Pacific Sociological Association The Culture of Poverty : An Ideological Analysis

For three decades Oscar Lewis's subculture of poverty concept has been misinterpreted as a theory bent on blaming the victims of poverty for their poverty. This essay corrects this misunderstanding. Using a sociology of knowledge approach, it explores the historical origins of this misreading and shows how current poverty scholarship replicates this erroneous interpretation ofLewis's work. An attempt is made to remedy this situation by arguing that Lewis's subculture of poverty idea, far from being a poor-bashing, ideological ploy, is firmly grounded in a Marxist critique of capital and its productive contradictions. As such, Lewis's work is a celebration of the resilience and resourcefulness ofthe poor, not a denigration of the lower class and the cultural defenses they erect against poverty's everyday uncertainty. THE CULTURE OF POVERTY PARADOX Few ideas in the social sciences have been as widely used, or as thoroughly abused, as has Oscar Lewis's (1964, 1966, 1968) subculture of poverty thesis.1 Two reasons account for this abuse: one is endemic to the social sciences; the other is of an ideological nature. In the social sciences we are all too familiar with the first of these reasons. Every so often a concept comes along with such a ring of authenticity there is a rush to employ it in several areas of research. Several examples of this come to mind: in sociology, the concept of alienation; in social psychology, prisoner's dilemma research; in econometrics, the recent flurry of activity in mathematical catastrophe theory; and, in history, the concepts of conjuncture and the longue dureie. Sometimes it is the very sound of a word or a phrase that sets off this frantic rush. We suspect this is the case with the recent flowering of such *Direct all correspondence to: David L. Harvey, Department of Sociology, 300 University of Nevada, College of Arts and Science, Reno, NV 89577-0067; e-mail (c/o): laurie@equinox.unr. edu. This content downloaded from 194.214. 27.178 on Tue, 6 Aug 2013 10:46:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 466 SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES Volume 39, Number 4,1996 terms as "post-structuralism," postmodernism" and "post-Marxism. " Indeed, there is no small humor in the panic to add the prefix "post-" or the adjective "critical" to thread-bare concepts in order to breathe new life into them. Such widespread borrowings and popular applications of a term share a common fate. Moderate and judicious adaptations of a concept quickly give way to massive misappropriation as an idea is removed from its original context and altered to fit increasingly remote projects. The original meaning is soon wrung from the term and all that is left is its linguistic shell. At that point the idea is either reduced to a myth or a cliche, or it is so laden with secondary connotations as to render it scientifically useless.2 At this point the profession's gatekeepers and trend setters pronounce the concept passe', and urge their wards to move on to newly uncovered linguistic lodes. Ideological motives can also give rise to the use and/or abuse of a scientific idea. Examples of ideological manipulation would include the Enlightenment's conception of progress, the end of ideology thesis of the 1950s and the 1960s, the recurring debate over the universality of the nuclear family and the gender roles associated with it, and, finally, the never-ending debate over race, class, and intelligence. A sociology of knowledge approach allows us to analyze the ideological import of such controversies and discover the sources of their abuse. It not only gives insight into a concept's evolution, but also instructs us about the social forces shaping a profession. Such analyses also provide a mirror by which we in the social sciences can gain a measure of self-understanding about the material forces bracketing our everyday work. In such circumstances the sociology of knowledge becomes a tool of reflexive insight-an instrument by which the teacher is taught. These observations are especially apropos when we review the curious history of Oscar Lewis's "subculture of poverty" concept. A sociology of knowledge approach instructs us not only in the politics of poverty research that govemed the ideas's original reception three decades ago, but also provides disturbing insights into the limitations of the current poverty debate. In this paper we will use the sociology of knowledge paradigm to examine the ideological fire storm that has swirled around Lewis's subculture of poverty concept almost from its inception. Our hope is to understand the evolution of poverty research over the last three decades so that we can better grasp where poverty studies have been and where they may go. At the same time, we hope to gain more than retrospective insight, for Lewis's work has withstood the many abuses and misreadings to which it has been subjected. We believe this resilience springs from the fact that the subculture of poverty concept taps into a social reality that has not been articulated by other poverty theories. When compared to other approaches to poverty, the virtue of Lewis's thesis lies in the clarity with which it demonstrates that poverty's subculture is not a mere "tangle of pathology," but consists, instead, of a set of positive adaptive mechanisms. These adaptive mechanisms are socially constructed, that is, collectively fabricated by the poor from the substance of their everyday lives, and they allow This content downloaded from 194.214. 27.178 on Tue, 6 Aug 2013 10:46:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Culture of Poverty 467 the poor to survive in otherwise impossible material and social conditions. By underscoring the positive content of the subculture of poverty, Lewis's model is also politically significant for it speaks in defense of the poor and their creative abilities. It keeps open the possibility that under propitious political circumstances the poor contain within themselves the skills necessary to forge their own self-liberation. If given access to and control of the resources and expertise public planners possess, they could build, maintain, and govern their own communities. Finally, Lewis's model speaks honestly and in a balanced way about the personal damage the poor sustain at the hands of a society that has ceased to care. Unlike other explanations of poverty, it concedes the poor have been damaged by the system but insists this damage does not clinically disqualify them from determining their own fate. This last judgment is something many social scientists of both the left and the right have forgotten. If we have learned anything after three decades of poverty research, it is that a positive conception of poverty's subculture cannot be excised from scientific discourse. Such exclusion has been tried and it has failed. While the subculture of poverty idea can be misrepresented and ignored, such dissembling carries with it a heavy scientific ost, for the more poverty researchers sidestep the subculture of poverty's positive content, the more they are forced to limit the explanatory range of their own work. And, in turn, the more effectively poverty researchers suppress a discussion of the poor's adaptive potential, the more distant poverty's real amelioration becomes. In order to explore the various facets of this paradox, we divide this paper into six parts. In the section following this introductory, we trace the history of the idea of a subculture of poverty by documenting some of the erroneous criticisms lodged against Lewis. In parts three and four we discuss one of the most serious criticisms leveled against the subculture of poverty thesis-that it "blames the victim. " In the fifth section we deal with the problem of the conceptual incompleteness of Lewis's model and demonstrate how it can be integrated into a larger critical perspective. Finally, a concluding section speculates as to why Lewis's ideas, for all their conceptual richness, have been neglected by those engaged in the New Poverty Debate. THE CAREER OF A CONCEPT Lewis first introduced the idea of a subculture of poverty in July 1958, in San Jose, Costa Rica, at the International Congress of Americanists (Rigdon 1988:69). In the next decade his family studies and the subculture of poverty concept made him a public figure and gave him access to political personalities of the highest rank. Lewis's celebrity brought him the kind of media attention few academics ever know. It is no secret his sudden renown exacerbated the already difficult relationships the abrasive Lewis had with many in his profession. These professional and personal jealousies must, however, remain a wild card in our account, for while they undoubtedly played a role in shaping scholarly criticism, it is difficult o This content downloaded from 194.214. 27.178 on Tue, 6 Aug 2013 10:46:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 468 SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES Volume 39, Number 4,1996 assess the extent to which they actually influenced evaluations of his work. We do know, however, that these antagonisms, whatever their source, were kept relatively in check until the late 1960s. By then Lewis was approaching the zenith of his career. Though far from analytically complete, the most extensive statement of his subculture of poverty thesis had already been given in La Vida (1966). By 1968 he had moved his culture of poverty research from Mexico to Puerto Rico, and was planning a study of the Cuban Revolution. In that year Charles Valentine's Culture and Poverty: Critique and Counter-Proposals was published. Valentine's work was both an assessment of the culture of poverty thesis and an emotionally charged critique of Lewis himself. When reading Valentine's wide-ranging polemic today, it is difficult o see why it was given such prominence, and why left scholars so readily accepted so many of its charges. Valentine was not the first to raise questions about the