ABSTRACT
The culture of poverty can come into being in a variety of historical contexts. The way of life which develops among some of the poor under these conditions is the culture of poverty. It can best be studied in urban or rural slums and can be described in terms of some interrelated social, economic and psychological traits. However, the number of traits and the relationships between them may vary from society to society and from family to family. The culture of poverty is both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor to their marginal position in a class-stratified, highly individuated, capitalistic society. It represents an effort to cope with feelings of hopelessness and despair which develop from the realization of the improbability of achieving success in terms of the values and goals of the larger society. People with a culture of poverty are provincial and locally oriented and have little sense of history.
