Why do people live so differently, and what does that mean for poverty and health? In this Heterodox Academy virtual colloquium, cultural anthropologist Michael Jindra argues that culture belongs in the answer. He starts from a three-part model of any social problem: structure (jobs, discrimination, the tax system), culture (lifestyles, habits, values) and the individual (biology, personality). Updating the culture of poverty debates of the 1960s with newer work in anthropology and sociology, he argues that academics lean on structural explanations and give the other two parts less attention, partly from wariness about blaming the victim.
Jindra then asks what pulls people in different directions: wealth, power, meaning, family and the search for experience, from extreme jobs and thrill-seeking to downshifting and simple living. Along the way he covers spending, saving and inheritance habits, ethnographic studies of subcultures from bicycle couriers and surfers to homeschoolers and nomadic groups, and the life course, before closing with what it all means for mentoring, parenting and schools. Jindra is a cultural anthropologist at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs and a Visiting Research Scholar at Boston University. A transcript of Jindra’s talk follows below.
Michael Jindra: We’re doing a classic topic here: culture and social problems, really, is what I’m looking at. But I’m going to update it. I mean, you know, there’s a long history of that. I won’t get into all the details, going back to the poverty of culture, sorry, the culture of poverty debates back into the ‘60s. But what I want to do is update it a bit and look at how some of the more recent research in both anthropology and sociology really can add to this, especially looking at subcultures and lifestyle diversity and how that’s increased, especially in Western countries and in the U.S., over the years.
So what I have in front of you is kind of the basic model of the big picture of how this fits in, I would say, theoretically, as far as how do you understand any social problem? What do you have to look at? And this is where you see, I think, a lot of the problems and the one-sidedness in academia among anthropologists and sociologists that look at some of these problems. They love the structural explanations there. My argument is you need to consider structure, cultural, and individual especially. I mean, especially all of them. Sociologists, anthropologists probably focus more on the structures and the cultures. Individuals, that gets more, of course, into things like psychology. But they all overlap and they all influence each other, of course, right? Structural and cultural is this back and forth. They influence each other. And individuals, of course, make up cultures and make up structures. And so you have these mutual interactions going on.
So which social problems, mentioned quickly at the top there? I mean, poverty is probably the main one I look at, and overlaps into research I’ve been doing with my wife, for instance, on how nonprofits help the poor. I’ve done some volunteer work; we’ve published in that area also. But this also applies to other things like crime, education disparities, health. Lots of research going on in a lot of those areas, again, with a focus usually on structural stuff. But over the years, as I’ve worked on this project, I find nice little nuggets, I would say, in all of these areas of people looking at other people, at cultures, at groups, at how people have agencies. And so I’ll look more at the model of that too.
So culture has, of course, traditionally been left out often of issues of poverty. People are wary of that. They’re wary of things like blaming the victim, things like that. But I don’t think that’s— if you want to tackle these problems, if you want to try to resolve them, you have to include that, of course. A lot of times people will only focus on structures when they write about. They don’t even mention cultures or individuals. If you mention poverty and you talk only about cultures and influence and you don’t mention structures, you’re going to get nailed by the reviewers. There’s really kind of a double standard going on there. So I always— one of the things I look at any analysis is, are they at least acknowledging all three, even if a person will focus on one over the other?
Let’s see. And there’s other people. I, you know, just referring to sociologist Orlando Patterson, uses something kind of like this in his Cultural Matrix book and in some of his other books there. So that’s kind of where I’m coming from, focusing on the cultural side here.
So putting it structural, if people don’t understand what structural means, could be a number of things: structures in the economy, low-paying, high-paying jobs, lots of debate over that, the hollowing out of working-class jobs, high-paying working-class jobs, for instance. Discrimination is another factor. Some people in structure will look at the political system and maybe how the tax system or how politics are built in to help the wealthier and hurt the poor. Those are all kind of put in the structural side of things.
What I want to look at is cultural explanations. I like to focus, as an anthropologist— I’m a cultural anthropologist, you know, I like to get kind of down and dirty, talk to people, find out what’s going on in their lives. Kind of from the bottom up has always been my interest, to look at what are they actually doing in their life? What are their lifestyles? What are their habits? And then how has that shifted over time? How has leisure work shifted, the consumption side of things and the work side shifted?
So from looking at poverty, for instance, you know, the work side of things, the income side of things, the consumption side of things, the expense side of things. So if people are consuming a lot of money, not working much, they’re getting gradually more into debt. And of course we know credit card debt, and a lot of people have a lot of debt issues, especially in our very high consumer-oriented society. So these processes, I think, are very, very important. And then how they are different between different groups, not just ethnic groups, but subcultural groups and lifestyle groups, and I’ll get into that a little bit. So then there’s also— and then, of course, social class is important here, too, and family processes, things that diverge. So even you see differences among groups and how different kind of groups use the internet, how much certain groups watch TV and how much they read, what they focus on, schooling, focus on consumption, things like that. There’s all these differential patterns that are interesting to look at that certainly play a role in things like poverty and some of the other social problems.
Okay. And then going back even more basic, I think to understand these issues and divergences in that, I think you really have to look at what are some of the major human motivations. So why do people go off in different directions? How are we pulled in different directions? Well, different people will have different motivations for doing things. Some of the classic ones are on top, right? I mean, think of social theory, Marxian, Weberian explanations, whether it’s wealth, power, people after power, groups are protecting their interests, or people after meaning. They do things because they find it meaningful, right?
A lot of people focus more on family. So if you look at some of the patterns, for instance, Latino groups like to keep their kids at home. They don’t necessarily hunt out the most selective college. They’ll look more for the college that’s closer to home because they’ll focus more on family. And again, these are general patterns. There’s always exceptions, of course, among groups, but you can see these general differences. And people have written about all these things in general. Asian American groups tend to focus more on getting into the best selective college, even if it’s far from home, Ivy League especially, right? So even though they’re focused on family, they’re also focused a lot more on education and the highest attainment of education. So these are patterns you find among groups, too.
The one that I find most interesting there is the fourth one that’s listed. It’s not the one that’s necessarily found in classic social theory very, very much. But I think it’s one that really drives a lot of people, especially nowadays in a consumer society. And I kind of, you know, compile all the experiences, kind of the general term I use. But, you know, including a lot in that: fantasy, fun, flow. Edgework is a sociological term, how people— it’s kind of the adrenaline. You know, there’s certain subculture of guys that are adrenaline-filled. I have one son like that right now, actually. The search for emotional energy is a sociological term that you find. Gosh, his name is escaping me. Famous anthropologist that focuses— sorry, famous sociologist that focuses on that a lot.
And of course, then it can get into some troubling things, things like addictions, drugs, gaming, gambling, gang work. You know, search for what is— why do people join gangs, right? Is that kind of a search for family? Not necessarily for wealth or power. It’s often they’re looking more for a group. Or for some things, it’s people are doing things for the thrill of things. I became aware about 20 years ago of a little subset of sociologists that are doing cultural criminology. And their main point is that people don’t steal a car for the value of the car. A lot of times they don’t steal it to sell it. They’ll steal it, take it for a joyride, totally trash it. They’ll do it for the thrill of things. A lot of people violate norms for the thrill of violating norms. These are not motivations, kind of the classic motivations, that you’re doing it for wealth or for the money, but you’re doing it for often other reasons.
So, you know, the fourth category, I mean, people spend a lot. I mean, sports is a fascinating subset of— look at what happened, what’s happening in college football now, the billions and billions of dollars that we’re throwing at that, that people are giving the universities for their sports teams, right? Something’s going on there, basic about human motivation, that we become attached to these organizations, these institutions, your home university, your favorite team, and you will divest lots of money.
Just the other day, I was with a friend in a cemetery. I’m from Wisconsin. I’m actually visiting back there right now, even though we’re living out West right now. But you go to a cemetery and you see Packer flags in Wisconsin in the cemetery. That says something. Having studied funeral rituals in Africa, you know, that the death rites are something that really shows you what society is really concerned about, what they think is very important. And that’s, again, a kind of a quasi-religious motivation, that people will devote themselves to things like that.
So the inequality research— the dissatisfaction I’ve had with a lot of the inequality research is it’s kind of, I call it there on the bottom, a limited, warped view of human life, because they’ll focus maybe on the primary ones before. They focus on interest groups, they focus on the structural reasons, and they really kind of neglect these other ones, which I think are just as important, or perhaps even more important. So you have to look at the consumption side of things, not just the production side of things.
This is a way to summarize some of this, right? It’s not just about income, it’s about how people are also spending money, getting into debt, not building savings, not building inheritances that they pass on to their children. That’s a good middle and upper-middle-class habit, right? You save money, you buy a house, you build equity in that, you end up passing that on to your kids. Well, a lot of groups aren’t doing that. African Americans, much lower. And there’s various reasons for that. Maybe some of that is structural, probably, but some of that is certainly cultural, and it’s the combination between that. They don’t pass nearly as much on in inheritances. Their savings rates tend to be lower. Asian Americans’ savings rates tend to be higher. And so you can look at some of the data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and things like that and see some of these patterns between groups and how both they work— some groups work more than others— and how they spend. So all of these things kind of enter into understanding things like income and other social problems.
So looking specifically, I’ve got examples here of the ethnographic work that I have noticed over the years. Very interesting stuff, I think, going on, especially on subcultures, leisure studies, occupations. You’ve got work on occupational devotees, right? People that devote their lives to their jobs, or extreme jobs: people who love jobs, they take little vacations, they get their— and again, this is a mix of motives, right? So it could be for income, they want to make a lot of money, but for some people their jobs are their identity. That’s where they get their meaning from. And so it’s hard to generalize exactly what the motive is. It’s often mixed motives in lots of these different things.
Subcultures of experience, getting back to that experience motivation again. Both work subcultures, like the bicycle couriers— of course, that’s kind of going down a little bit, I think, with— well, you’ve got the delivery drivers now too. But edgework is a term Stephen Lyng, I think, uses that. I’ve got citations there, and I can send people, you know, citations too if they want specifics about this. But pop culture, surfers. Tango is a subculture; my wife is going to a tango meeting tonight, actually. Postmaterialists are a general term that you often find: people that want to experience life and don’t focus a lot on just climbing the corporate ladder, necessarily, getting income.
So you have a lot of different diversity of subcultures amongst these different groups. Downshifters, simple livers: some people intentionally get out of consumer society. They want to downshift from high-paying jobs, or they simply want a simple living agrarian lifestyle. I thought of that recently when— those of you who know Wendell Berry, he passed away recently. Very much a strong representative of that agrarian, stick-to-the-land, you-don’t-need-income. Things like family and meaning are much more important in that kind of subculture.
You have itinerants. The homeless subculture is interesting. Again, a number of reasons for that. Some of that is structural, high prices, lack of housing, but more of it than you would think tends to be people that don’t want to be tied down. In anthropology, there’s a whole study on nomadic cultures and the appeal of nomadism, of not having a lot of things that you own that you have to drive around. The groups in Europe, too, that used to be called Gypsies and now called Roma are a group that you could fit into that a little bit, that tend to be semi-nomadic. Some of them are settling down, but they do not get themselves sucked into the modern corporate complex institutional worlds that most of us have chosen and most of us have been socialized into working effectively in. There are a lot of groups that simply prefer to stay outside of that complex group.
And then, you know, more on the meaning side of things, the normative side of things, the political side of things: environmentalists, communitarian groups, people for political reasons, whether on the political left or on the— you can find groups in the political left and the political right that form their own kind of subcultures that drive them in different ways economically. You have things like homeschoolers, too, that form.
And the groups and the motivations that I looked at— so the motivations, you know, there’s a lot of different motivations for why people do what they do. I summarize that, generalize that, to look at especially those motivations that affect people’s lifestyles and habits, that might enter into calculations of whether they make a lot of money or don’t make a lot of money, or whether they enter a life of crime, or related even to health issues, right? Consumer— you have the people that are the fitness people, and then you have a lot of Americans that struggle with overeating and with poor health, because we’re not a culture, compared to the European cultures, that tend to walk and bike and things like that more. We tend to be much more sedentary in our cars, things like that. So those daily habits are really kind of interesting. And then, of course, I mean, there’s an ethnic component, a religious subculture component to all of these things too. Patterns that vary among these different groups here.
So let me just take a peek at the time here, and okay. So, yeah, I’ll start winding this up a little bit, getting towards the end, just of the introduction. We’ll open it up to questions, but we’ve got— this is, I like this life course approach. So another way to look at how this process happens is the life course approach, right? You start out as an individual, you’re born, you’ve got a certain biology, and I don’t want to neglect my biology here. I do think that’s important, but again, it’s more on the individual side. Anthropology, I think there is good work now that’s interdisciplinary, that’s trying to combine all these things together. But our biology, our neurodiversity is another term, our personality, things like that: the individual.
As you go through your life, of course, you gradually get exposed. Your family is your first influence, then your neighborhood, then your schools. And then you become more aware or influenced also at the same time by your socioeconomic class patterns. Think of Annette Lareau’s work on— what’s the term is— how you, anyway, it’s the concerted cultivation. That’s it, concerted cultivation: how certain middle and upper-middle-class families really focus on having their kids do well in school and cultivate their kids much more, in a way, in order to be successful economically, is fitting in that middle. And then, of course, all these things are influenced by regional, ethnic, religious traditions, immigrant traditions, some more upwardly mobile, some more family-oriented, some more religious-oriented, that will tend to kind of push or pull people off in different directions.
Then we have the overall structural environment, too, that we’re exposed to, especially once we’re adults. We have technologies, the influence of screens, of the internet, of course. We’re trying to figure out what’s that doing to our minds and how that’s affecting also patterns now, both in mental health and in other social issues involving economic mobility or immobility, or in crime and things like that. And the overall structure, of course, of the political economy, the availability of jobs, things like that. So that’s all structural, kind of cultural, individual. Another snapshot of how those three things interact through this life course approach right here.
Just another example of interesting work that really is not touched on a lot by a lot of sociologists or anthropologists that are looking at this is just the different patterns and oversavers and overspenders. So there’s a whole literature of people that talk about financial literacy. It’s kind of more in the nonprofits world. I’ve been a volunteer at a nonprofit that helps people understand their spending and saving habits and how those are really influential. If you can shift your habits, you can actually start building wealth. What you’re doing is you’re basically trying to shift from often a generational poverty pattern of spending money as soon as you get it to one that kind of plans for the future.
Bridges Out of Poverty, if any of you have heard of that nonprofit, national nonprofit. Well, they’re not a nonprofit, they’re a for-profit. But anyway, they put on seminars for people that are really a good social class analysis of how we’ve all been socialized into these different kinds of groups. So people from generational poverty have not often been exposed to middle-class values and ethics. We often forget how unique and specialized these middle-class habits are, of planning and working and understanding this complex society. So these are another way of looking at it.
I’ll kind of end it here. I mean, lifestyle diversity and how people— even Weber looked at it, Lebensführung, life conduct. There is some of this in classic social theory. Different people have looked at lifestyle and habits and things like that, so you find nice nuggets in there. There are implications to mentoring, parenting classes, family influences, schools and education, certain culture of schools that you knew. An example, like “no excuses” schools: certain schools seem to be doing better now, like even in Mississippi, that’s, if you’re reading the literature there, to a certain kind of cultural pattern and how that interacts with family involvement in schools, things like that.
