Culture and poverty from a lifeworld stance: rehabilitating a controversial conceptual pair

Abstract

AbstractThis paper picks up Oscar Lewis’s controversial culture of poverty theorem and shows that it has analytical potential, if applied with a rigorous, dispassionate and actor-bound concept of “culture”. Based on Alfred Schutz’s socio-phenomenological model of the lifeworld, “culture” is understood as the interpretive und pragmatic ways in which actors approach the world. Staying true to this framework, I argue that people in scarce living conditions are deprived of institutionalized possibilities to live out their intentionality. This demoralizes and disorients them, which results in the loss of inner drive and pessimistic attitudes. Fatalism and passiveness infiltrate their action planning. Phenomenology helps to systematize these results into spatial, temporal and social aspects: people in poverty lose opportunities for the appropriation of space, their biographies appear to stagnate and they are preoccupied with securing their social reputation. My results therefore show that poverty should not be understood as a self-isolated subculture. Instead, people in poverty are heavily oriented towards the dominant middleclass and its life models. The interview data that provided these insights were collected in North England and South Wales, in the facilities of subsidiary and counseling bodies, between 2016 and 2019. They were analyzed using methods of hermeneutic text interpretation.