3.2 The Culture of Poverty
We noted earlier that, in the establishment of the social order, the structural dependency of Latin-American capitalism has given rise to a phenomenon of social marginalization. One of the ideas which others have emphasized is that marginalization is based on a particular culture, a culture which manifests through the psychological characteristics of the marginalized and whose propagation hinders their chances of integrating into the established system. This concept has acquired a particular notoriety under the name “the culture of poverty.” The poor, or at least a substantial portion of the poor, form a particular system with its own norms and values: the world of the poor. The culture of poverty is considered the chief way a marginalizing system is reproduced as such, maintaining a sector of poor people.
The chief proponent of this framework was the North-American anthropologist Oscar Lewis. According to Lewis (1959, 1966, 1969), in capitalist societies, which are strongly stratified into social classes and have a very individualist outlook, there is a large probability that a sector of the poor population develops a particular culture, the culture of poverty, which is passed on from generation to generation, perpetuating the traits which impede people from rising above their poverty. The main ideas of this view can be summarized into four points:
1. The struggle for survival brings the poor to develop a particular sub-world in which a lack of ambition and solidarity between people compensates for a lack of resources, while reciprocal networks of exchange between relatives and neighbors compensates for the inability and incapacity to compete in the established system. Thus, a separate system is developed, a marginal world, an economy of subsistence—the “penny economy.”
2. The culture of the poor differs immensely from the dominant culture in the established system, which is typified by the middle sectors. This culture is characterized by being “a disorganized, pathological, or incomplete version of major aspects of the middle class” (Valentine, 1972, p. 147).
3. The culture of poverty's principal characteristics appear as psychological traits expressed by individuals. It is a syndrome which includes symptoms of apathy, impotence, dependence, and inferiority; lack of self-control and difficulty in satisfying one’s own needs or thinking beyond the present to plan for the future; a sense of resignation and fatalism; a glaring machismo, a great tolerance for psychological pathology, and feebleness of ego itself.
4. The culture of poverty develops on its own, because it is transmitted through processes of socialization and assures its survival by passing on characteristics inherently opposed to the system (feeling of impotence, apathy, fatalism, incapacity to rise above the present). “Once it comes into existence, it tends to perpetuate itself from generation to generation because of its effects on children. By the time slum [marginalized] children are six or seven years old, they usually have absorbed the basic values and attitudes of their subculture and are not psychologically geared to take full advantage of changing conditions or increased opportunities which may occur in their lifetime” (Lewis, 1969, p. 188).
Poor individuals learn to be poor and thus shape their personality through a peculiar process of socialization within the culture of poverty, guaranteeing permanent failure in the eyes of the established system. Rubén Ardila (1979) uses the concept of “learned helplessness,” coined by Seligman (1975), to explain the learning of impotence vital for characterizing the poor in relation to their conditions. A child learns from the start to fail at one point or another, to achieve nothing, and thus learns that it is not worth planning anything or pushing oneself to obtain something which will never come.
There are several studies which have tried to put the culture of poverty thesis to the test. Generally, it is safe to say that these studies have not been able to corroborate its fundamental points beyond a purely descriptive level. Thus, for example, L. Kriesberg (1970) found that contextual factors played a much more important role than cultural values in explaining the differences between poor and not-poor mothers in the North-American population of Syracuse. In another study about the North-American black population, Coward, Feagin, and Williams (1974) found that the only aspects of the culture of poverty confirmed by data were those which could be considered simple alternative indicators of poverty, not representations of a way of life belonging to a culture or a distinct psychological orientation.
Moreover, the empirical studies provide a strong case for seriously questioning that the poor’s sunken aspirations are the ideal mechanism for guaranteeing that they remain poor. In fact, there exists no clear proof that the poor’s presumed motivational deficiencies are central to their lack of economic mobility. In a series of studies on poor and not-poor people’s attitudes toward work, L. Goodwin did not find any significant differences, at least in what is called “work ethic.” Goodwin was thus able to conclude that all kinds of poor people “identify their own worth in their work as much as the not-poor. They express the same desire to prepare themselves for a job whether they have adequate income or cannot earn a living and find work. Moreover, they have life aspirations which are as high as those of the not-poor and desire the same things, such as a good education and nice place to live. This study shows that there are no differences between the poor and not-poor in terms of life objectives and desire to work” (Goodwin, 1972, p. 112). A similar conclusion can be drawn from a study carried out by Juana Olimpia Peña (1984) with 20 Salvadoran families displaced by the war who were found in a refugee camp near San Salvador. The most prominent need felt by these people was not that of continuing to receive help in whatever form it took, but obtaining paid work which would allow them to reconstruct their lives and, above all, their personal and social identities.
The culture of poverty claims to account for the reproduction of the marginalizing social order, or at least, the reproduction of the poor and marginalized sector. This explanation places the fundamental cause of poverty's persistence within the poor themselves and in the traits of their personality. In this way, it results in a psychologism which is quite favorable for the established order, since it acquits the order of a failure so grave as the incapacity to provide a huge sector of the population with a minimal satisfaction of their needs and integration into “normal” life. The system is considered healthy, and the defects are attributed to the poor themselves, even if those defects were learned.
Perhaps the most significant, contemporary form of psychologism typical for the culture of poverty is in the phrase coined by William Ryan: victim-blaming, in which fault is assigned to the victims themselves (Ryan, 1976). The idea that the victim is at fault or, in our case, that the poor are guilty for their own poverty, clearly appears in the view often held about the poor and which manifests in expressions like the following: “And why do they insist on living so promiscuously and all bunched up together, exposing their children to those situations and their bad examples?” “You see, as soon as they have some money, they spend it on alcohol or waste it on fancy or worthless things like the shop window TV instead of using it on something useful.”
The substance of this ideologized view consists of justifying existing discrimination and social injustice, pointing out the undeniable and visible defects of the victims of exploitative inequality and thus making them responsible for their own existential failure, for their own misery. The poor are said to suffer from the psychological effects of impoverishment, thus converting them into the makers and inheritors of their own problems. From this perspective, the obvious fact that poverty and marginalization are primarily and fundamentally a lack of money and other resources ends up being cast aside, or even forgotten.
Victim-blaming sometimes comes wrapped up in concern and paternalism, and it is covered in an aura of humanitarianism, which is quite typical of professions like that of the psychologist or the social worker. It claims to help “those poor people” escape their poverty, promoting their learning of habits useful for society with which they can integrate themselves as valuable members of the social system. There is a need, so they say, to change the attitudes of the poor—a stigma undoubtedly acquired in the environment, but a stigma which nevertheless marks the victim and engenders future victimization. Thus, the stigma, the defect is seen as something belonging to the poor from head to toe, even if it is due to environmental factors. With that in mind, the continuous “victimizing” or impoverishing effect of the social system itself, the impact of social forces on what the poor can or cannot do, is once again ignored.
It is wrong to attribute a sub-systemic autonomy, that is to say, an independence from forces shaped by the established social systems, to a “culture of poverty.” The fundamental forces and norms which mold the world of the poor create the dependence and impoverishment to which the system itself subjects them. The world of poverty is not a world molded by itself in the first instance, but by the broader determinants of the social system in which it is found. By forgetting this historical point and by attributing the poor’s poverty and marginalization to their own traits, the demand of change falls not on the society, but on its victim—not the system, but the marginalized. The survival and reproduction of the established system thus remains ideologically maintained.
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