"A vacant lot on East 110th Street in New York in 1952: the study of urban blight has long been influenced by political fashions."

 

…I stumbled upon this article.  ”‘Culture and Poverty’ Makes a Comeback” — it’s kind of confusing and weird.  Many familiar tensions arise…blaming the victim; lack of consideration of the “culture of wealth”; using culture as scapegoat; nature vs. nurture; the poverty trap; perceptions of reality vs. reality; structural violence vs. cultural norms; dehumanization and oversimplification of ‘the poor’; …etc. Thoughts?

Rep. Woolsey at last spring’s Congressional briefing: “What a concept. Values, norms, beliefs play very important roles in the way people meet the challenges of poverty.”  Values, norms, and beliefs play also play important roles in how others structurally inflict suffering unto others. Womp.

Compliments of Maya:

Common indeed are the ethnographies in which poverty and inequality, the end result of a long process of impoverishment, are reduced to a form of cultural difference. We were sent to the field to look for different cultures. We saw oppression; it looked, well, different from our comfortable lives in the university; and so we called it ‘culture.’ We came, we saw, we misdiagnosed. – Infections and Inequalities, pg. 7

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