Do you seriously believe that they don’t? Consider Malaysia, for example. The top item returned by a Google search for “income distribution Malay Chinese Indian Malaysia” is a paper whose abstract reads as follows:

A new social accounting matrix (SAM) for Malaysia in 2000 is constructed and applied to analyse income inequality. Income per capita was unevenly distributed across ethnic groups. The differences can be explained by the interplay of three factors: unequal income per hour worked, unequal numbers of working hours per week, and unequal numbers of household members that depend on a worker’s income. The unequal hourly wage rates appear to be mainly due to differences in industrial occupation of employees: a large fraction of the ethnic Malay work in low-wage industries, while the ethnic Chinese and Indians often work in high-wage industries.

This is no surprise to anyone who knows a bit about Southeast Asia, since the greater economic success of overseas Chinese minorities vis-a-vis indigenous populations is an old, old story.

The same is true of Indians (the ones from India) all over East Africa.

Where Lewis gets himself into trouble is that he argues that the opposite is also true. That people’s cultural adaptations shape their economic conditions.

I think it becomes very tricky to disentangle that from the blame-the-victim discourses that you say you want to distance yourself from. And given the importance of structural economics, institutional racism, and sheer luck in determining any given person’s socio-economic status how ought we weigh the importance of CoP given the apparent power of all these other forces?

It is legitimate to claim that CoP plays some role, I acknowledge that. Perhaps CoP is not negligible. However the importance that has been given to it is disproportional and in the discourses we seek to critique it ranks as an outright obsession. In sum I think it is substantially less important than these other structural forces that I identified.

At the same time, however, let’s not mistake rhetorical games for serious thinking. You are the one who wrote,

Lewis states the CoP tends to grow and flourish in societies with the following: cash economy, wage labor; high un/under employment; low wages; failure to provide for the poor; bilateral kinship patterns; “and finally, the existence of a set of values in the dominant class that 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.

Replace the phrase “culture of poverty” with another expression, let’s say a permanent underclass. What would you expect its attributes to be, given that the society as a whole combines a cash economy, wage labor, and high un/under employment? Add failure to provide for the poor, and bilateral kinship, what is that all about?

Would you expect a high degree of participation in a society in which cash is king by people who don’t have much cash?

Would you expect people without cash who are likely to be unemployed to own property?

Would you expect them to be highly educated or actively involved in unions or political parties?

Would you expect stable marriages or children who grow up in protected and nurturing environments?

I readily concede that talk about “male-centered families” and lack of impulse control is problematic. But if we don’t insist on portraying Lewis’ arguments in the worst possible light, can we say that they are entirely wrong?

I don’t assume that Lewis’ is right. I know for a fact that adaptations to poverty are various. I’ve not only read Lewis, I’ve also read Maxine Hong Kingston (Warrior Woman and China men) and James Webb’s Born to Fight. I do think that, as someone whose intellectual life is shot full of ideas my predecessors came up with, I ought to take them seriously, starting with the same assumptions I bring to fieldwork, that I need to read and listen carefully and withhold judgment while trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. I don’t see that happening here. I see an all too familiar combination of moral panic and rush to judgment. Sorry, that turns my stomach.

With this little jape I hope to show how the CoP (and maybe even the sociology of deviance) is, at its base, ethnocentric because it starts from assumptions inherent in the culture of the anthropologist.

I had a sociology student in 101 remark to me once that he found it interesting that anthropologists didn’t seem to talk about deviance very much. Tony Wallace has done interesting work looking at just how individuals displaying statistically deviant attitudes and behaviors are handled cross-culturally.

But you’re right that one could just as easily reframe those lacks as a presence, a criticism led me to try another approach. CoP is like a sociology of deviance in that it approaches its subject population with this driving question: “What is wrong with these people?”

This can be a legitimate framework if the people you are dealing with are actually pathological, such as the mentally ill or drug addicts. Although since Foucault anthropology is more interested in problematizing those discourse of deviance than in applying them. (Note to Rick, if you can do Foucaultian applied anthropology you’ll be famous.)

Here’s a little thought experiment. Let’s flip the script and take the *form* of Lewis’ argument and study up with a “culture of opulence.” Given the rising gap between the wealthy and the poor and the fact that its increasingly clear that the complex financial mechanisms of the elite are to blame for our current economic crisis, I propose that we study the elite under the framework of “What’s wrong with these people?”

Here are some distinguishing features of the CoO:
-dominance within mainstream society
-lack of systems of informal credit
-over education with lack of practical knowledge
-monopolizes control of unions, political parties
-over-reliance on nuclear families
-regimented organization outside the family
-delayed onset of adult responsibilities
-lack of female centered households
-lack of ability to live for today

I have some anecdotal experience that shows that the above might be true.

With this little jape I hope to show how the CoP (and maybe even the sociology of deviance) is, at its base, ethnocentric because it starts from assumptions inherent in the culture of the anthropologist. Unfortunately the criticism of CoP constantly has to defend itself from charges of being nothing more that political correctness gone awry. This could not be further from the case. Ethnocentric anthropology stems from the difficulty of field work, the difficulty of writing, and poorly framed research questions.

Also, what I mean is that each prof. has a particular outline of the history of their sub-discipline which is good to think for them. When they go through these historical and theoretical outlines, especially in undergrad courses, they almost always incorporate their opinions in the lectures, and many students often do not ever question what they were first taught. There have been a lot of psych studies that show that the first thing you are taught on a subject tends to stick, and people usually reject other views, even when they were told the original view was made up.

I’ll give an example. I have a lot of eviro. anthro. in my education, and when we get to the debates between say White and Steward, many profs. will let you know which one they feel was right. It’s pretty standard, as far as I know, to teach Oscar Lewis with an immediate critique, basically designed to show the student why Lewis is wrong. This is often not questioned, I guess other than your class, and what the students are left with is the critique. In all of my courses the reaction was the opposite. Then as they go off into their careers they always know that Lewis is wrong, and never really think about it beyond that. I’ve even met one full prof who was Stanford educated that never actually read the “Culture of Poverty” essay, because I asked her, because it didn’t sound like she had. She just knew it was wrong. I admit that I don’t have any data on these processes directly, so this is no more than an assumption on my part from limited experience.

I think the gist of the theory is simply that poverty is something which can be measured (although I don’t think he ever operationalized it), and that material/environmental reality shapes culture in ways that can also be observed and patterned. I don’t have a dog in the fight. If I see studies done which show me one way or the other, then I’ll be more sure, but when something is just made bad to think in a social science, those studies won’t even be done. All the critiques I’ve seen are basically just personal arguments, which would be fine if we were philosophers. Until I see a bunch of studies showing that there are not patterned correlations between poverty and culture, then I’m suspending judgment. From my personal experience living and working in poor places, I have some anecdotal experience that shows Lewis may have been more correct than his critics give him credit for.

Lewis states the CoP tends to grow and flourish in societies with the following: cash economy, wage labor; high un/under employment; low wages; failure to provide for the poor; bilateral kinship patterns; “and finally, the existence of a set of values in the dominant class that 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.”

Do we teach close reading anymore?

Here are some distinguishing features of CoP:
-lack of participation in the greater society
-lack of property ownership
-lack of literacy/ education
-lack of membership in unions, political parties
-lack of stable marriages
-lack of organization beyond the family
-lack of a protected childhood
-lack of male centered households
-lack of impulse control and ability to defer gratification

Notice the pattern? The CoP is defined as absence. This is very different from the way most anthropologists are trained to conduct ethnography: focusing of what people do, what they say and what is observable. With CoP Lewis’ turns it around and says look at what people don’t do, don’t say, and what you don’t observe.

I do think several of the items in the list might be posited as privative features, but that may be neither here nor there. At first blush, again, without having read Lewis’s stuff, the list feels like it was created for cross-cultural research (as in doing cross-tabs with data drawn from the HRAF). I also feel that the cargo concept has to be part of the genealogy of Lewis’s thesis—can you confirm or deny, Michael?

Is it a good or bad thing to say that I feel like the representation of La Perla in the Calle 13 video isn’t all that out of sync with Lewis’s list?

And to get back to Michael’s first point, Lewis really is good reading.

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 of Lewis’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 of the poor, not a denigration of the lower class and the cultural defenses they erect against poverty’s everyday uncertainty.