ABSTRACT
Poverty and the so-called war against it provide a principal theme for the domestic program of the present Administration. It is a culture in the traditional anthropological sense in that it provides human beings with a design for living, with a ready-made set of solutions for human problems, and so serves a significant adaptive function. The first volume to issue from this study is to be published next month under the title of La Vida, a Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty-San Juan and New York. It reflects the combined effect of a variety of factors including poverty, to begin with, but also segregation and discrimination, fear, suspicion and apathy and the development of alternative institutions and procedures in the slum community. It is the low level of organization that gives the culture of poverty its marginal and anomalous quality in our highly organized society.
