ABSTRACT
In his chapter, Michael Walton convincingly argues that, although culture does matter to understand poverty mechanisms, there is no such thing as a ‘culture of poverty’. He develops interesting tools to understand the changing patterns of inequality traps throughout history and different political contexts, based on Indian examples. However, the question is not totally solved: why is there persistency of some group-based differences? Is it because of internal or external mechanisms? As a social anthropologist, I will comment here on two of the topics related to the discussions about culture and its implications for development and poverty reduction, which have recently been subjected to vivid discussions: first, temporality and the issue of cultural distance between societies, and secondly, meaning, that is, can culture explain collective behaviours, including poverty mechanisms?
