Cultura e pobreza a partir de Oscar Lewis: notas para uma antropologia urbana dos pobres no Brasil

The paper argues that a critical appropriation of Oscar Lewis’s work and his suggestion to study poverty from a cultural perspective can be useful for an urban anthropology concerned about poverty in Brazil today. It presents ethical, political and methodological perspectives from this author, then analyzes the concept of “culture of poverty”, their inconsistencies, appropriations, and possibilities. In a society marked by social inequality and poverty as Brazil, the investigations into the practices and values that perpetuate such a situation must necessarily focus cultures that works toward the naturalization of such a situation. This perspective needs to be relational and analyze poverty as a social construction and not just an economic fact.