The Culture of Poverty
Author(s): Oscar Lewis
Source: Scientific American, Vol. 215, No. 4 (October 1966), pp. 19-25
Published by: Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc.
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SCIENTIFIC
Established 1845 AMERICAN October 1966 Volume 215 Number 4
The Culture of Poverty
Does membership In a group that has been poor for generations
constitute belonging to a separate culture? A study of Puerto
Ricans in both Puerto Rico and New York indicates that it does
P
overty and the so-called war
against it provide a principal
theme for the domestic program
of the present Administration. In the
midst of a population that enjoys unexampled
material well-being-with the
average annual family income exceeding
$7,000-it is officially acknowledged
that some 18 million families, numbering
more than 50 million individuals,
live below the $3,000 "poverty line."
Toward the improvement of the lot of
these people some $1,600 million of
Federal funds are directly allocated
through the Office of Economic Opportunity,
and many hundreds of millions
of additional dollars flow indirectly
through expanded Federal expenditures
in the fields of health, education, welfare
and urban affairs.
Along with the increase in activity
on behalf of the poor indicated by these
figures there has come a parallel expansion
of publication in the social
sciences on the subject of poverty. The
new writings advance the same two opposed
evaluations of the poor that are
to be found in literature, in proverbs
and in popular sayings throughout recorded
history. Just as the poor have
been pronounced blessed, virtuous, upright,
serene, independent, honest, kind
and happy, so contemporary students
stress their great and neglected capacity
for self-help, leadership and community
organization. Conversely, as the poor
have been characterized as shiftless,
mean, sordid, violent, evil and criminal,
by Oscar Lewis
so other students point to the irreversibly
destructive effects of poverty on individual
character and emphasize the
corresponding need to keep guidance
and control of poverty projects in the
hands of duly constituted authorities.
This clash of viewpoints reflects in
part the infighting for political control
of the program between Federal
and local officials. The confusion results
also from the tendency to focus
study and attention on the personality
of the individual victim of poverty
rather than on the slum community and
family and from the consequent failure
to distinguish between poverty and
what I have called the culture of
poverty.
The phrase is a catchy one and is
used and misused with some frequency
in the current literature. In my writings
it is the label for a specific conceptual
model that describes in positive terms
a subculture of Western society with
its own structure and rationale, a way
of life handed on from generation to
generation along family lines. The culture
of poverty is not just a matter of
deprivation or disorganization, a term
signifying the absence of something.
It is a culture in the traditional anthropological
sense in that it provides
human beings with a design for living,
with a ready-made set of solutions for
human problems, and so serves a significant
adaptive function. This style of
life transcends national boundaries and
regional and rural-urban differences
within nations. Wherever it occurs, its
practitioners exhibit remarkable similarity
in the structure of their families,
in interpersonal relations, in spending
habits, in their value systems and
in their orientation in time.
N
ot nearly enough is known about
this important complex of human
behavior. My own concept of it has
evolved as my work has progressed and
remains subject to amendment by my
own further work and that of others.
The scarcity of literature on the culture
of poverty is a measure of the gap
in communication that exists between
the very poor and the middle-class personnel-social
scientists, social workers,
teachers, physicians, priests and otherswho
bear the major responsibility for
carrying out the antipoverty programs.
Much of the behavior accepted in the
culture of poverty goes counter to
cherished ideals of the larger society.
In writing about "multiproblem" families
social scientists thus often stress
their instability, their lack of order,
direction and organization. Yet, as I
have observed them, their behavior
seems clearly patterned and reasonably
predictable. I am more often struck by
the inexorable repetitiousness and the
iron entrenchment of their lifeways.
The concept of the culture of poverty
may help to correct misapprehensions
that have ascribed some behavior patterns
of ethnic, national or regional
groups as distinctive characteristics. For
19
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example, a high incidence of commonlaw
marriage and of households headed
by women has been thought to be distinctive
of Negro family life in this country
and has been attributed to the Negro's
historical experience of slavery. In
actuality it turns out that such households
express essential traits of the culture
of poverty and are found among diverse
peoples in many parts of the
world and among peoples that have had
no history of slavery. Although it is now
possible to assert such generalizations,
there is still much to be learned about
this difficult and affecting subject. The
absence of intensive anthropological
studies of poor families in a wide variety
of national contexts-particularly
the lack of such studies in socialist
countries-remains a serious handicap
to the formulation of dependable crosscultural
constants of the culture of
poverty.
My studies of poverty and family
life have centered largely in Mexico. On
occasion some of my Mexican friends
have suggested delicately that I turn
to a study of poverty in my own country.
As a first step in this direction
I am currently engaged in a study of
Puerto Rican families. Over the past
three years my staff and I have been
assembling data on 100 representative
families in four slums of Greater San
Juan and some 50 families of their relatives
in New York City.
Our methods combine the traditional
techniques of sociology, anthropology
and psychology. This includes a battery
of 19 questionnaires, the administration
of which requires 12 hours per informant.
They cover the residence and
employment history of each adult; family
relations; income and expenditure;
complete inventory of household and
personal possessions; friendship patterns,
particularly the compadrazgo, or
godparent, relationship that serves as
a kind of informal social security for
the children of these families and establishes
special obligations among the
adults; recreational patterns; health and
medical history; politics; religion; world
view and "cosmopolitanism." Open-end
interviews and psychological tests (such
as the thematic apperception test, the
Rorschach test and the sentence-completion
test) are administered to a sampling
of this population.
All this work serves to establish the
context for dose-range study of a selected
few families. Because the family is
a small social system, it lends itself to
WATERFRONT SHACKS of a Puerto Rican slum provide a sharp
contrast to the modern construction that characterizes the prosperous
parts of San Juan's Santurce district (rear). The author
has found that residents in clearly delineated slum neighhorhoods
such as this one often have a community sense similar to that
characteristic of villagers in rural areas. Such esprit de corps is
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the holistic approach of anthropology.
Whole-family studies bridge the gap
between the conceptual extremes of the
culture at one pole and of the individual
at the other, making possible observation
of both culture and personality as
they are interrelated in real life. In a
large metropolis such as San Juan or
New York the family is the natural unit
of study.
Ideally our objective is the naturalistic
observation of the life of "our"
families, with a minimum of intervention.
Such intensive study, however,
necessarily involves the establishment
of deep personal ties. My assistants include
two Mexicans whose families I
had shldied; their "Mexican's-eye view"
of the Puerto Rican slum has helped
to point up the similarities and differences
between the Mexican and Puerto
uncomnl0n among participants in the cuI.
lure of poverty; although gregadous, they
seldom manage to become well organized.
Rican subcultures. vVe have spent many
hours attending family parties, wakes
and baptisms, responding to emergency
calls, taking people to the hospita1, getting
them out of jail, filling out applications
for them, hunting apartments with
them, helping them to get jobs or to get
on relief. With each member of these
families we conduct tape-recorded interviews,
taking down their life stories
and their answers to questions on a wide
variety of topics. For the ordering of
our material we undertake to reconstruct,
by close interrogation, the history
of a week or more of consecutive
days in the lives of each family, and we
observe and record complete days as
they unfold. The first volume to issue
from this study is to be published next
month under the title of La Vida, a
Puerto Rican Family in the Cultw'e of
Poverty-San Juan and New York (Random
House).
'rhere are many poor people in the
world. Indeed, the poverty of the
two-thirds of the world's population
who live in the underdeveloped countries
has been rightly called "the problem
of problems." But not all of them
by any means live in the culture of
poverty. For this way of life to come
into being and flourish it seems clear
that certain preconditions must be met.
The setting is a cash economy, with
wage labor and production for profit
and with a persistently high rate of
unemployment and underemployment,
at low wages, for unskilled labor. The
society fails to provide social, political
and economic organization, on either a
voluntary basis or by government imposition,
for the low-income population.
There is a bilateral kinship system centered
on the nuclear progenitive family,
as distinguished from the unilateral extended
kinship system of lineage and
clan. The dominant class asserts a set of
values that prizes thrift and the accumulation
of wealth and property, stresses
the possibility of upward mobility and
explains low economic status as the result
of individual personal inadequacy
and inferiority.
Where these conditions prevail the
way of life that develops among some
of the poor is the culture of poverty.
That is why I have described it as a
subculture of the vVestern social order.
It is both an adaptation and a reaction
of the poor to their marginal position
in a class-stratified, highly individuated,
capitalistic society. It represents an effort
to cope with feelings of hopelessness
and despair that arise from the
realization by the members of the marginal
communities in these societies of
the improbability of their achieving success
in terms of the prevailing values
and goals. Many of the traits of the culture
of poverty can be viewed as local,
spontaneous attempts to meet needs not
served in the case of the poor by the
institutions and agencies of the larger
society because the poor are not eligible
for such service, cannot afford it or are
ignorant and suspicious.
Once the culture of poverty has come
into existence it tends to perpetuate
itself. By the time slum children are
six or seven they have usually absorbed
the basic attitudes and values of their
subculture. Thereafter they are psychologically
unready to take full advantage
of changing conditions or improving
opportunities that may develop in
their lifetime.
N
[Y studies have identified some 70
1 - traits that characterize the culture
of poverty. The principal ones may
be described in four dimensions of
the system: the relationship between the
subculture and the larger society; the
nature of the slum community; the nature
of the family, and the attitudes,
values and character structure of the
individual.
The disengagement, the nonintegration,
of the poor with respect to the
major institutions of society is a crucial
element in the culture of poverty. It
reflects the combined effect of a variety
of factors including poverty, to begin
with, but also segregation and discrimination,
fear, suspicion and apathy
and the development of alternative institutions
and procedures in the slum
community. The people do not belong
to labor unions or political parties and
make little use of banks, hospitals, department
stores or museums. Such involvement
as there is in the institutions
of the larger society-in the jails, the
army and the public welfare systemdoes
little to suppress the traits of the
culture of poverty. A relief system that
barely keeps people alive perpetuates
rather than eliminates poverty and the
pervading sense of hopelessness.
People in a culture of poverty producc
little wealth and receive little
in return. Chronic unemployment and
underemployment, low wages, lack of r
property, lack of savings, absence of
food reserves in the home and chronic
shortage of cash imprison the family
and the individual in a vicious circle.
Thus for lack of cash the slum householder
makes frequent purchases of
21
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SAN JUAN SLUM AREA in the Santurce district sprawls along the
edge of the tidal inlet (top) that connects the city's harbor with
San Jose Lake. Rickety buildings have been erected on stilts be·
EL BARRIO, the original nuclear Latin·American slum area of
Manhallan, occupies the greater part of this aerial photograph.
Lying roughly between Central Park and the East River north of
22
yond the high.water line and narrow alleyways crisscross the dis·
trict. Compared to this area, many of New York's worst slum
areas, such as the ones that appear below, are nearly middle·class.
99th Street and south of 125th Street in Manhallan, this is the area
that received the pioneer Puerto Rican immigrants to New York
in the early years of this century. Photograph was made in 1961.
© 1966 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC
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small quantities of food at higher prices.
The slum economy turns inward; it
shows a high incidence of pawning of
personal goods, borrowing at usurious
rates of interest, informal credit arrangements
among neighbors, use of
secondhand clothing and furniture.
There is awareness of middle-class
values. People talk about them and
even claim some of them as their own.
On the whole, however, they do not live
by them. They will declare that marriage
by law, by the church or by both
is the ideal form of marriage, but few
will marry. For men who have no steady
jobs, no property and no prospect of
wealth to pass on to their children, who
live in the present without expectations
of the future, who want to avoid the
expense and legal difficulties involved
in marriage and divorce, a free union
or consensual marriage makes good
sense. The women, for their part, will
turn down offers of marriage from men
who are likely to be immature, punishing
and generally unreliable. They feel
that a consensual union gives them
some of the freedom and flexibility men
have. By not giving the fathers of their
children legal status as husbands, the
women have a stronger claim on the
children. They also maintain exclusive
rights to their own property.
Along with disengagement from the
larger society, there is a hostility to the
basic institutions of what are regarded
as the dominant classes. There is hatred
of the police, mistrust of government
and of those in high positions and a
cynicism that extends to the church.
The culture of poverty thus holds a certain
potential for protest and for entrainment
in political movements aimed
against the existing order.
With its poor housing and overcrowding,
the community of the culture of
poverty is high in gregariousness, but it
has a minimum of organization beyond
the nuclear and extended family. Occasionally
slum dwellers come together in
temporary informal groupings; neighborhood
gangs that cut across slum
settlements represent a considerable
advance beyond the zero point of the
continuum I have in mind. It is the low
level of organization that gives the culture
of poverty its marginal and anomalous
quality in our highly organized
society. Most primitive peoples have
achieved a higher degree of sociocultural
organization than contemporary
urban slum dwellers. This is not to say
that there may not be a sense of community
and esprit de corps in a slum
neighborhood. In fact, where slums are
isolated from their surroundings by enclosing
walls or other physical barriers,
where rents are low and residence is
stable and where the population constitutes
a distinct ethnic, racial or language
group, the sense of community may approach
that of a village. In Mexico City
and San Juan such territoriality is engendered
by the scarcity of low-cost
housing outside of established slum
areas. In South Africa it is actively enforced
by the apartheid that confines
rural migrants to prescribed locations.
The family in the culture of poverty
does not cherish childhood as a specially
prolonged and protected stage in the
life cycle. Initiation into sex comes
early. With the instability of consensual
marriage the family tends to be mothercentered
and tied more closely to the
mother's extended family. The female
head of the house is given to authoritarian
rule. In spite of much verbal emphasis
on family solidarity, sibling rivalry
for the limited supply of goods
and maternal affection is intense. There
is little privacy.
The individual who grows up in this
culture has a strong feeling of fatalism,
helplessness, dependence and inferiority.
These traits, so often remarked in
the current literature as characteristic
of the American Negro, I found equally
strong in slum dwellers of Mexico City
and San Juan, who are not segregated
or discriminated against as a distinct
ethnic or racial group. Other traits include
a high incidence of weak ego
structure, orality and confusion of sexual
identification, all reflecting maternal
deprivation; a strong present-time orientation
with relatively little disposition
to defer gratification and plan for the
future, and a high tolerance for psychological
pathology of all kinds. There
is widespread belief in male superiority
and among the men a strong preoccupation
with machismo, their masculinity.
Provincial and local in outlook, with
little sense of history, these people
know only their own neighborhood and
their own way of life. Usually they do
not have the knowledge, the vision or
the ideology to see the similarities between
their troubles and those of their
counterparts elsewhere in the world..
They are not class-conscious, although
they are sensitive indeed to symbols of
status.
T
he distinction between poverty and
the culture of poverty is basic to the
model described here. There are numerous
examples of poor people whose way
of life I would not characterize as belonging
to this subculture. Many primitive
and preliterate peoples that have
been studied by anthropologists suffer
dire poverty attributable to low technology
or thin resources or both. Yet
even the simplest of these peoples have
a high degree of social organization and
a relatively integrated, satisfying and
self-sufficient culture.
In India the destitute lower-caste
peoples-such as the Chamars, the leatherworkers,
and the Bhangis, the sweepers-remain
integrated in the larger society
and have their own panchayat
institutions of self-govemment. Their
panchayats and their extended unilateral
kinship systems, or clans, cut across village
lines, giving them a strong sense
of ideptity and continuity. In my studies
of these peoples I found no culture of
poverty to go with their poverty.
. The Jews of eastern Europe were a
poor urban people, often confined to
ghettos. Yet they did not have many
traits of the culture of poverty. They
had a tradition of literacy that placed
great value on leaming; they formed
many voluntary associations and adhered
with devotion to the central community
organization around the rabbi,
and they had a religion that taught
them they were the chosen people.
I would cite also a fourth, somewhat
speculative example of poverty dissociated
from the culture of poverty. On
the basis of limited direct observation
in one country-Cuba-and from indirect
evidence, I am inclined to believe
the culture of poverty does not exist in
socialist countries. In 1947 I undertook
a study of a slum in Havana. Recently I
had an opportunity to revisit the same
slum and some of the same families.
The physical aspect of the place had
changed little, except for a beautiful
new nursery school. The people were as
poor as before, but I was impressed to
find much less of the feelings of despair
and apathy, so symptomatic of the culture
of poverty in the urban slums of
the U.S. The slum was now highly organized,
with block committees, educational
committees, party committees.
The people had found a new sense of
power and importance in a doctrine that
glorified the lower class as the hope of
humanity, and they were armed. I was
told by one Cuban official that the
Castro govemment had practically eliminated
delinquency by giving arms to
the delinquents!
Evidently the Castro regime-revising
Marx and Engels-did not write off the
so-called lumpenproletariat as an inherently
reactionary and antirevolutionary -
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MOTHER AND DAUGHTER stand together by the door of a rundown
apartment building on upper Park Avenue_ Because commonlaw
marriage offers the female participant in the culture of poverty
more protection of her property rights and surer custody of her
children than formal marriage does, the mother is usually the head
of the household and family ties are to her kin and not the father's_
Hidalgo, Father Morelos, Juarez, Diaz,
Zapata, Carranza and Cardenas. In San
Juan the names of R{lmon Power, Jose
de Diego, Baldorioty de Castro, Ramon
Betances, Nemesio Canales, Llorens
Torres rang no bell; a few could tell
about the late Albizu Campos. For the
lower-income Puerto Rican, however,
history begins with Munoz Rivera and
ends with his son Munoz Marin.
The national context can make a big
difference in the play of the crucial
traits of fatalism and hopelessness.
Given the advanced technology, the
high level of literacy, the ali-pervasive
reach of the media of mass communications
and the relatively high aspirations
of ali sectors of the population, even the
poorest and most marginal communities
of the U.S. must aspire to a larger future
than the slum dwellers of Ecuador and
Peru, where the actual possibilities are
more limited and where an authoritarian
social order persists in city and
country. Among the 50 million U.S.
citizens now more or less officially certified
as poor, I would guess that about
20 percent live in a culture of poverty.
The largest numbers in this group are
made up of Negroes, Puerto Ricans,
Mexicans, American Indians and Southern
poor whites. In these figures there
is some reassurance for those concerned
because it is much more difficult to und�
the culture of poverty than to cure poverty
itself.
Middle-class people-this would certai�ly
include most social scientiststend
to concentrate on the negative aspects
of the culture of poverty. They
attach a minus sign to such traits as
present-time orientation and readiness
to indulge impulses. I do not intend to
idealize or romanticize the culture of
poverty-"it is easier to praise poverty
than to live in it." Yet the positive aspects
of these traits must not be overlooked.
Living in the present may develop
a capacity for spontaneity, for
the enjoyment of the sensual, which
is often blunted in the middle-class,
future-oriented man. Indeed, I am often
struck by the analogies that can be
drawn between the mores of the very
rich-of the "jet set" and "cafe society"
-and the culture of the very poor. Yet
it is, on the whole, a comparatively superficial
culture. There is in it much
pathos, suffering and emptiness. It does
not provide much support or satisfaction;
its pervading mistrust magnifies
individual helplessness and isolation. Indeed,
poverty of culture is one of the
crucial traits of the culture of poverty.
The concept of the culture of poverty
provides a generalization that may help
to unify and explain a number of phenomena
hitherto viewed as peculiar
to certain racial, national or regional
groups. Problems we think of as being
distinctively our own or distinctively
Negro (or as typifying any other ethnic
group) prove to be endemic in countries
where there are no segregated ethnic
minority groups. If it follows that the
elimination of physical poverty may not
by itself eliminate the culture of poverty,
then an understanding of the subculture
may contribute to the design of
measures specific to that purpose.
W
hat is the future of the culture of
poverty? In considering this question
one must distinguish between those
countries in which it represents a relatively
small segment of the population
and those in which it constitutes a large
one. In the U.S. the major solution proposed
by social workers dealing with
the "hard core" poor has been slowly to
raise their level of living and incorporate
them in the middle class. Wherever
possible psychiatric treatment is pre­
scribed.
In underdeveloped countries where
great masses of people live in the culture
of poverty, such a social-work solution
does not seem feasible. The local
psychiatrists have all they can do to
care for their own growing middle class.
In those countries the people with a
culture of poverty may seek a more
revolutionary solution. By creating basic
structural changes in society, by redistributing
wealth, by organizing the poor
and giving them a sense of belonging,
of power and of leadership, revolutions
frequently succeed in abolishing some
of the basic characteristics of the culture
of poverty even when they do not succeed
in curing poverty itself.
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