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Presentation
Culture and Development: Focusing on Overcoming Poverty and the Role of Culture
Ryu, Seung-ho
Department of Visual Culture, Kangwon University
I. Development from a Cultural Perspective: Consideration of Cultural Diversity
“Cultural approach to poverty” is often an unwelcome subject for social scientists who deal
with poverty issues. They argue that culture is the reason why poor people cannot escape
from poverty no matter how much welfare they receive. This rationale leads to the
justification of poverty. This logic applies to the rich as well. The rich are worthy of their
wealth because they hold certain values, and the disparity in values is what results in the
difference in capabilities, which eventually makes them rich. A cultural approach that ignores
the structural factors that affect poverty and wealth, and instead blames individual or group
values denote that the income gap is a matter of values as well. Under this logic, poverty and
wealth are cultural values that cannot easily be changed and hence passed on from generation
to generation. For this reason, social science research on poverty from a cultural perspective
has remained unpopular for the past several decades.
Ironically, this approach to understanding poverty has recently gained the attention of the
mainstream sociology academia. “Reconsidering poverty and culture” by Small et al (2010)
is a reflection of this trend. As questions were raised about the long-term effects of the
economic, educational, and political institutions established by the West to reduce poverty,
such as affirmative action and employment policies, people began to argue yet again that
poverty is more closely related to culture than it is to politics or economics. Moreover, with
the progress of science, it has become possible to analyze the workings of the human mind,
which is at the core of culture.
Thus, the understanding of the previously vague and arbitrary concept of culture is
becoming increasingly concrete and applicable to the real world. Such a change is another
drive behind the re-interpretation of culture. With the progress in cognitive science raising the
possibility of understanding and re-shaping people's way of thinking and their values, fresh
approaches to cultural values have started to emerge.
An economic viewpoint cannot answer some of the more important questions regarding
poverty. Why do people fall into poverty in the first place? Studies have shown that recipients
of economic aid tend to be complacent instead of trying to escape from poverty. Why is this