1914-1970
The anthropologist Oscar Lewis is best known for devising the "culture of poverty" theory and applying the life history and family studies approach to studies of urban poverty. The concept of the culture of poverty is cited often, especially in the popular press, and at times it is misapplied as an argument that supports the idea of "blaming the victim." Not surprisingly, given the continuing salience of debates about the causes of poverty, Oscar Lewis’s legacy within anthropology and the social sciences is still very much debated. Indeed, the notion of a "culture of poverty" has since reemerged in discussions of the "urban underclass." While most researchers view the causes of poverty in terms of economic and political factors, there is still a strain of thinking that blames poverty on the behavior of the poor.
Oscar Lewis was born on December 25, 1914, in New York City, and he was raised in upstate New York. He received a BA in history from the City College of New York While in college he met his future wife, the former Ruth Maslow, who would also become his co-collaborator in many of his research projects. He enrolled in graduate school in history at Columbia University, but under Ruth Benedict’s guidance he switched to anthropology. Partially due to a lack of funding, his PhD dissertation on the impact of white contact on Blackfoot culture was library based. After graduating he took on several jobs, including United States representative to the Inter-American Indian Institute in Mexico, which led him to begin conducting research on the peasant community of Tepoztlan. Lewis’s critique of Robert Redfield’s 1930 study of the same village is considered a classic in Mexican anthropology. Lewis’s research shows, in contrast to Redfield’s, that peasant culture in Tepoztlan is not based on "folk" solidarity but is rather highly conflictual, driven by struggles over land and power. In 1948 Lewis joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was one of the founders of the anthropology department.
During his tenure at Illinois, Lewis produced his best-known works including Five Families (1959), The Children of Sdnchez (1961), and Anthropological Essays (1970). In both Five Families and The Children ofSdnchez, Lewis describes the culture of poverty theory and provides rich insights on urban poverty in Mexico through the narratives of his informants. In Anthropological Essays, Lewis reiterates the culture of poverty theory, which at its most basic level is an adaptation to economic circumstances: "The culture of poverty is … a reaction of the poor to their marginal position in a class-stratified, highly individuated, capitalistic society" (Lewis 1970, p. 69). Included in Lewis’s trait list of the culture of poverty are feelings of inferiority and aggressiveness, fatalism, sexism, and a low level of aspiration. Lewis saw the culture of poverty as resulting from class divisions, and therefore present not only in Mexico but throughout the world.
Because Lewis’s description of the poor went against the clean-cut image presented by the Mexican media, there was, within Mexico, harsh criticism of the notion of a culture of poverty. This response, as Miguel Diaz-Barriga (1997) points out, obfuscates the overlap between Lewis’s representations of the urban poor and Mexican social thinkers such as Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz. Diaz-Barriga shows that in their interviews, many of Lewis’s informants ironically played off of well-known stereotypes of the urban poor, and that Lewis took their statements literally.
In the United States, the culture of poverty theory became well known through its application in Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 report for the Department of Labor, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, which informed national policymaking, including Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. By focusing on the "pathologies" that emerged from slavery, discrimination, and the breakdown of the nuclear family, Moynihan saw the emergence of a culture of poverty among the African American poor. This emphasis on the pathologies of poverty has since been reframed in terms of theories of the urban underclass that seek to understand the urban poor as being both economically and culturally isolated from the middle-class. While sociologists such as William Julius Wilson (1980) have devised sophisticated understandings of the urban underclass, this concept, especially in the popular press, has become a stand-in for arguments that see the causes of poverty in terms of cultural pathologies.
In their well-known 1973 refutation of the application of the culture of poverty theory, Edwin Eames and Judith Goode argued that many of the characteristics associated with poverty, including matrifocal families and mutual aid, are rational adaptations. The continuing prevalence of poverty, they stated, must be understood in terms of restricted access to and attainment of job skills. Studies that pathologize the poor have received justified criticism for privileging middle-class values, being vague about the overall characteristics of poverty and their interrelations, and viewing matrifocal households as being a cause rather than a result of poverty. The historian Michael Katz argues that, when given educational and employment opportunities (instead of dead-end service sector jobs), the urban poor aspire to succeed as much as their middle-class counterparts. Katz convincingly calls for a historical understanding of the educational, housing, and economic policies that have generated urban poverty.
As evidenced by essays marking the fortieth anniversary of the Moynihan Report in the popular press, many continue to believe that the culture of the poor must be understood as a cycle of broken households and disruptive behavior. This renewed cycle of applying the culture of poverty theory represents the pathological ways that American society has sought to overcome class-based and racial inequalities. Indeed, it is easier to blame the poor for their poverty than to do the hard work of understanding the historical and economic factors that have generated poverty and the policy options that can transform cities.
When Oscar Lewis died, on December 16, 1970, social scientists were beginning to forcefully criticize his work for blaming the victim. Lewis’s death at fifty-five years old was particularly untimely because he was not able to respond to these critiques. Indeed, the social sciences lost an opportunity to engage Lewis’s responses and, perhaps, reach agreement on more fruitful ways to explore urban poverty.
