Mexican cooking at least 1500 years ago. As the article points out, the cultivation of chiles implies a well developed tradition of seasoning and cookery. (There is some research indicating possible antiseptic qualities to chiles, but as food, chiles are grown more as seasoning than for caloric sustenance.) The finding of use of both dried and fresh chiles indicates familiarity with the distinct quality of chiles in different preparations, and to me implies even longer familiarity and use of chiles than is directly indicated by the archaeological evidence.
The second article, “A Crash Course in Mexico’s Varied Cuisine,” simply presents a savory overview of “Mexico’s varied cuisine.” For those only passingly familiar with Mexican food, much less its regional diversity, there will probably be several surprises. For those who are familiar with Mexico’s regional cuisines, there probably won’t be any surprises – but if you’re thoroughly familiar with the range of regional cuisine diversity in Mexico or anywhere else, you probably like reading about food like I do.
Burying the N-Word
A week or so ago, the NAACP held a mock funeral to bury the “N-word.” In my local newspaper, The Pensacola News Journal, columnist Reginald Dogan presented his response to this event in “NAACP campaign to ‘bury’ N-word overlooks the bigger picture.”
Dogan writes:
“I wasn't as troubled by the mock funeral to bury a word as I was by NAACP officials saying ending the use of the N-word is one of their main goals.
“I cannot believe that of the myriad problems facing black people in America, the NAACP sees the N-word as the root of all troubles.”
See also Dogan’s follow-up column, “Racism is not the cause of all ills that plague black people.”
Florida and Climate Change
Also about a week ago, Florida’s governor made surprising announcements regarding plans for the state on energy and carbon emissions. An article in Grist magazine summarizes the announcement:
“His plans include adopting California's strict vehicle-emissions law, making Florida the first Southeast state to go that route; calling for a 40 percent reduction in statewide greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025; and requiring state agencies to prioritize fuel efficiency when buying or renting vehicles and to hold events in facilities certified as green by the state Department of Environmental Protection. Crist is also asking state utilities to produce 20 percent of their power from renewables, and creating a Florida Governor's Action Team on Energy and Climate Change.”
Optimal Foraging
An article on Science Daily, “Monkeys don’t go for easy pickings,” has the following to say:
“Animals’ natural foraging decisions give an insight into their cognitive abilities, and primates do not automatically choose the easy option. Instead, they appear to decide where to feed based on the quality of the resources available and the effect on their social group, rather than simply selecting the nearest food available.”
In other words, monkeys at least do not simply always forage the closest resources, but also forage partly on the basis of nutritional quality of food resources. That alone is easily understood in terms of something like optimal foraging theory. What I find particularly interesting is that monkeys seem to take into account non-nutritional qualities of food resources, specifically potential social effects (presumably things like the different effects likely to result from foraging fruits that are large but less common versus smaller but more common and dispersed), when selecting foraging strategies. This could also be understood in terms of optimal foraging – it’s just that what’s “optimal” becomes a bit more complex to include factors in addition to use of physical space and nutritional qualities of foods.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Urban Popular Movements (UPMs) and Cultures of Poverty
In my post from two days ago, I ended with the following two paragraphs:
“Matthew Gutmann’s fine ethnography The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City has as its main setting the colonia community of Santo Domingo. (A colonia is an urban squatter community, typically on the edge of a major city, such as Mexico City. Initially, colonias represent communities with truly dire conditions of poverty, with housing improvised out of materials at hand, generally unpaved streets, and a lack of even basic utility services. Over time, if not subject to mass eviction and elimination of the colonia, such settlements do tend to improve at least a bit, with individual residents and families improving their housing bit by bit, tapping into utilities, often illegally at first and gradually through legal means, having streets paved, and acquiring legal title to land.) Santo Domingo, though still known as a colonia, was at the time of Gutmann’s field work in the early 1990s a well established community in Mexico City – while it was once on the outskirts of town, further squatter settlement had long since surrounded it. It was also a community with relatively formalized infrastructure. What had brought this about, and what seems in part to have kept the colonia from developing a culture of poverty, even though poverty was an element of day to day life, was a strong tradition of community activism and the presence of UPMs.
“‘Urban Popular Movement’ is used in the social science literature to refer to a variety of social movements. Some are oriented toward very specific issues, such as paving roads in a community, improving a water supply, or building a school, others toward improving conditions of a community generally or of addressing important social justice issues, such as women’s rights or combating police violence. Though the terminology could be applied to other world areas, UPM usually refers to Latin American social movements, with the main thing in common being their urban orientation and the fact that these are grassroots organized movements. UPMs have played an important role in the economic and infrastructural development of Santo Domingo, and while they have by no means eliminated poverty, the UPMs (and the fact that many of the residents of the community seem to be the sort who join UPMs) seems to have inhibited the development of a culture of poverty.”
Here I ask, what is the relationship between some urban impoverished communities and the development of UPMs or some similar mechanism providing for a sense of belonging and collective action (with its combination of social and psychological benefits) and the lack of a culture of poverty?
A pessimistic interpretation would simply chalk up Santo Domingo as a statistical fluke. Mexico City is a huge metropolis, currently the second largest city in the world and growing. Over the past several decades, there have been countless squatter settlements-turned-urban-slums like Santo Domingo. With any large sample, we expect to find a few exceptions, and that could be what Santo Domingo represents (this is a case where more community by community ethnographic study is needed), an unusual case where at the start of the community, a cluster of people with the right qualities and aptitudes might have been in place to keep things going in terms of community action, and as a result a community where despite endemic poverty, the malaise of a culture of poverty never took root.
At the same time, UPMs seem too prominent in Latin America to be simply the result of statistical anomalies. UPMs sprung up in a number of countries in Latin America in great numbers during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and were an outgrowth of a number of factors, including rapid economic growth and transformation in much of the region, entailing large scale urbanization (e.g. the fact that Mexico City is today the world’s second largest city is the result of this) and a massive transition from rural to urban life, but without corresponding private or public investment in new affordable housing and other urban infrastructure for the millions of urban in-migrants. One result of these changes was colonia development, with countless new urbanites living in squalid conditions on the outskirts of virtually every major Latin American city.
In many, if not most, cases, a culture of poverty was also something that developed, but given that the people moving to these new settlements were active agents in their own right, individuals who were taking it upon themselves to try to improve their lives by their movements to urban areas, the particular combination of agitators, go-getters, altruists, and individuals simply trying ambitiously to improve the situation for themselves and their families that Gutmann writes about in Santo Domingo might be expected to have occurred with some frequency. The tragedy, perhaps, is that UPMs were not even more common, with this testament to the negative power of grinding poverty – and of course the repressive nature of most Latin American governments during the same period.
“Matthew Gutmann’s fine ethnography The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City has as its main setting the colonia community of Santo Domingo. (A colonia is an urban squatter community, typically on the edge of a major city, such as Mexico City. Initially, colonias represent communities with truly dire conditions of poverty, with housing improvised out of materials at hand, generally unpaved streets, and a lack of even basic utility services. Over time, if not subject to mass eviction and elimination of the colonia, such settlements do tend to improve at least a bit, with individual residents and families improving their housing bit by bit, tapping into utilities, often illegally at first and gradually through legal means, having streets paved, and acquiring legal title to land.) Santo Domingo, though still known as a colonia, was at the time of Gutmann’s field work in the early 1990s a well established community in Mexico City – while it was once on the outskirts of town, further squatter settlement had long since surrounded it. It was also a community with relatively formalized infrastructure. What had brought this about, and what seems in part to have kept the colonia from developing a culture of poverty, even though poverty was an element of day to day life, was a strong tradition of community activism and the presence of UPMs.
“‘Urban Popular Movement’ is used in the social science literature to refer to a variety of social movements. Some are oriented toward very specific issues, such as paving roads in a community, improving a water supply, or building a school, others toward improving conditions of a community generally or of addressing important social justice issues, such as women’s rights or combating police violence. Though the terminology could be applied to other world areas, UPM usually refers to Latin American social movements, with the main thing in common being their urban orientation and the fact that these are grassroots organized movements. UPMs have played an important role in the economic and infrastructural development of Santo Domingo, and while they have by no means eliminated poverty, the UPMs (and the fact that many of the residents of the community seem to be the sort who join UPMs) seems to have inhibited the development of a culture of poverty.”
Here I ask, what is the relationship between some urban impoverished communities and the development of UPMs or some similar mechanism providing for a sense of belonging and collective action (with its combination of social and psychological benefits) and the lack of a culture of poverty?
A pessimistic interpretation would simply chalk up Santo Domingo as a statistical fluke. Mexico City is a huge metropolis, currently the second largest city in the world and growing. Over the past several decades, there have been countless squatter settlements-turned-urban-slums like Santo Domingo. With any large sample, we expect to find a few exceptions, and that could be what Santo Domingo represents (this is a case where more community by community ethnographic study is needed), an unusual case where at the start of the community, a cluster of people with the right qualities and aptitudes might have been in place to keep things going in terms of community action, and as a result a community where despite endemic poverty, the malaise of a culture of poverty never took root.
At the same time, UPMs seem too prominent in Latin America to be simply the result of statistical anomalies. UPMs sprung up in a number of countries in Latin America in great numbers during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and were an outgrowth of a number of factors, including rapid economic growth and transformation in much of the region, entailing large scale urbanization (e.g. the fact that Mexico City is today the world’s second largest city is the result of this) and a massive transition from rural to urban life, but without corresponding private or public investment in new affordable housing and other urban infrastructure for the millions of urban in-migrants. One result of these changes was colonia development, with countless new urbanites living in squalid conditions on the outskirts of virtually every major Latin American city.
In many, if not most, cases, a culture of poverty was also something that developed, but given that the people moving to these new settlements were active agents in their own right, individuals who were taking it upon themselves to try to improve their lives by their movements to urban areas, the particular combination of agitators, go-getters, altruists, and individuals simply trying ambitiously to improve the situation for themselves and their families that Gutmann writes about in Santo Domingo might be expected to have occurred with some frequency. The tragedy, perhaps, is that UPMs were not even more common, with this testament to the negative power of grinding poverty – and of course the repressive nature of most Latin American governments during the same period.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Poverty without a Culture of Poverty
Following my previous post, I would here emphasize that “poverty” and “culture of poverty” are not synonymous, that a culture of poverty is one possible development as people attempt to adapt to conditions of extreme and persistent impoverishment. But the subcultural patterns of a culture of poverty (including present-time orientation with little future orientation, the emotional and physical grind to meet basic needs and the stresses resulting from that, social anomie and lack of real hope for a better future, often high rates of substance use and abuse, what Philippe Bourgois called a “culture of violence” in reference to parts of Spanish Harlem in his ethnography In Search of Respect, etc.) are not the only possible developments in contexts of poverty.
In La Vida (pp. xlviii – l), Oscar Lewis discussed four examples of social settings in which people lived in extreme poverty, but where a culture of poverty had not developed. He argues first that in most of the small scale “primitive” societies anthropologists have often studied (cultures in which people live through foraging or small scale cultivation), people live in physical poverty in an absolute sense, with very little in the way of material wealth, and often with little accumulated food surplus. They don’t constitute a subculture at all, though, much less one in relative poverty to a larger society. Instead, individuals have a strong sense of belonging to a well integrated and fully functioning society. This hasn’t precluded the development of cultures of poverty among such peoples over the last century and a half or so as many of them have been incorporated forcibly into larger state societies, turning them into no longer fully functioning, distinct subcultures living in both absolute and relative poverty (the social malaise of many Native American reservations in North America is a good example of this).
Lewis’ second and third examples concern distinct subcultures that were distinctly poor (lower caste Indians in villages in mid-twentieth century India when Lewis encountered them ethnographically, and Jews of Eastern Europe [up through the mid-twentieth century Holocaust – though Lewis doesn’t mention this – the communities he speaks of being obliterated at that time]) but which did not have a culture of poverty. The two cases have a number of things in common. First, the examples Lewis discusses involve distinct subcultural groups in rural or small community settings, rather than impoverished communities in vast and largely anonymous urban slums (Lewis in fact mentions the possibility of cultures of poverty seeming to be in development in Calcutta and Bombay at the time of the writing of La Vida). Second, these both involve groups seen as distinct and seeing themselves as distinct, but also providing a sense of belonging within the group for their members (the religion and common schooling for Eastern European Jews, unilineal clans for lower caste Indian villagers), mitigating against the malaise and anomie so often an important part of a culture of poverty. Finally, while extremely poor, both groups had at least some collective influence over the larger community, through the high quality of education and literacy, as well as voluntary associations for Eastern European Jews, through the panchayat, or formal caste organization, which provided local leadership and some collective influence for even lower caste Indians, at least in small villages.
Lewis presented his fourth example as a speculative and tentative one, Cuba after the revolution. Having visited a slum in Havana before the revolution, Lewis writes, “After the Castro Revolution I made my second trip to Cuba as a correspondent for a major magazine, and I revisited the same slum and some of the same families. The physical aspect of the slum had changed very little, except for a beautiful new nursery school. It was clear that the people were still desperately poor, but I found much less of the despair, apathy and hopelessness which are so diagnostic of urban slums in the culture of poverty. They expressed great confidence in their leaders and hope for a better life in the future. The slum itself was now highly organized, with block committees, educational committees, party committees. The people had a new sense of power and importance.” While I’m wary of the picture Lewis paints here, wary in particular of whether what he encountered in Havana on his second trip was a sort of “Potemkin Village” show for the visiting, sympathetic scholar, and while I certainly have no illusion that Cuba has achieved a socialist paradise, given everything I’ve read about the Caribbean, when comparing Cuba to other islands of the Greater Antilles, the features associated with a culture of poverty seem much less prevalent even in impoverished conditions in Cuba than in Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, or even Puerto Rico.
But poverty in a large urban area without the development of a culture of poverty is possible even without a socialist revolution. (Then again, the example I’m about to discuss is in Mexico City, and the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century was a socialist revolution of a sort, though it’s no longer particularly recent and not a Marxist socialist revolution. It is likely, though, that widespread education in Mexico emphasizing the virtues of the Mexican Revolution, as well as the post-revolutionary ideal of an effective social welfare state [even if not always well instantiated in practice], have shaped all Mexicans’ expectations and have facilitated the development of Urban Popular Movements [UPMs] there.)
Matthew Gutmann’s fine ethnography The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City has as its main setting the colonia community of Santo Domingo. (A colonia is an urban squatter community, typically on the edge of a major city, such as Mexico City. Initially, colonias represent communities with truly dire conditions of poverty, with housing improvised out of materials at hand, generally unpaved streets, and a lack of even basic utility services. Over time, if not subject to mass eviction and elimination of the colonia, such settlements do tend to improve at least a bit, with individual residents and families improving their housing bit by bit, tapping into utilities, often illegally at first and gradually through legal means, having streets paved, and acquiring legal title to land.) Santo Domingo, though still known as a colonia, was at the time of Gutmann’s field work in the early 1990s a well established community in Mexico City – while it was once on the outskirts of town, further squatter settlement had long since surrounded it. It was also a community with relatively formalized infrastructure. What had brought this about, and what seems in part to have kept the colonia from developing a culture of poverty, even though poverty was an element of day to day life, was a strong tradition of community activism and the presence of UPMs.
“Urban Popular Movement” is used in the social science literature to refer to a variety of social movements. Some are oriented toward very specific issues, such as paving roads in a community, improving a water supply, or building a school, others toward improving conditions of a community generally or of addressing important social justice issues, such as women’s rights or combating police violence. Though the terminology could be applied to other world areas, UPM usually refers to Latin American social movements, with the main thing in common being their urban orientation and the fact that these are grassroots organized movements. UPMs have played an important role in the economic and infrastructural development of Santo Domingo, and while they have by no means eliminated poverty, the UPMs (and the fact that many of the residents of the community seem to be the sort who join UPMs) seems to have inhibited the development of a culture of poverty.
In La Vida (pp. xlviii – l), Oscar Lewis discussed four examples of social settings in which people lived in extreme poverty, but where a culture of poverty had not developed. He argues first that in most of the small scale “primitive” societies anthropologists have often studied (cultures in which people live through foraging or small scale cultivation), people live in physical poverty in an absolute sense, with very little in the way of material wealth, and often with little accumulated food surplus. They don’t constitute a subculture at all, though, much less one in relative poverty to a larger society. Instead, individuals have a strong sense of belonging to a well integrated and fully functioning society. This hasn’t precluded the development of cultures of poverty among such peoples over the last century and a half or so as many of them have been incorporated forcibly into larger state societies, turning them into no longer fully functioning, distinct subcultures living in both absolute and relative poverty (the social malaise of many Native American reservations in North America is a good example of this).
Lewis’ second and third examples concern distinct subcultures that were distinctly poor (lower caste Indians in villages in mid-twentieth century India when Lewis encountered them ethnographically, and Jews of Eastern Europe [up through the mid-twentieth century Holocaust – though Lewis doesn’t mention this – the communities he speaks of being obliterated at that time]) but which did not have a culture of poverty. The two cases have a number of things in common. First, the examples Lewis discusses involve distinct subcultural groups in rural or small community settings, rather than impoverished communities in vast and largely anonymous urban slums (Lewis in fact mentions the possibility of cultures of poverty seeming to be in development in Calcutta and Bombay at the time of the writing of La Vida). Second, these both involve groups seen as distinct and seeing themselves as distinct, but also providing a sense of belonging within the group for their members (the religion and common schooling for Eastern European Jews, unilineal clans for lower caste Indian villagers), mitigating against the malaise and anomie so often an important part of a culture of poverty. Finally, while extremely poor, both groups had at least some collective influence over the larger community, through the high quality of education and literacy, as well as voluntary associations for Eastern European Jews, through the panchayat, or formal caste organization, which provided local leadership and some collective influence for even lower caste Indians, at least in small villages.
Lewis presented his fourth example as a speculative and tentative one, Cuba after the revolution. Having visited a slum in Havana before the revolution, Lewis writes, “After the Castro Revolution I made my second trip to Cuba as a correspondent for a major magazine, and I revisited the same slum and some of the same families. The physical aspect of the slum had changed very little, except for a beautiful new nursery school. It was clear that the people were still desperately poor, but I found much less of the despair, apathy and hopelessness which are so diagnostic of urban slums in the culture of poverty. They expressed great confidence in their leaders and hope for a better life in the future. The slum itself was now highly organized, with block committees, educational committees, party committees. The people had a new sense of power and importance.” While I’m wary of the picture Lewis paints here, wary in particular of whether what he encountered in Havana on his second trip was a sort of “Potemkin Village” show for the visiting, sympathetic scholar, and while I certainly have no illusion that Cuba has achieved a socialist paradise, given everything I’ve read about the Caribbean, when comparing Cuba to other islands of the Greater Antilles, the features associated with a culture of poverty seem much less prevalent even in impoverished conditions in Cuba than in Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, or even Puerto Rico.
But poverty in a large urban area without the development of a culture of poverty is possible even without a socialist revolution. (Then again, the example I’m about to discuss is in Mexico City, and the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century was a socialist revolution of a sort, though it’s no longer particularly recent and not a Marxist socialist revolution. It is likely, though, that widespread education in Mexico emphasizing the virtues of the Mexican Revolution, as well as the post-revolutionary ideal of an effective social welfare state [even if not always well instantiated in practice], have shaped all Mexicans’ expectations and have facilitated the development of Urban Popular Movements [UPMs] there.)
Matthew Gutmann’s fine ethnography The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City has as its main setting the colonia community of Santo Domingo. (A colonia is an urban squatter community, typically on the edge of a major city, such as Mexico City. Initially, colonias represent communities with truly dire conditions of poverty, with housing improvised out of materials at hand, generally unpaved streets, and a lack of even basic utility services. Over time, if not subject to mass eviction and elimination of the colonia, such settlements do tend to improve at least a bit, with individual residents and families improving their housing bit by bit, tapping into utilities, often illegally at first and gradually through legal means, having streets paved, and acquiring legal title to land.) Santo Domingo, though still known as a colonia, was at the time of Gutmann’s field work in the early 1990s a well established community in Mexico City – while it was once on the outskirts of town, further squatter settlement had long since surrounded it. It was also a community with relatively formalized infrastructure. What had brought this about, and what seems in part to have kept the colonia from developing a culture of poverty, even though poverty was an element of day to day life, was a strong tradition of community activism and the presence of UPMs.
“Urban Popular Movement” is used in the social science literature to refer to a variety of social movements. Some are oriented toward very specific issues, such as paving roads in a community, improving a water supply, or building a school, others toward improving conditions of a community generally or of addressing important social justice issues, such as women’s rights or combating police violence. Though the terminology could be applied to other world areas, UPM usually refers to Latin American social movements, with the main thing in common being their urban orientation and the fact that these are grassroots organized movements. UPMs have played an important role in the economic and infrastructural development of Santo Domingo, and while they have by no means eliminated poverty, the UPMs (and the fact that many of the residents of the community seem to be the sort who join UPMs) seems to have inhibited the development of a culture of poverty.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Oscar Lewis and the Culture of Poverty
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).
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).
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