Abstract:
Our objective is to take stock of the budding literature on the relationship culture-poverty; identify issues that remain unanswered; and make the case that the judicious, theoretically informed, and empirically grounded study of culture can and should be a permanent component of the poverty research agenda. We begin by identifying the scholarly and policy reasons why poverty researchers should be deeply concerned with culture. We then tackle a difficult question - what is "culture"? - and make the case that sociologists and anthropologists of culture have developed at least seven different, though sometimes overlapping, analytical tools for capturing meaning-making that could help answer questions about marriage, education, neighborhoods, community participation, and other topics central to the study of poverty.
Keywords:
Culture; Poverty; Culture and poverty relationship; Social inequality; Cultural sociology