Poverty and the savage slot

In today’s anthropology, the word “culture” is conspicuous by its absence from anthropological discourse. But the word is still alive outside anthropology, particularly in sociology and psychology, in ways anthropologists cannot ignore, as fields like urban poverty and education have been altered by the introduction of the culture concept. In this paper, I revisit the stakes of the debate over the analytic term “culture” within anthropology in the hope of revivifying the particularly anthropological take on “culture” that may help us answer more effectively those who still argue that poverty is reproduced through what poor people learn in childhood. I argue that the assumptions behind the marked term “culture” within the culture of poverty thesis are heir to two competing interpretations. In the first understanding, “culture” speculatively refers to what is embodied in individuals who perpetuate “a design for living” (Lewis, 1966) into which they have been socialized and reproduce it, causally and deterministically. In the second understanding, “culture” refers to what emerges as people interact with each other, their conditions and experiences, including those that had emerged earlier and can only be understood empirically as a product of everyday life. In what follows, I deliberately oversimplify a complicated intellectual history in order to throw the stakes of the culture concept into high relief. Culture’s circuitous career has been powerfully taken up by Trouillot (2003, pp. 113–115): he notes that it emerged from the Boasian tradition as an anti-concept designed to counter biological racism and social Darwinism, but today often underwrites unwarranted speculations on race and class. In the 50 years since the Moynihan report, as Trouillot laments, culture has only dug deeper into daily use as a bulwark against change, particularly change which might reshuffle the status quo in favor of those with lesser means. How did we get here? Looking back on the winding history of the culture concept within anthropology, Trouillot identifies the culture concept with “the Savage Slot (2003, 8–10)” that he argues was inherited by anthropology as the “savage or the primitive was the alter ego the West constructed for itself” (2003, 18). But an inheritance, like all gifts, can be refused. While critiquing the unfortunate fate of the culture concept within anthropology, Trouillot notes that particular strands of anthropological thought have critiqued the existence of “the Savage Slot” by inverting the assumptions from which it stemmed and turning its gaze back upon the tradition of Western philosophy from which it originated. Thus, the culture concept has been deployed within anthropology both to recapitulate “the Savage Slot” and to critique its existence in the hopes of moving Western thought beyond the tired dichotomy. The infamous struggle to define culture within anthropology and its ultimate abandonment as an analytical concept serves as an index to these disagreements and debates (see Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952). However, this nuance was lost when the culture concept crossed out of anthropology into sociology, psychology, and policy debates, where the “the Savage Slot” reemerged with dire consequences for those caught in its gaze. Two debates starkly illustrate the contested interpretation of the culture concept: the classification of ethnographic artifacts within the nineteenth century Museum Anthropology and an exchange between Conrad Arensberg and Oscar Lewis over Lewis’ use of the term “culture of poverty” to describe the ebb and flow of urban poverty. The first case illustrates contested versions of the culture