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3 Cards in this Set
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- Back
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Culture of Poverty
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Cultural difference => class position. The values, preferences, cultural forms, etc. of cultural minorities actively prevent them from advancing in class position. In some versions, these differences are INTENTIONAL.
"The subculture [of the poor] develops mechanisms that tend to perpetuate it, especially because of what happens to the world view, aspirations, and character of the children who grow up in it.” The poor engage in cultural practices that lead them to be poor. Poverty does not drive behavior, but is shaped by cultural difference. |
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Base & superstructure
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Base and superstructure (Marx) – Williams - culture is stuff that underlies economic relations – the base (economic relations in modes of production) is the structure that organizes society and it is that that matters. Superstructure is superfluous (stuff) – masks true underlying economic relations, what is imaginable, creatively possible depends on material reality. Economic relations drive culture.
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Resistance recreates inequality
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Willis argues that it is the culture of the lads that prepares them for a career in manual labor – culture drives them to make choices that condemns them to a life of manual labor. Paul Willis on culture and class: “I argue that it is their own culture which most effectively prepares some working class lads of the manual giving of their labor power… there is an element of self-damnation in the taking on of subordinate roles in Western capitalism. However, this damnation is experienced, paradoxically, as true learning, affirmation, appropriation, and as a form of resistance.” Identity closely tied to inequality (Willis – working class boys that resist and resent school bc perceive themselves as oppositional out of class-based resentment of inequality and that action reproduces their class inequality). In seeking autonomy from economic position in economy they act in opposition to school, which ensures that they reproduce their class positions (will be manual laborers like their fathers).
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