ABSTRACT
In any society that perceives poverty as intolerable and unacceptable on a personal level, the social status of ‘poverty’ becomes a stigma. The social category to which all poor people could be said to belong is extremely varied, which increases the risk of its individual members becoming isolated. At the beginning of this century Georg Simmel had already noticed that in modern society the social category of ‘the poor’ constituted a ‘unique sociological synthesis’. The worst aspect of poverty is that it covers a group of people whose only identifiable social status is the fact that they are poor. The initial risk of becoming homeless, however, varies from country to country, as does the risk of becoming socially isolated. Often, stress is placed upon the low level of homelessness in southern Europe. The living conditions and experiences of ‘the poor’ must be analysed in this light of interdependence, which varies throughout history and in different sociocultural contexts.
