Introduction: Person‐Centered Approaches in the Study of Culture and Poverty

This introduction to a special collection of articles on the theme of poverty and personhood provides an overview of the collection's response to recent calls for a reconsideration of culture in urban poverty studies. We argue that such a reconsideration must confront two theoretical problems if it is to be successful. First, the analyses must make a sustained effort to define clearly the theoretical model of “culture” used in the analyses and why this theoretical perspective is illuminative without reproducing the problematic uses of culture in past scholarship. Second, this reconsideration must come to terms with the problematic relationship between culture and human subjectivities. The remainder of the article describes how this special collection addresses these two concerns by bringing together recent innovations in person‐centered ethnography that draws considerably from psychodynamic theory, phenomenology, and a theory from cognitive anthropology that replaces bounded cultures with variably distributed, affectively imbued cultural models. Cultural models also include expectations about others’ judgments. This introductory article concludes by highlighting four contributions the accompanying research articles make as a collection to the question of how we might better understand the relation of culture and human subjectivity in the study of urban poverty.