Poverty and Culture of Daily Life

Abstract

This article explores the nature of culture and its antecedent value in explaining states of people in poverty. It tries to do it by revisiting the highly critiqued concept of the “culture of poverty”. It argues that culture affects the poor and poverty not in the deterministic way Oscar Lewis is usually understood to have proposed, but in an alternative way. It is the “culture of daily life” that influences the options and choices available to the poor. This conception of culture is oriented towards pragmatic considerations in face of contradictions and potential conflicts of everyday life and is passed on, constituted, modified, or refined by the grind of daily life. It retains space for agency and inventiveness on part of the poor so that some of them are able to reach higher levels of everydayness (well-being) in their lives. Based on conceptual discussion and evidences from a village in north India the article argues that the “culture of daily life” mostly orients the poor to secure minimum requirements for subsistence, but some amongst them through their inventiveness move out of poverty in any existing “opportunity structure”.