ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses poverty that has been organized around four recurring motifs. The first maintains that while poverty originates in the structural contradictions of capitalist production, it is culturally reproduced by the poor. The second pertains to the culture of poverty itself. It possesses logic its own, entire one grounded in the life world of the lower class. The third motif revolved around the claim that subcultures of poverty are pathological in their content. The final organizing theme concerns the methodological and ontolog-ical role that dialectics played in Potter Addition's poverty. The dialectical patterns themselves discussed in this work shared three attributes: First, their dialectical constitution was real in that they were not mechanically constituted or abstractly deduced, but emerged from the real-life predicaments of life in Potter Addition. Second, dialectic was historically grounded. Each drew its expressive substance and inner motion from the sociohistorical contradictions of Clay County's heartland culture. Finally, the emergent dialectics were usually nonprogressive in nature.
