{"id":571,"date":"2018-04-25T10:28:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-25T09:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.northumbria.ac.uk\/sociology\/?p=571"},"modified":"2018-04-25T10:28:00","modified_gmt":"2018-04-25T09:28:00","slug":"the-re-culturalisation-of-poverty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.northumbria.ac.uk\/sociology\/2018\/04\/25\/the-re-culturalisation-of-poverty\/","title":{"rendered":"The Re-culturalisation of Poverty"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Cultures
Lewis’s work has been used to link culture to poverty<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Stephen Crossley writes on the re-emergence of cultural explanations of poverty<\/strong><\/p>\n

(Slides from Dr Crossley’s recent seminar are available here:\u00a0The (re)culturalization of poverty policy)<\/a><\/p>\n

Cultural explanations of poverty have a long (and largely evidence-free) pedigree but the more specific and explicit theory of a \u2018culture of poverty\u2019 can be traced back to the work of the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis in the 1950s and 1960s. Lewis\u2019 work was strongly critiqued at the time it was written, but it was also hugely influential but not necessarily in a way which Lewis approved of. Indeed, by the late 1960s, when he was still writing about a \u2018(sub)culture of poverty\u2019, he was privately attempting to distance himself from it in correspondence with colleagues. It has been argued that Lewis\u2019 ideas, based on small scale studies with very small numbers of Latin American families in different countries, have remained peripheral to UK policy and political discourse surrounding poverty and disadvantage. In recent times, however, and in line with narratives surrounding other \u2018social problems\u2019, UK political rhetoric and government initiatives aimed at tackling poverty and disadvantage have become increasingly concerned with cultural explanations, in a new iteration of what Mamdani has termed \u2018Culture Talk\u2019.<\/p>\n

UK political rhetoric and government initiatives aimed at tackling poverty and disadvantage have become increasingly concerned with cultural explanations, in a new iteration of what Mamdani has termed \u2018Culture Talk\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For example, in the 1980s \u2018politicians of the right condemned the \u201cdependency culture\u201d of welfare benefit recipients, contrasting it with the \u201centerprise culture\u201d of those who seek to create wealth and opportunity\u2019. In the late 1990s, Tony Blair\u2019s first term in office as Prime Minister was associated with a desire to end this \u2018dependency culture\u2019. His first term was also notable for his historic commitment to end child poverty forever by 2020. Throughout their period in power, New Labour attempted to address problematic or \u2018destructive\u2019 cultures amongst disadvantaged communities.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to the Coalition Government (2010-2015) and at the launch of a flagship social policy aimed at \u2018turning around\u2019 the lives of \u2018troubled families\u2019, the Prime Minister David Cameron claimed that they were characterized by a \u2018culture of disruption and irresponsibility that cascades through generations\u2019. A UK government Social Justice Strategy<\/em> included a section on \u2018Challenging the culture of worklessness\u2019 and, at around the same time, the Leader of the Opposition spoke of the need to end the \u2018culture of something for nothing\u2019. David Cameron, during a speech explaining how the government intended to \u2018transform the lives of the poorest in Britain\u2019, spoke of \u2018the opportunity of culture\u2019 and remarked, that \u2018there are too many young people in Britain who are culturally disenfranchised\u2019, who \u2018might believe that culture is not for them\u2019. This bears a remarkable similarity to Charles Valentine\u2019s critique, nearly fifty years ago, of Frazier\u2019s portrayal of cultural practices within poor black communities:<\/p>\n

“While these constructs are labelled and treated as \u201ccultures\u201d, they are nevertheless presented as so lacking in basic elements of organization universal among human lifeways that they stand quite outside any usual definition of the term culture. Thus, life in the culture of the poor takes on the paradoxical meaning of life without culture, or at least without major elements previously understood as necessary aspects of culture”<\/p>\n

Raymond Williams wrote that \u2018culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language\u2019 and it is this complexity that makes its use as an explanation of poverty and disadvantage so enduring and problematic.<\/p>\n

…the use of culture in political rhetoric around poverty helps to keep the focus on the behaviours and practices of people on low-incomes rather than the behaviour and practices of people in positions of power<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod suggests that \u2018culture is the essential tool for making other\u2019 and the use of culture in political rhetoric around poverty helps to keep the focus on the behaviours and practices of people on low-incomes rather than the behaviour and practices of people in positions of power who choose to do nothing about continued existence of poverty in one of the richest countries in the world.<\/p>\n

Dr Stephen Crossley<\/strong>\u00a0is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at Northumbria University.<\/p>\n

Twitter: @akindoftrouble<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen Crossley writes on the re-emergence of cultural explanations of poverty (Slides from Dr Crossley’s recent seminar are available here:\u00a0The (re)culturalization of poverty policy) Cultural explanations of poverty have a long (and largely evidence-free) pedigree but the more specific and explicit theory of a \u2018culture of poverty\u2019 can be traced back to the work ofContinue reading “The Re-culturalisation of Poverty”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-power-culture-identities-group","category-research-stories","entry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Ih7L-9d","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.northumbria.ac.uk\/sociology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.northumbria.ac.uk\/sociology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.northumbria.ac.uk\/sociology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.northumbria.ac.uk\/sociology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.northumbria.ac.uk\/sociology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.northumbria.ac.uk\/sociology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.northumbria.ac.uk\/sociology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.northumbria.ac.uk\/sociology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.northumbria.ac.uk\/sociology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}