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Re: [xmca] Culture of Poverty, read all about it.



Thanks for the pointer, Mike. This is a topic of great interest to me and one for which I think Vygotsky has much to offer. I have no doubt that of the reactionary nature of the target of the writer's critique. I am familiar with it via the writings of Francis Fukuyama, who makes the coping strategies of Black families in the US the cause of their misery. And we have the same guys here in Oz. But I wonder if the writer is making himself a bad dichotomy between what I could call habitus (meaning the family and the 'community' which determines the cultural choices and practices of individuals) and the larger social structure. Consider this paragraph, citing Liebow (1967) favourably:

       "Liebow did not deny culture—indeed, he documented it in
       scrupulous detail. However, he insisted that the streetcorner
       man was not a carrier of an independent cultural tradition. To
       be sure, there were obvious similarities between parents and
       children, but Liebow held that these were not the product of
       cultural transmission, but rather reflected the fact that “the
       son goes out and independently experiences the same failures, in
       the same areas, and for much the same reasons as his father.”
       Thus, it is not their culture that needs to be changed, but
       rather a political economy that fails to provide jobs that pay a
       living wage to millions of the nation’s poor, along with a
       system of occupational apartheid that has excluded a whole
       people from entire job sectors throughout American history."

I think this position is untenable. It poses a version of Theses On Feuerbach #3, i.e., he splits society into two parts, one of which is subject to the structure while the other (e.g. the writer) is a subject of the structure. How are the "conditions" to be changed except by the people subordinated by those conditions (revolutionary practice in Marx's terms), and how else will they do this but by transforming a "culture" which is barely coping with oppression, into one which succeeds in rolling it back, and ultimately changing the societal structure?

What did others make of the article?

mike cole wrote:
Re this topic -- while reading orasanu, boykin, mcdermott......

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.1/steinberg.php
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