The Culture of Poverty Revisited: Bringing Back the Working Class
Keywords:
Marxism, poverty, homelessness, working class, anthropology of the United States, raceAbstract
This article looks at the "unhappy marriage" between the anthropology of poverty in the United States and Marxist social science. It examines the theoretical and methodological assumptions of poverty studies that have excluded a Marxist analysis and identifies the analytic weaknesses of these assumptions through ethnographic field data on homelessness in New York City during the Reagan/Bush years. Finally, an attempt is made to situate the development of poverty studies within the larger political history of the American working class in the 20th century and suggestions are presented for the directions that a Marxist anthropology of poverty might take.
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- Canadian Anthropology Society
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- University of Victoria
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