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272 Th e Culture of Povertyin countries where there are no distinct ethnic minority groups. This suggeststhat the elimination of physical poverty per se may not be enough to eliminatethe culture of poverty which is a whole way of life.

What is the future of the culture of poverty? In considering this question,one must distinguish between those countries in which it represents a relativelysmall segment of the population and those in which it constitutes a very largeone. Obviously the solutions will differ in these two situations. In the UnitedStates, the major solution proposed by planners and social workers in dealingwith multiple-problem families and the so-called hard core of poverty has beento attempt slowly to raise their level of living and to incorporate them into themiddle -class. W herever possible, there has been some reliance up on psychiatrictreatment.In the underdeveloped countries, however, where great masses of people livein the culture of poverty, a social-work solution does not seem feasible. Becauseof the magnitude of the problem, psychiatrists can hardly begin to cope with it.They have all they can do to- care for their own growing middle class. In thesecountries the people with a culture of poverty may seek a more revolutionarysolution. By creating basic structural changes in society, by redistributingwealth, by organizing the poor and giving them a sense of belonging, of powerand of leadership, revolutions frequently succeed in abolishing some of the basiccharacteristics of the culture of poverty even when they do not succeed inabolishing poverty itself.

THE CULTURE OF POVERJY:A MISAPPLICATION OFANTHROPOLOGY TOCONTEMPORARY .ISSUESEdwin Eames and judith Goode

Edwin Eames and Judith Goode critically assess Lewis's culture-ofpoverty concept, offering an insightful anal)rsis of the conceptual,theoretical, and ethical limitations of Lewis's formulation. Beyond this,they comment on anthropological research among the poor. They questionwhether the study of urban poverty belongs within urban anthropology atall, for poverty is not unique to cities but is generated by modernindustrial society.

In almost every volume that has appeared it) the rather loosely confederatedfield of urban anthropology, there is a section devoted to the "Culture ofPoverty" concept. Therefore, we would assume that this topic is also includedin most urban anthropology courses. The issue of the culture of poverty, thedevelopment of the c6'flc'ept, its potential as an explanatory device, and itspolicy implications, 'particularly in American society, have all receivedconsiderable critical attention in the recent-literature.

We feel that a discussion of this concept will serve as a classic illustration ofwhat no t to do iri an emerging urban anthropology. In addition, problems ofethics, methodology, units of aqalysis, and application of traditional anthropological concepts to complex society can be clarified and illustrated in this discussion.

Th e developmentof the culture of poverty concept is intimately linked to thework of Oscar Lewis.... Th e criticisms we make of the culture of poverty concept deal with only one aspect of Lewis's work. His total life's work includedmany significant contributions, including peasant village studies using innovative data-collecting techniques and further innovations in his studies of slumresidents. He was a pioneer in the development of the intensive focus on thefarp)ly unit .in the city, and his development of the method of portraying the"typical day" and the life cycles of individuals did much to accentuate the hu-SouRcE: Edwin Eames, Judith Granich Goode, Anthropology of the City: An Introduc-tion to Urban Anthropology, 1977, pp. 304-319. Adapted by permission of PrenticeHall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New jersey.

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274 Th e Culture of Poverty: A Misapplicationmanistic emphasis of anthropology. His informants were portrayed as realpeople, and Lewis has received kudos for his incisive biographical portrayals.However, the repercussions of his culture of poverty concept often seem toovershadow the positive contributions of his career.We can see that Lewis began his career by attacking Redfield;s folk societyand folk-urban dichotomy; he continued by doing ethnographic studies inMexico City which initially emphasize.c! s.trqng p e r ~ i s t e n c e Of organization(family, compadrazgo, religion), only later to shift to an almost exclusive concernwith the Mexican and Puerto Rican underclasses. T_hest;' s ; u ~ _ i e ~ cuJnJiuaJed inthe development of the culture of poverty concept, in which he described thefamilies he studied in terms of their disorganization and pathologies.Lewis thus became the target of attack in much the same way that Redfieldwas earlier, when Lewis led the attack. Beginning his career by attackingovergeneralized and weakly documented cOncepts, Lewis ends his career beingattacked for the same reasons. Beginning his work with a direct assault uponthe concepts of social disorder a,nd disorgar1iz'J.tion, he ends his career creatingsimilar models of disorganization for the culture of poverty.

A further peculiarity in the development of Lewis's work is that, in hisearlier criticisms of Redfield's folk society concept, he used a variety of scientificand empirically based arguments, which were quit e effective. But in thedevelopment of his own concept, he made the very same errors of overgeneralization and non-empiricism that he discovered in Redfield's work....THE CULTURE OF POVERTY CONCEPTLewis suggests that the culture of poverty is an integrated set of values, norms,and behaviors characteristic of some of those who live in poverty conditions. Itis found in an industrialjcapitalist society characterized by a cash economy,production for profit, social mobility, and high rates of underemployment andunemployment. It should be noted that Lewis himself sees the culture ofpoverty as a response to industrial capitalism and not to the urban. Lewis doesnot imply that the natu.re of the city influences the deVelopment of the culture ofpoverty, but many others assume that since his work is done in urban areas, heis implying that poverty and the culture of poverty are ur:ban phenomena.

Lewis claims that there are some seventy traits t hat are diagnostic of those inthe culture of poverty. These are subdivided into fOur subcategories: the natureof integration with the larger society, the nature of the slum community, thenature of'the family, and the nature of the individual personality.

Under the category labelled relationship to the larger society, Lewis notesthe general lack of participation in the institutions of the larger society(political parties, labor unions, health, education, fihancial, and cultural institutions). Prisons, courts, and welfare systems, however, are institutions wherethe poor are overrepresented. He notes that distrust and hostil,ity toward theseinstitutions is also extended_toward the church.

Edwin Eames and judith Goode 275Regarding the nature of the community, Lewis notes a lack of organization

beyond the family level, but offers little in the way of a description of the community level.

The family is described as a "partial" structure, with high rates ofconsensual (or informal) unions, desertion, and separation, as well as femalebased households. Some of the characteristics of the household-! UJ1its wereovercrowding and lack of privacy.

At the individual level, those in the culture of poverty are seen as presenttime oriented and fatalistic. They have "weak ego structures" and ambiguitya b o ~ t sex roles, despite an emphasis on masculinity. Thes e latter attribut es' areallegedly related to maternal deprivation. Certain individual characteristics arerelated to the nature of the life cycle: an early initiation into sex and a relatively short period of childhood (the period during which the child is protectedand dependent).

Lewis includes in his description a number Of economic characteristics unrelated to the fourfold classification. These would include high rates of underemployment and unemployment, low wages When employed, frequent purchasesof small quantities of goods, lack of savings, borrowing at usurious rates, smallscale informal credit mechanisms, pawning, and the use of secondhand goods.

It s h ~ u l d be apparent that lack of orgarlization or evidence of disorganizationis found at all four levels inthe culture of poverty. Lewis suggests that the culture of poverty, once it comes into existence, tends to be perpetuated throughtime, regardless of changes in the circumstances of the people. He views it as asubculture that is transmitted intergenerationally. He indicates that by the timea child is six or seven, he or she has been irreversibly molded into the culture ofpoverty. Thus, an individual raised in t_l:te culture of poverty is viewed as unable to take advantage of a ; a ~ g i n g circumstances.

THE USE OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONCEPTSThere are four continuing themes in anthropology that should be carried overinto urban anthropology: ethnography, holism, comparison, and relativism. Inthe next few pages we will discuss Lewis's culture of poVerty in terms of each ofthese themes and the culture concept.

In Lewis's research in Mexico City, the basic techniques of ethnographywere used. He obviously was intimately concerned with his informants, andprovided us with detailed descriptions of everyday activities and life histories.The research in San Juan is not as clearly ethnographic.... Lewis did not livein the community, nor were his contacts with informants as continuous andlong-term as those in Mexico City.

Concerning holism, Lewis's work appears to fit the general model in someways. His emphasis upon the multiplicity of relationships between the cultureof poverty and the larger external system that generates it is quite explicit.However, he frequently confuses the two; t hat is, he includes as part of the cui-


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276 Th e Culture of Poverty: A Misapplicationture oLthe poor aspects of life that are characteristic of the external system, notresponses to it. For example, he talks of unemployment as a trait of the culture,when it is the generator of poverty itself. Unfortunately, Lewis develops a traitlist rather than a systemic view of the relationships between aspects of the culture. Therefore, what is finally derived as the culture of poverty is a series ofcharacteristics, not carefully linked to one another or to the n(:!ture of the largersociety.

While Lewis was comparative, in that he compared Mexico City to SanJuan, he did not clearly dePict the similarities and differences in the nature ofboth places, as would be required in a controlled comparison. Moreover, thefact that he did not study any n o n ~ H i s p a n i c cu)tural system, a n ~ stillgeneralized to all of the Third World on the one hand and the United States onthe other, belies the kind of careful comparison required,.

A major difficulty with the use of the culture concept in conjunction withpoverty (or with any question relating to complex societ.ies) is t!:tat the conceptof culture has varied and changed over time. Although accepted as basic, theconcept has never been successfully defined in a univer sally accepted way byanthropologists.

In Lewis's use of the culture concept when dealing with poverty, he e m ~ phasized. the selfperpetuation of the culture of poverty-the notion thatchildren are doomed to the culture of poverty by age six. The use of early childhood socialization as the explanatory device for the transmission of culture hasbeen characteristic of: anthropology since its beginning.... More recent studieshave focused upon this process as a central research problem in order to d e ~ termine when early socialization is important and when it is not. Lewis, on theother hand, simply accepts early childhood cultural transmission as the onlysignificant enculturation process, without recognizing the issues involved.

In recent times, one sees two emergent views of culture. In one view, cultureis a systell) of cognitive c a t e g o r i e ~ or cognitive maps, wh_ich i p d j v i d ~ a l s carryaround in their heads and transmit through symbolic codes. The sum of theoverlapping elements of individual cognitive maps is culture. Th e other point ofview sees culture as a set of adaptive strategies for survival, usually linked to aparticular setting of available resources and external constraints. This is anecological approach to culture.

Lewis does not recognize these two trends and uses a traditional definition ofculture as a "way of life." Thus, the ecological approach-;: he generation ofculture and continued culture change resulting from interaction with theecosystem-is not found in Lewis's formulation. Lewis views the culture ofpoverty more as a shared set of cognitive maps. He presents a view of thecarbon copy recapitulation of a way of life, generation after generation, withoutany notion of the interaction of this way of life with changing external systems.

For both the cognitive and ecological approaches, the issue of change is fundamental. It is generally recognized that modern society is characterized byrapid rates of change, particularly in the technological and economic spheres.Thus, modern culture concepts must be able to deal with change. In Lewis's

Edwin Eames an d judith Goode 277definition of the culture of poverty, however, the issue is dealt with by s u g g e s t ~ ing that those in the culture of poverty are relatively imml!ne to changes inthe external system. Thus we have a view of cultural traditions which are s e l f ~ perpetuating and closed to outside influences.

To some degree, the concept of culture can be useful in the study of urbanpoor. For one thing, it focuses our attention on shared behavioral patterns,rather than on behavior as individually derived. Th e culture c o n ~ e p t can .thusbe used productively in showing variability of patterned behavioral responseswhich differ because of the socioeconomic position of a group in the system towhich it is responding. Thus, class subcultures or subcultures of occupationalstatus communities can be fruitfully s t u d i ~ d ....

Th e aspect of the culture concept that seems least appropriate in the study ofurban poverty groups is that which focuses on intergenerational transmission ofbasic values and belief systems, which serve as the basis of behavioralresponses. We would agree that social learning remains as the major processfor the transmission of values and beliefs. However, the learning J;Tiay beintragenerational in peer groups, rather than intergenerational, leading topersistence for over four hundred years as Lewis suggests ..Attributing b e ~ havioral responses solely to early parent-child socialization seems unwarrantedon the basis of empirical data. We need a modified definition of culture thattakes into account different temporal duratio ns and intragenerational modes ofsocial transmission in order to understand modern society . . .. . . Th e transposition of the culture concept to the study of whole complexsocieties presents many difficulties. Any attempt to describe the total culture oflarge, industrial nation-states-such as Great Britain or Germany-is boundto fail, since there is n o , , . e a ~ y way of summing up the totality of the way of lifein such large-scale, complex societies....RELATIVISM AND ETHNOCENTRISMLewis's concept l a ~ k s the perspective of cultural relativism, a conceptual toolwhich is one of the ~ t r e n g t h s of anthropology. His ethnocentrism shows in hisdescription of the culture of poverty as a thin culture and his equation of the culture of poverty with a "poverty of culture." The latter may indeed be a catchyphrase and a neat linguistic aphorism, but it demonstrates an attitude toward aparticular segment of society that is pejorative. This attitude carries over into thediscussion of traits, many of which Lewis describes as "lack of "ratherthan describing what is present. It is obvious that Lewis is working from aframework of middle class notions of what should exist.

Lewis suggests that those in the culture of poverty lack organization, but hesubsequently notes their ability to develop informal credit groups and mutualaid mechanisms. He obviously views organization from a middle class vantagepoint, w h i ~ h assumes that only formal structures with specific goals are "organized." We have mentioned [elsewheie] that one strength of urban anthropo)ogy is its ability to uncover informal structures and networks that have no la-

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278 Th e Culture of Poverty: A Misapplicationbels and titles. It is obvious from Lewis's own data that much informal organization does exist, without the formal characteristics of names, officers, andarchives.

This ethnocentric view is particularly apparent in Lewis's description offamily patterns and personality types. Disregarding diminishing maritalstability throughout the entire class spectrum, Lewis focuses on marital instability for this group alone. In characterizing th-e female-based household as apartial version of the "normal" family, h e ~ i s neglecting anthropological literature on domestic cycles and domestic variations that tend to occur under certainconditions. In addition, his description of individuals as having weak ego structures, as being fatalistic and present-time oriented, or as having confused sexidentities is obviously based upon class-biased psychological models of whatconstitutes adequate egos, time orientations, and sex identities.

Also he is comparing the middle class ideals of planning for the future anddeferred gratification with the actual behavior of the poor. This is not the sameas comparing middle class behavior with poverty behavior, since recent middleclass consumption patterns indicate a lack of concern for the future. Lewisnotes that many of those in the culture of poverty hold':middle class ideals aboutthe desirability of a stable nuclear family .but do not follow their ideals. Thiss'ame discrepancy between ideal and real behavior exists for the middle class aswell. 1

In all fairness to Lewis, his informants are portrayed in their own words assympathetic human beings. However, the culture of poverty concept denigratedtheir behavior and their beliefs.

WHAT IS URBAN ABOUT THE CULTURE OFPOVERTY?Th e emphasis upon pove_rty groups in urbaiJ areas ip modern ~ l ) . d developingsocieties is primarily the result of an erroneous association of the term urbananthropology with the so-called urban crisis, which leads- to an interest in thepoor, the marginal, and the disenfranchised. Fox has divided urban anthropology into three categories, the largest of which is- "the anthropology ofpoverty.nz He includes in this category most of the urban ethnographic literature that does not deal with migration or with the city as a whole. One of thetrends in early urban anthropology was a concern with social problems and thesearch for solutions. However, we would maintain that continued overemphasisof this one area will distort the subfield.

Poverty is not an exclusively urban phenomenon, nor is it generated by thenature of cities. Gulick has noted for American society that poverty, racism,and sexism are fundamental characteristics of the larger social system and notmerely aspects of urban localities.3

Lewis himself explicitly recognizes that the development of the culture ofpoverty is a consequence of modern industrial capitalist society-with its labor

Edwin Eames and judith Goode 279market, i,t,s materialism, and its profit orientation-=----rather than the urban set-ting. He suggests that, as traditional agrarian societies follow a capitalist industrial model, a culture of poverty will e m e ~ g e . However, his poverty researchhas been carried out exclusively in urban areas; his selection of the slum comf!l-Unity as the geographic locus in which the culture of poverty will be founddoes give the concept an urban appearance.

Th e culture of poverty issue faps more neatly under the rubric of anthropology of urban indus trial society, rather than anthropology in or of the city. Ifone were tempted to convert this issue to the anthropology of cities, then itwould be essential to study the effects of the urban setting on the poverty population. This would be difTJ.cult but could be done. The lack of clearly definedurban poverty research can only lead to a continuing confusion between urbanism, modernism, and industrialism.

METHODOLOGYIn concept formation, there are two mutually interacting processes involved: induction and deduction. The inductive process is one in which a concept ormodel is derived from prior empirical research. Th e deductive process is one inwhich the theorist starts with a series of assumptions, develops a rriOdel in alogical manner, and then tests the concepts oi" model by doing empirical research. Most philosophers of science distinguish these two modes, but in realitythey are often joined in a process of formulating and testing.

Lewis's concept was derived from his original fieldwork irl Mexico City and'was thus inductively derived. Lewis contends that in his later study of PuertoRican slum life, he was tesi1hg the validity of the concept in a'different culturalsetting. It must be noted that the thrust of Lewis's work was the developmentof a cross-cultural, generalizable model of the values and 'behavior of a povertysegment of the population. However, it does not appear from the work in SanJuan that the model developed earlier was actually tested in the field situation.What seems to have happened is that Lewis undertook the study in San Juanwith a preconceived notion of what he would find, and then selected from theavailable research material those segments that substantiated his originalfortnulation. This point is apparent in the La Vida volume, where we note asignificant discontinuity between the introduction to the volume, where_ the concept is outlined, and the rest of the volume, where the data are presented.Rarely do we find in this volume an interplay between theoretical formulationand empirically derived data, which could serve to sharpen the theoretical focusand aid ~ J ) the interpretation of empirical data.

This disassociation between formulation and data is the basis of Valentine'scritique of Lewis. By selecting from the mass of data presented in the body ofthe La Vida volume, Valentine is able to demonstrate repeatedly areas inwhi.ch the behaviorlof members of the Rios family Completely contradicts theculture of poverty t;\it list.4 These obvious contradictiOns remain unexplored

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280 The Culture of Poverty: A Misapplicationand unexplained by Lewis and thus become a basic issue related t"o the validityof the concept.

In terms of research design, Lewis's initial work in Mexico City was a traditional anthropological s tudy without a problem focus. Lewis .felt that he haddiscovered an unexplored constituency for anthropological fieldwork-theurban slum dweller. He was studying the "way of life" of this group in traditional fashion. In his long-range study of this-constituency, he developed theculture of poverty notion as a by-product.

When Lewis shifted his research focus to Puerto Rico, he had more clearlyformulated a problem-the testing of the culture of poverty model. In this latterformulation, one could say that the culture of poverty is a dependent variable,or the outcome of a set of society-wide conditions, which are independent variables. However, by not explicitly following this kind of logical procedur e, he wastrapped into the position of viewing the culture of poverty as a self-perpetuating subcultural system.

In the translation of a conceptual formulation into a rhearch design, an important element is the development of ways to define the variables. When welook at the muJ_tiplicity of variables that comprise the culture of poverty, we aregiven no clues as to how most of them are defined.

Another methodological source of confusion in Lewis's work is the lack ofany clear-cut separation of those aspects of the larger social system related tothe position of the poor in the social system from those aspects that form theculture (or adaptive response to the position). Thus, when Lewis i n c l u ~ e s within the traits of the culture such items as high rates of unemployment, lackof cash reserves and other situational constraints, he is adding attributes to thedependent vari;ble that really comprise the independent variables.Problem of Selecting a Unit of StudyIn urban research either a particular unit may be selected to study its characteristics, or a problem may be selected to study within the context of the unit asan ethnographic target population. Lewis's t.actic is to take the latter approach.However, the research problem-the description of the culture of poverty_;_cannot be readily disassociated from the .social unit. Lewis assumes th at theslum is the geographic or spatial. unit witltin which one can study the culture ofpoverty. He notes that not all slum residents tan be characterized in this way.They cannot even all be characterized as poor. But he never selects a pool ofpoor defined in material terms as .-the ethnographic target population. He a l ~ o notes that not all the characteristics of the culture of poverty can be found many slum group.

Eventually, he narrows the lens through which one sees the culture ofpoverty to a single fam,il y. Once he turns fro111 the slum community to thefamily as the unit of analysis, the question of whether the family is an appropriate unit for the study of a culture or subculture is immediately raised. If onewere to accept Lewis's notion (which we do not) that there is little organizationabove the family level, then perhaps one could derive a culture or subculture

' "Edwin Eames and judith Goode 281

from family studies. However, it would then be incumbent upon Lewis todescribe the similarity in values and behavior among the families who share thecommon tradition of the culture of poverty and indicate the means of socialtransmission, namely, networks and inform.:al social structures. In Lewis's LaVida he relies on only one family, and one which--he himself states is atypical.He states that the Rios family is characterized by the most "unbridled id" thathe has ever observed. Prostitution is also not typical of other f ~ m i l i e s . Thus wehave no indication of the extent to which the Rios family represents a sharedpattern that could be called a subculture of poverty.

Qoipg' beyond Lewis's work in the culture of poverty, it can be suggestedthat the study of "the poor" as an urban anthropological research problembrings _to the fore many basic issues in the selection of units of study. Selectingan inner-city slum, or an ,irregular community (squatter settlement), or aminority ethnic group as the unit in which to study the behavior of the poor isa basic error. Even comq_lllnities and ethnic groups that have a high proportionof poor people within them will still contain large numbers of non-poor or temporarily poor, which make such units inappropriate.

Some examples of the inappropriate use of the ethnic minority group as theunit within which to study poverty can be seen in the work of Valentine andParker and Kleiner.fl In both cases, the work was used in relation to the cultureof poverty concept. Valentine cites the literature on Black Americans in a discussion of the culture of p o v ~ r t y and he seems to make the assumption thatBlacks are equivalent to "the poor." Parker and Kleiner use data collected in aprevious project on Blacks and mental illness to discuss whether these Blackshave culture of poverty beliefs. This partic ular work presents two problems. Itassumes that being Black is being poor. It also confuses the relationshipbetween racial minorii)T Status and poverty status. If the research in a Blackpopl!lfition does indic"'ate"feelings of hopelessness and fatalism, are these relatedto being poor or to being in an oppressed-underclass?

The problem of selecting an appropriate social unit is also demonstrated in anumber of commu'nity studies used to refute Lewis, where it is assumed that theneighborhoods selected are equivalent to "the poor." Mangin uses hisexperiences with barriadas (squatter settlements) in Lima, Leeds his data onfavelas in Rio, and Safa her data on a shantytown in San Juan to disprove theculture of poverty notion. They do not explicitly point out that their communities were, in fact, not equivalent to the poor, but col).ta,ined people of differentoccupational levels, c areer directions, and income.6

Poverty must be defined in economic terms, since it is basically an economiccondition. The consequence of economic deprivation for behavior is the areathat must be studied. However, a population defined merely by income characteristics tends to be a social aggregate of unrelated, non-interacting people.Sue!). an aggregate is not a useful ethnographic unit. A search for a commonculture among this aggregate is inappropriate.

Probably the very best unit to use in the ethnographic study of poverty andits consequences would be an occupation.al status c;ommunity. In every complex

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282 Th e Culture of Poverty: A Misapplicationsociety, there are certain lowpaying occupations. Those pursuing such occupations would therefore represent a group who live in conditions of poverty,characterized by instability or intermittency of employment. These jobs arefrequently timeconsuming and/or require heavy physical effort. They areconsidefed menial, dirty, and unpleasant and are frequently.viewed by othermembers of society as defiling to those who pursue"them.

In urban areas, specific occupations that would fall into the .poverty levelcategory are: non-mechanized construction labor, clockwork, pedicab drivers,porters (carriers of heavy items), domestics, janitors, scavengers, street vendors,and watchmen. In some of these occupations, the individual is self-employedand has relative autonomy oVer his time and effort. However, the monetaryrewards are minimal, unpredictable, and often lead to depending on creditorsfor survival. In othe r cases, the individual works for others, often on a daylabor basis, so that he or she has no job security and has little control over thework situation. The cominon thread in all of these jobs is that returns aresmall, insecure, and:- s p o r a d i c ~ , so that those who do thiskind of work live inconditions of material deprivation and insecurity.

Most of the occupations catalogued above abound in cities 'in societies thatare not fully industrialized. Mechanization frequently leads to the eliminationof such work. Another way in which.some of these occupations are transformedis through unionization and bureaucratization. For example, constructionworkers and longshoremen, through union organizations, developed thebargaining power to assure them a secure income above the poverty level. Bureaucratic organization of work has eliminated such jobs as the small-scalewatchman, replacing him with private and public security organizations, whichare_ hierarchiCally organized and guarantee employment security and betterpay. In the transformation from a preindustrial to a postindustrial society,many occupations formerly characterized by poverty level income and insecurity are eliminated br transformed.

Despite technology and the organization of work, there are still someanalogues to these marginal occupations in the industrialized world. These indude menial workers in restaurants and hospitals, janitors, domestics, andvestiges of pi"emechanized construction work and commerce. Even when attempts have been made to unionize or bureaucratize day laborers on some ofthese jobs, they have not been able to prevent high turnover, mass lay-offs, andthe .poor working conditions tha t encourage turnover. Furtherm ore, somepowerful unions seek to exploit the organized low-level worker.

Economists recognize that there is a secondary labor market in the, UnitedStates in which jobs are characterized by short-term employment, low wages,and no fringe benefits. In fact, this labor market recruits from a pool of laborcharacterized by low income, sporadic employment, and job sequencescharacterized by horizontal movement rather than vertical career progression.The secondary labor market consists of dead-end jobs.

Th e phenomenon of poverty in contemporary American society clearly related to an economic system that, under normal economic conditions, assumes

EdwinEames and judith Goode 283an unemployment rate of apprOximately six percent. A certain segment of this"normal" population of unemployed consists of those who are longterm unemployed (out of work one year or mQre). Despite a social welfare system thatprovides some compensation, the amount of income while unemployed is wellbelow the poverty line. .[Drawing on] this discussion, we would contend that the most appropnatesocial unit within which the urban anthropologist might study the impact ofpoverty is one based upon occupation or participation in the s e c o n d ~ r y lab?rmarket rather than a unit based on space or minority status. Interacting umts, 7of people in marginal career cycles or long-term unemployed can be studted.The particular effects to be studied could be selected by the particular researcher, but the independent variable-material deprivation-could be clearlydefined and measured. Gutkind is one of the few urban anthropologists to usesuch a unit. He selected the longterm unemployed as an ethnographic targetunit in some of his African urban research. His dependent variables were kinship and. network ties. 8

ETHIC$ AND POLICY IMPLICATIONSAnthropologists working with an urban population have a commitment to ~ h e group with whom they worlc.. :Part of this commitment is to avoid generatmgdata and/or analyses that can be used against informants. They should beaware at all times of the consequences of public. use of their data andgeneralizations.

This criterion pertains as well to the culture of poverty concept. ~ a n y .ofthose who have attacked the Lewis formulation have done so on the bas1s of ttsimplications for the develi:pment of programs dealing with poverty. It shouldbe noted that a t the time 'Lewis' was writin g about the concept, a major thr ustof American domestic policy was the eradication of poverty. The various programs that were developed in the 1960s to deal w ith this .problem. weresubsumed under the itotion of the-"War on Poverty." For those mvolved m determining what programs could be established to eliminate po.verty c o n d i t i o ~ s , there were two major alternatives: either attack the econom1c system, whtchcreated unemployment and underemployment, or attack the values and .behaviorof the poor, which were assumed to be i n : e r g e n e ~ a t i o n ~ l l y transm1tted. ~ n d which by themselves perpetuated poverty by mterfenng wuh upward mob1hty.Although Lewis did accept the larger social system as generating p o ~ e r t y , htsemphasis on the selfperpetuation of the culture of poverty was the pomt of departu re for elaboration by those developing specific anti-poverty programs.Thus, many programs of the War on Poverty were designed to c h a n g ~ the: behavior and values of the poor. These included compensatory educatiOn programs, manpower training programs, and community action programs. S i n ~ e Lewis himself maintains that the only way of changing the culture of poverty mthe United States is through a psychiatric or social work approach, his "scientific credentials'' reinforced such government programs.

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284 Th e Culture of Poverty: A MisapplicationAnother reason for the attractiveness of LewiS's formulation to policy makers

was that it explained failures in education, health care, and job training programs. If programs failed, the inappropriate values of their clients could beblamed, instead of the ill-cOnceived oi' misapplied nature of the program itself.Finally, the concept was broadly accepted because it bolstered the popular viewthat had developed siil.ce the Industrial Revolution that the poor were responsible for their own condition. Lewis, by providing a 1'scientific" explanationbased on notions of intergenerational transmission and early childhood socialization, was reinforcing already existing beliefs.

Another ethical issue is that of national pride. In his later work in MexicoCity and SanJuan, Lewis's descriptions of the life of the poor offended manyMexicans and Puerto Ricans. They felt his presen tatio n of life in these countries was unbalanced and pejorative. When one reads some of the anti-Lewisstatements, and when one 'is exposed to Puerto Rican students who have readLa Vida, this national dismay is quite apparent. Since Lewis's work is sowidely read by nonprofessionals, many Puerto Ricans feel it has simply reinforced the negative stereotypes of Puerto Ricans held by the American public.As a result of such strong feelings, Lewis became persona non grata in bothMexico and Puerto Rico, making further research in these sites impossible forhim.

When he popularly disseminated an .untested hypothesis, which was thengeneralized to the total c'apitalist-industrial world, Lewis acted contrary to thestandards for concern about the uses and possible misuses of anthropologicalstudies.

Once again, we must temper this criticism by looking at Lewis's work in thecontext of its time. Th e issue of the social responsibility of the anthropologistwas not explicitly raised until the latter part of the 1960s.9 Lewis's work on theurban poor considerably antedated this. In his day, anthropologists sought' ~ k n o w l e d g e for its own sake." Th e belief that one owed one's informantssomething in return or that one musLprotect them from the potential misuse ofdata had" not become widespread. It is too easy to castigate with hindsight. AndLewis was by no means the only one responsible for developing notions ofcultural deprivation and poverty culture. Many other social scientists alsodeveloped similar concepts to explain the non-success of the poor.Th e Overemphasis on PovertyIn the larger arena of urban anthropology, the body of literature dealing.withpoverty segments or underclass segments in the city is the most voluminous....Of great concern is the fundamental social science issue of relating poverty toan understanding of the nature of urban centers and urban processes. We havelooked at Lewis's work in some detail and noted that in many ways the fundamental issue of the relationship between the urban and poverty is unexplored.

Th e poverty literature in urban anthropology has been a dead-end literature.On e reason for this is that only the lower segments of society were studied. Tounderstand poverty in urban industrial systems or to study the nature of urbancenters, one must also understand the middle and dominant groups in the system,

Edwin Eames and judith Goode 285and how they relate to each other. Th e forces in the larger system must also beexamined as to their interaction with all social segments (orethnographic targetpopulations).... No social unit-from the level of the microscopic to the macro scopic-is autonomous or independent. To study poverty by focusing entirelyupon the poor is to disregard the larger context and the continuous interactiveprocess....

Unfortunately, the publication of Lewis's work and the controversygenerated by the culture of poverty concept directed the attention of a disproportionately large number of urban a l ) ~ ~ r < ; ~ p o l o g i s t s to the study of povertygroups. In many cases, these studies were explicitly designed to test and/orrefute Lewis's contentions. Another reason for this concentration on the lowersegments was because they seemed easy to define and were relatively accessible.Th e rich can avoid the anthropologist, while the poor do not have the resourcesto do this....

Another factor that has led to an overemphasis on lower social segments isthe concern with rural-urban migration. In fact, migration literature andpoverty literature have become inextricably intertwined in many instances. Asan example of this, Mangin, as the editor of a volume specifically concernedwith migration, devotes most of his introduction to the culture of poverty concept.10 Not all migrant groups enter the urban arena at the bottom, but fewanthropological studies (especially in America) have focused upon any but thelowest segments....SUMMARY

,}L ' h fWe have frequently ,noted t e tendency o urban ethnographers to concentrateupon the poorer segments of the urban populatior:t This bias can be seen in thecontroversy over the culture of. poverty concept.

Oscar Lewis's_work has been central to this controversy. A pioneering figurein the d e v e l o p m ~ n t of urban anthropology, he focused toward t ~ e end of hiscareer almost e x ~ l u s i v e l y upon the study of poverty. From such studies hedeveloped the notion of a common subculture that characterizes segments of thepoor population in many areas of the world:

Th e poverty subculture concept has many theoretical limitations. Manycontemporary a n ~ h r o p o l o g i s t s avoid the use of the culture concept, particularlywhen dealing with complex societies. Most of the core characteristics of thepoverty subculture concept have been questioned by other anthropologists asrepresenting a list of traits, many of which are contradictory, not testable, an dnegative in tone.

Poverty is obviously not an exclusively urban problem, and a culture ofpoverty-to the extent to which it might exist-is not a particularly urbanproblem. Th e inclusion of the literature dealing with this issue under urbananthropology is an error. It does not fall into the category of anthropology ofthe city, or anthropology in the city, but rather the anthropology of complex society....


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286 Th e Culture of Poverty: A MisapplicationNOTES1. For an important discussion of the tendency to confuse ideal behavior with real behavior in comparing class subcultures, seeS. M. Miller, F. Reissman and A. Seagull, "Poverty and Self-Indulgence: A Critique of the Non-Deferred Gratification

Pattern," in L. Ferman eta!. (eds.), Poverty in America (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1965), pp. 416-32.2. R. Fox, Cities in Their Cultural Settings (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,1977).3. J. Gulick, "The Outlook, Research Strategies and Relevance of Urban Anthropology," in E. Eddy (ed.), Urban Anthropology (Athens, Georgia: University ofGeorgia Press, 1968), pp. 93-98.4. C. Valentine, Culture and Poverty: A Critique and Counterproposals (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1968).5. Valentine, Culture and Poverty; and S. Parker and R. Kleiner, "The Culture ofPoverty: An A.djustive Dimension," Amencan Anthropologist, 72 (1970), 516-28.6. Mangin, Peasants in Cities and "Poverty and Politics in the Latin American City,"in L. Bloomberg and H. Schmandt (eds.), Power, Poverty and Urban Policy,Urban Affairs Annual Review, val. 2, 1970; Anthony Leeds, "The Concept of the

'Culture of Poverty': Conceptual, Logical and Empirical Problems with Perspectives from Brazil and Peru," in E. Leacock (ed.), CuLture of Poverty: A Critique(New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1971), pp. 226-84; and Helen Safa, "TheSocial Isolation of the Urban Poor: Life in a Puerto Rican Shanty Town," in I.Deutscher arid E. Thompson (eds.), Among the People: Encounters with the Poor(New York' Basic Books, 1968), pp. 335-51.7. For a discussion of this issue, see E. Eames and J. Goode, Urban Poverty in aCrosscultural Context (New York: Free Press, 1973), Chapter 4; j. Goode,"Poverty and Urban Analysis," Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology, 3(1972), 1-19.8. P. C. W. Gutkind, "The Energy of Despair: Social Organization of the Unemployed in Two African Cities: Lagos and Nairobi," Civilisations, 17 (1967), 186-21 t.9. G. Berreman, G. Gjessing and K. Gough, "Social Responsibilities Symposium,"Current AnthropolOgy, 9 (1968), 391-435; Diane Lewis, "Anthropology andColonialism," Current Anthropology, 14 (1973), 581-602.10. Mangin (ed.), Peasants in Cities.

STRATEGIES FOR COPING WITHINADEQUATE RESOURCES:A CROSS-.CUL TURAL VIEW OFTHE BEHAVIOR -OF THE POOREdwin Eames and Judit.h Goode

Whatever the causes of poverty, the poor must develop strategies to copewith low, sporadic income and inadequate resourceS. In this selection,Eames arid Goode eXarriii1e the adaptive tech,niques developed by poorpeople in industrialized societies. The comparative framework they usereveals many similarities in the behavioral responses of the poor despitetheir different cultural backgrounds. This framework suggests that manybehaviors of the poor develop in response to a set of economic and socialconditions rather than from a cultural or cognitive origin. (Note thesimilarity of some of the strategies described here, particularly the role ofurban kin groups in providing support, with the group-oriented strategiesdescribed among urban migrants in part two.)

Much of the literature de&-lipg with the behavior of the poor in modern capitalist societies attempts tr evelop a psychological or cognitive understanding ofthe valu.es of the poor. Individuals, as well as the motives and values underlyingtheir behavior, are frequently used as a basic focus of analysis. To the extentthat this emphasis is maintained, the behavior of the poor is often seen as dysfunctional and i r r a t i ~ n a l , and the larger issue of the adaptiveness of commonresponse patterns is ~ b s c u r e d . It is these common response patterns that werefer to as coping mechanisms. In the following discussion we will emphasizeshared patterns of coping responses found among poor people in industrialsocieties in as wide and varied cultural settings as possible.

From our perspective, many aspects of the behavior of the poor can be seenas direct responses to the conditions of poverty. Poverty in capitalist-industrialsocieties is defined by inadequate access to material resources. This means thatthe poor not only have no accumulated wealth and low cash incomes but theirincome is sporadic, intermittent and uncertain. Those in poverty are thoselocated- in the bottom sectors of the job market, where they not only receiveminimal rewards for their work but are in positions where the sources of in-SoURCE: Article written expressly for Urban Life. Copyriiht 1980 by St. Martiri'sPress.

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Against Culture of Poverty