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Poverty and Culture of Daily Life

Mukul Kumar Psychology Developing Societies 2010 22: 331 DOI: 10.1177/097133361002200205 The online version of this article can be found at: http://pds.sagepub.com/content/22/2/331

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Article Editors Introduction

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Psychology and Developing Societies 22(2) 331359 2010 Department of Psychology, University of Allahabad SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC DOI: 10.1177/097133361002200205 http://pds.sagepub.com

Poverty and Culture of Daily Life

Mukul Kumar
Institute of Rural Management Anand, Gujarat, India

Abstract This article explores the nature of culture and its antecedent value in explaining states of people in poverty. It tries to do it by revisiting the highly critiqued concept of the culture of poverty. It argues that culture affects the poor and poverty not in the deterministic way Oscar Lewis is usually understood to have proposed, but in an alternative way. It is the culture of daily life that influences the options and choices available to the poor. This conception of culture is oriented towards pragmatic considerations in face of contradictions and potential conflicts of everyday life and is passed on, constituted, modified, or refined by the grind of daily life. It retains space for agency and inventiveness on part of the poor so that some of them are able to reach higher levels of everydayness (well-being) in their lives. Based on conceptual discussion and evidences from a village in north India the article argues that the culture of daily life mostly orients the poor to secure minimum requirements for subsistence, but some amongst This article liberally draws from my doctoral research work at Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. Part of this article has been read at Research Scholars Conference at Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics on 26 March 2008 and at Thursday Afternoon Seminar Series at IRMA on 3 September 2008. Address correspondence concerning this article to Mukul Kumar, Assistant Professor, IRMA, Anand, Gujarat. E-mail: mksm_raj@rediffmail. com; mukul@irma.ac.in Environment and Urbanization ASIA, 1, 1 (2010): viixii

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them through their inventiveness move out of poverty in any existing opportunity structure. Keywords Poverty, culture, daily life, agency, everydayness In late 1950s, Oscar Lewis proposed his concept of the culture of poverty.1 This was considered nothing short of blasphemy in the social sciences. He faced severe criticism from different corners of the academic world. Nevertheless, Lewis produced many studies on the lives of the poor and reiterated the concept that he had proposed at the beginning. In 1965, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, a study report on the status of African Americans came up by the US Department of Labour. This US Department of Labour Report (1965a, 1965b, 1965c), also known as the Moynihan Report, argued that disorganisation in the black family structure was the main reason for poverty and instability among the majority of African Americans in the 1960s in the United States. Analysis contained in this report also drew considerable criticism. The major criticisms of the arguments proposed by Lewis and Moynihan Report had one element in common. Both were accused of de-linking the causes of poverty and other related problems from larger structures of the economy and polity, and instead placing them at the door of the poor and the vulnerable who were the subjects of their studies. Charles A. Valentine (1968) in a critique of other similar representations of poverty by Franklin Frazier, Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Walter Miller and David Matza found that they like Lewis placed main reasons of poverty with the poor itself. Some of the criticisms levelled at Lewis were valid because his writings could not avoid occasional equivocation, and sometimes even duplicity; and hence genuine issues and concerns were raised. But one of the critiques was rhetorical and ideological in nature. It had structural biases, that is, a commitment to explaining social reality with reference to basic structures of polity and economy only. The critics wanted to understand poverty as the effect of structural forces independent of the complicity of the attributes of individuals, groups, or both. In this game of intellectual grandstanding, the non-structural and non-overarching causes were overlooked and omitted from the domain of discussion. I attempt here to say

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that while studying poverty one needs to take culture seriously without being an apologist for Lewiss notion of the culture of poverty or having given in to any other variant of cultural determinism. This article begins with an elucidation of the main problem regarding the use of culture as an important explanatory variable in analysis of poverty and development. The following section examines the nature of culture. The concept of culture of poverty has been revisited in the next section. The last section examines everyday life issues in the lives of the poor and explores the possible ways in which culture influences as well as is influenced by practices of daily lives. Field evidences in this section are drawn from a village, Subhanpura,2 in Kanpur Nagar district of the state of Uttar Pradesh in India. The main ethnographic field work was done in 200405 though followed up for a week each following year till 2008. This section also explores space for inventiveness and creativity among the poor, which in many cases enables them to escape the trap of poverty.

The Problem
The doctrinaire critique of Oscar Lewiss writings on the culture of poverty led social scientists to keep away from an etiology explaining poverty and development that contained culture3 as a significant variable. This was seen as being so repugnant to social science writing that no scholar would presumably like to risk stating the obvious even when the causes were incontrovertibly cultural. In many instances, it is highly likely that cultural causes are the only intervening ones, and ultimately could have been reduced to some other structural factors, but even then they had a clear influence on the process of development, or on a lack of it. But acknowledging this fact was a difficult proposition for quite some time. The reality of culture shaping people as well as of people shaping culture came to be acknowledged again in social science writings on poverty and development around 1990 and thereafter. In view of this renewed interest in culture as an explanatory factor for growth, development and poverty, I wish to explore the extent to which culture can be attributed as a cause of poverty and to see which aspects of daily life affect poverty.

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In the last two decades, there has been a revival of interest in culture in poverty and development studies. In 2004, a volume edited by Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton (2004) titled Culture and Public Action was published. In this collection, scholars from different social science disciplines such as economics, anthropology, political science and development studies have underscored the importance of culture and have attempted to explicate the ways in which culture influences growth, development and poverty. In the last decade, two other important works have appeared, The Clash of Civilizations: The Debate by Huntington (1997) and Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress edited by Harrison and Huntington (2000). These two books re-emphasised the importance of culture in explanations of growth, poverty, development and politics at the global level. Michael Porter (2000) has also used the concept of economic culture as a relevant factor in the acceptance of policies and behaviours that support competitiveness. W.J. Wilson has, of late, re-emphasised the importance of culture along with psychological and structural factors in his exposition of the concept of underclass, as he says that environment featuring concentrated poverty and isolation leads to weak attachment of underclass to the labour market (Wilson, 2006). He had made this point in an earlier book titled The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Wilson, 1987). My aim in this article is to restore the due position of culture in the set of etiological factors in the study of poverty. This task has not been made any easier by a spate of recent studies on the subject. I am suggesting this while being aware that the recent use of culture as a conceptual category has also an important element of essentialism, which I equally want to counter. In introduction to Culture Matters, Harrison and Huntington (2000) sought to explain differences between Ghana and South Korea in essentially cultural terms, losing sight of historical and other structural factors. They noted that the two countries had a similar economic status in the 1960s, but were differently placed in the 1990s, as South Korea had become a developed economy by that time, while Ghana remained underdeveloped. This difference they attributed mainly to cultural factors. Amartya Sen (2004), reviewing the relation between culture and poverty, warned against this kind of formulaic and simplistic view of the impact of culture on the process of development. In an attempt to deconstruct

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the causality between culture and growth with respect to Ghana and South Korea, Sen (2004, pp. 4647) writes:
There were many important differencesother than their cultural predispositionsbetween Ghana and Korea in the 1960s when they appeared to Huntington to be much the same, except for culture. First, the class structures in the two countries were quite different, with a very much biggerand proactiverole of business classes in South Korea. Second, the politics were very different too, with the government in South Korea willing and eager to play a prime-moving role in initiating a business-centred economic development in a way that did not apply to Ghana. Third, the close relationship between the Korean economy and the Japanese economy, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other, made a big difference, at least in the early stages of Korean development. Fourthand perhaps most importantby the 1960s South Korea had acquired a much higher literacy rate and much more expanded school system than Ghana had. The Korean changes had been brought about in the post-World War II period, largely through resolute public policy, and it could not be seen just as a reection of age-old Korean culture.

This article explores the nature of culture and the extent and the ways in which it lends itself to the analysis of poverty and behaviour of the poor. It will be worth reviewing the nature of culture briefly at this stage.

The Nature of Culture

It would be useful to understand the meaning of culture and the ways in which it is associated with society. Any conception of culture must necessarily take into account its links with society. Culture separated from society and vice versa is only an abstraction by itself. Scholarly writings range from one extreme to the other in analysing the relationship between culture and society. Some scholars have assigned priority to culture, while others have given precedence to society. On many occasions, an artificial dichotomy has been created between the two. The fact is, however, that structure needs culture to perpetuate itself because the organising principles of structure come from culture only. Similarly, culture needs a structure for recreation, propagation, rationalisation or change.

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Even the most reductionist explanations cannot rule out the operation of the other. It is only at the level research questions are attempted to be answered gives explanation cultural or structural emphases as in reality both are implicated into one another in inextricable ways. The concept of culture embodies a cluster of meanings. On the one hand, culture refers to the handiwork of great masters of any form of art or knowledge, which we understand as the taste of the elites. On the other hand, culture refers to mundane things like material artefacts, tools, and implements such as the wheel, fire and hammer (Goode, 1979). Socially constructed meanings and other forms of symbolisms are also part of culture. In an early article, David Bidney (1944) had classified different meanings and attributes of culture. These are given as follows:

It is an attribute of social behaviour and has no independent existence of its own. It is a realistic interpretation of culture. It is understood in terms of communicated knowledge. Culture can be understood in terms of a realm of ideas that influences people but has a transcendental reality.

Bidney pointed out to both ideational and realistic attributes of culture that enabled us to see it as both abstract and real at the same time (Bidney, 1944). It also retained a humanistic orientation and helped us see how culture influenced human beings and, in turn, how human beings created and shaped culture. This conception recognised the role of human agency. The perpetuation of human societies is ensured through the transmission of both genetic and non-genetic codes from one generation to another in human societies. The non-genetic codes of any society are transmitted mainly through language (Weiss, 1973). Language is also an invention of human societies. The behaviour of animals is instinctive, and they have developed similar ways of communication. The growth of a symbolic systema system of signs that enable communication as well as the transmission of the social heritage, including material culture, from one generation to anotheris essentially cultural (Weiss, 1973). Language is one of the preliminary symbolic systems. It is constituted of a system of signs. A sign is a double entity made up of a signifier (sound image) and signified (the concept), and the relationship between them is arbitrary in nature (Saussure, 1974). By arbitrary, he means that

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there is no natural relationship between the signified and the signifier. The apparent naturalness of the relationship between the signifier and the signified is due to the socio-cultural conventions (Saussure, 1974). Language is only one of the many symbolic systems developed by human beings. This capacity to create symbolism is unique to human societies. This is what makes human societies cultural.

Revisiting the Culture of Poverty

The poor are understood to have a common way of living and thinking, marked by certain aspects of behaviour, dress code and ways of communicating. Even Oscar Lewis (1961) had said that there were substantial similarities in family structure, interpersonal relationships, time orientation, value system and sense of community in lower-class settlements in London, Glasgow, Paris, Harlem and Mexico City. He did not, however, undertake a comprehensive cross-cultural analysis of the culture of poverty as his concept of the culture of poverty had itself been questioned. It should be noted, however, that the category of the poor is not a uniform one but is marked by differences of castes,4 classes, religions and ethnicities, with the poor having differential access to the means of production and consumption. And, hence, their lifestyles are also not uniform. Notwithstanding this difference in lifestyles, one thing is certainthat the lifestyles of the poor are marked by insecure and unsustainable livelihoods as well as by a psychology characterised by insecurity, marginality, dependence and inferiority. Oscar Lewis, while studying the poor, had introduced the idea of the culture of poverty in the late 1950s. He developed the concept while doing fieldwork amongst the urban poor in Mexico and Puerto Rico. He is known for his family studies in both urban and rural settings. In 1959, he published Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (Lewis, 1959), which describes five ordinary days in the lives of five families. Lewis further explored the concept of culture of poverty in The Children of Sanchez, which is the story of a family as told by different members. La Vida, a collection of life stories of people in the slums of Greater San Juan and New York City, explores lower-class culture amongst them (Lewis, 1966, 1967). Lewis (1967, p. 481) writes:

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My purpose was to give the reader an inside view of family life and of what it meant to grow up in a one-room home in a small tenement in the heart of a great Latin American city which was undergoing a process of rapid social and economic change. This approach gives us a cumulative, multifaceted, panoramic view of each individual, of the family as a whole, and of many aspects of lower-class Mexican culture.

According to Lewis (1961), the culture of poverty is a design for living. It is passed from one generation to another. The main markers of the culture of poverty are a strong feeling of marginality, helplessness, dependence, inferiority, present-time orientation, little ability to defer gratification, resignation and fatalism. It affects those people who do not have opportunities but nevertheless have aspirations to a better life (Lewis, 1961). Families affected by the culture of poverty are marked by free union, high incidence of abandonment of children and mother and a trend towards mother-centred families. Children have also more knowledge of maternal relatives. The poor affected by culture of poverty do not participate effectively in public life. They also rarely connect properly with the major institutions of the larger society. Referring to the urban poor, Lewis says that they rarely take part in trade unions, other associations and political parties. They do not make adequate use of banks, hospitals, departmental stores, museums and art galleries (Lewis, 1961). Lewis argues that the culture of poverty should be seen as a response by the poor to their marginal position in a class-stratified society. It emerges as a response to a given situation. Once established, the culture of poverty tends to perpetuate itself from one generation to another. He finds primitive people as well as working class not affected by the culture of poverty. It affects the poorest workers and peasants, plantation labourers as well as lumpen proletariat. It is usually found in societies that are in transitional state. Michael Harrington however finds the prevalence of the culture of poverty in the developed world as well (Harrington, 1964). Walter B. Miller (1978), another anthropologist, treats lower-class culture as being akin to the culture of poverty. He says that the lowest of the working class in America has a sub-culture with its own focal concerns, such as toughness, masculinity, search for thrills, present-time orientation, and a commitment to luck and fate rather than to achievement (Miller, 1978). Millers description is similar to Lewiss notion of the

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culture of poverty, which is self-perpetuating and is passed from one generation to another. Lewis and Miller would like us to believe that this culture, although it rose initially because of a host of factors, may well continue even if the circumstances that gave it birth were to disappear. The notion of the culture of poverty has been severely criticised for various reasons. These range from the charge that Lewis considered the poor as cultural dopes without their agency, to the criticism that he considered the culture of the poor as being different from the culture of the larger society, to the objection that he treated culture as something that is immutable. Lewiss interpretation of the culture of poverty suited popular blame-the-victims explanations for poverty in US. He sought to counter this one-sided emphasis or misinterpretation of the concept, but he could not completely clarify and settle the debate (Bourgois, 2001). The situational approach is an alternative to the culture of poverty approach. This approach clearly states that the poor are constrained by the facts of their situation. According to this perspective, the response of the poor to the world is a rational response to the opportunities and constraints before them. The first major critique of the culture of poverty approach and the exposition of the situational approach was made by Elliot Liebow (1967). Another significant critique of the culture of poverty from this point of view was made by Charles A. Valentine (1968). According to this approach, once the constraints or limitations melt away, the approach or attitude of the poor changes. It also does not consider the poor as being isolated from the norms and values of the mainstream world. On the contrary, the poor are seen to share the values of the larger society but find it difficult to succeed in terms of these values. They have aspirations similar to those of the middle class, although their behaviour differs from the conduct of the middle class. Liebow (1967) based on participant observation of black street-corner men in a low-income area of Washington D.C., reached similar conclusions. He collected data through participant observation in 1962, followed by intermittent observation in 1964. The men who were studied were unskilled construction workers, casual labourers, menial retail workers, in-service traders, or the unemployed. The age of these men ranged from the early twenties to the mid-forties. Their orientation to the realities of life was a rational response to the constraints they faced in their lives, which included racial discrimination and lack of opportunity. The similarity between black father and son was

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not due to intergenerational transmission of a specific culture. It was because each generation faced the failures independently (Liebow, 1967). Oscar Lewis has, however, been defended persuasively by Bourgois (2001, p. 11905), who writes:
The angry denial by academics of the existence of the types of violence and self-destructive behaviours described ethnographically by Lewis among the vulnerable families that he tape-recorded and described reveals how far removed intellectuals can be from the inner-city street. Although Lewiss writing deserves criticism for presenting his subjects in a decontextualised pornography of violence, sexuality, and emotional brutality, none of the behaviours or personalities described by Lewis should shock anyone who is familiar with everyday life in the US inner city or Latin American shanty towns. On the contrary, Lewiss ethnographic realist descriptions, unfortunately, still ring true four decades after they were written.

In the same paper, Bourgois refers to William Julius Wilson, author of The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987), saying that the culture of poverty thesis scared social scientists from undertaking ethnographic studies of the poor and poverty. Oscar Lewis never took this debate very seriously. He defended himself by saying that he had never attempted to develop a grand theory but had only suggested a bundle of traits. But the matter was not helped by Lewiss own contradictory writings. He advocated the need for structural change but also counselled for rehabilitation of the poor as a means to counter poverty. In response to a review of three of his books, The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (1967), Pedro Martinez: A Mexican Peasant and His Family (1980), and La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of PovertySan Juan and New York (1966), Lewis (1967, p. 499) writes:
There is nothing in the concept which puts the onus of poverty on the character of the poor. Nor does the concept in any way play down the exploitation and neglect suffered by the poor. Indeed, the subculture of poverty is part of the larger culture of capitalism whose social and economic system channels wealth into the hands of a relatively small group and thereby makes for the growth of sharp class distinctions.

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Harvey and Reed (1996) following the sociology of knowledge approach, attempted to find out why the concept of the culture of poverty has been classified as a means of locating the reasons of poverty with the poor. They have argued that the concept instead brings out the resilience and resourcefulness of the poor in handling conditions or situations linked with poverty. They also trace Lewiss intellectual development and find his position close to that of Marxism. Lewiss biography, published in American Anthropologist in 1972, also reveals him as being close to the issues of minorities and oppressed people (Butterworth, 1972). Harvey and Reed (1996) said that even when Lewis was ousted from Cuba, he had little to say against the Cuban revolution that was harsh and found it hard to imagine someone who was close to Marxism not taking into consideration the role of structures in the production of poverty. This interpretation of the culture of poverty concept is, in fact, a reflection of a new trend in American politics in particular and in the West in general, which glosses over the basic contradictions between classes and sees the resolution of the problem of poverty through administrative solutions (Harvey & Reed, 1996). They refer to Habermas who sees labour class losing its revolutionary potential and poverty being addressed mainly through technocratic solutions. Legitimation Crisis is an important book by Habermas (1976) that talks about the breakdown of the social identity of classes in the advanced stage of capitalism. He (Habermas, 1987) discusses the class compromise at this stage where everyone, in his words, is both a participant and a victim. He further develops this argument in his book The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. The exclusivity in the debate between cultural and situational approaches is a facile one. That is why Herbert Gans (1970, p. 154) writes:
The total stock of behavioural norms and aspirations which people hold is thus a mixture of situational responses and learned patterns. Some parts of this stock are strictly ad hoc responses to a current situation; they exist because of that situation, and will disappear if it changes or disappears. Other parts of the stock are internalized and become an intrinsic part of the person and of the groups in which he moves, and are thus less subject to change with changes in situation. Even so, the intensity of internalization varies; at one extreme, there are values which are not much deeper than lip service; at the other, there are

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behavioural norms which are built into the basic personality structure, and a generation or more of living in a new situation may not dislodge them.

Amartya Sen (2004) finds culture working along with other social influences. Use of culture as an explanatory factor along with other factors would help us understand social reality, the process of development and nature of our identity better, he said. While not agreeing to the prevalence of culture of poverty, Appadurai does not completely dismiss the trace of some common culture from lives of the poor. He alternatively posits the idea of commonalities by arguing for the need to identify the threads and themes (in his words) in the worldviews of the poor (Appadurai, 2004). At this juncture, I can safely state that both situational and cultural factors are important in determining the trajectory and content of the life of the poor.

Culture of Daily Life: Some Evidences from the Field

This section explores the possibility of existence of what Appadurai (2004) calls threads and themes in worldviews of the poor in community settings. Just as communities have cultures, the poor as part of any local community have their own culture. Parts of it are similar to the culture of the larger society, while parts of it are specific to the group. James C. Scott (1976, 1990) in two of his important works discusses the moral economy of peasants and the ways in which the weaker groups react to the stronger groups in society. Peasants and other weak groups have mostly everyday weapons to express their dissent and disenchantment such as going slow, mumbling, dragging their feet, etc., and they usually do not adopt the extreme step of organising for revolution, he adds. They revolt either in case of utter hopelessness, or when they are fairly sure about winning the war against their tormentors. Even if they revolt, they rarely achieve the objectives they had in mind in the beginning. Many times these revolts are unceremoniously repressed. This description of the lives of peasants and poor by Scott clearly brings out the strategic element in the daily lives of these people. All communities

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have their own built-in space for cooperation and conflict across classes, and taking the route of an all-out conflict is a strategic choice that the exploited section has to make. It is also rare to come by. Daily life in communities is not without some order. There is order in both cooperation and conflict. This is ensured by conventions, which are a part of the culture of daily life, which I am also calling as everyday culture. Two vivid examples of culture of daily life can be seen in the traditional jajmani5 relations in India, which exists in attenuated form even now, and different forms of tenancies in which landowners and tenants are associated in villages. Jajmani6 is the traditional system of division of labour in rural society in which people from different castes are associated in hereditary personal relationships (Wiser, 1936; Dumont, 1980). It is a non-contractual relationship between households in which payment is done in kind and spread over the whole year. Landowning castes are usually patrons while unclean castes are called service castes that provide craft, menial and labour services. The latter absorb onus of ritual contamination and perform and facilitate ritual purity of the upper castes (Gould, 1987). It is a form of patronclient relationship7 which binds them together and enables them to meet one anothers need. Apart from elements of cooperation and mutual benefits there was an aspect of jajmani that was conflict ridden. Biedelman (1959) and Mencher (1974) point to the exploitative side of jajmani as how it suited the landowning classes more than the labour class. Even Wiser who had generally a symmetrical view of the relationship of jajmans8 and purjans (service providers) had also referred to the embedded conflict in jajmani (Wiser, 1936). Sharma and Dreze (1996) talk about both cooperation and conflict in a study of sharecropping and tenancy relations in Palanpur in Moradabad district of Uttar Pradesh. They have used the word cooperative conflict to refer to the inherent cooperation and conflict embedded in the relationship. In the village Subhanpura, this was also found to be happening by the author. I was able to see many forms of tenancies and sharecropping arrangements between landowners and tenants. Landowners needed good tenants for cultivation of their farms, while tenants would need land for meeting their requirements of food security. They had a need to cooperate between them, but all the same, there used to be routine conflicts over terms of tenancies, care of the growing crop, share of

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produce, harvesting of produce and division of crop residues, inputs management or other related issues between them. Delay in starting agricultural operations, delay in irrigation, backbiting and stealthily cutting and carrying the produce away are other everyday forms of resistance found in the village. I was shown remains of lahi (a type of mustard plant) plants thrown in the field of gram. A lot of uprooting of gram plants takes place in the area. There was one instance when Ramai, a bataiyyah (sharecropper or tenant), asked the landowner to get his part of the crop harvested. He had done harvesting for half of it. Being a sharecropper, he was entitled to half of the produce. Bataiyyahs do not like close supervision of their work by landowners. On occasions when landowners visit their farms, bataiyyahs send their children to meet them. I had seen it taking place many times in the village when my landlord visited the village to supervise agricultural operations. There are not only everyday forms of showing dissent and conflict in the village, but also everyday forms of cooperation, cultivating relationships and bonds. In this context, I would like to specify that the idleness of rural people should not be indiscriminately seen as availability of a lot of time or wastage of time. It has a useful social function in the politics of livelihoods of the poor. Idlers use this as a resource to develop relationships, networks and compacts for their living. They would generally prefer sitting idle and cultivating relationships across social class that support their livelihoods than advancing the cause of their class, which could help them only to a limited extent in their everyday lives. Self-help apart, they need liaisons across classes which could offer and bestow new opportunities on them, which though would keep them in the same relative position but help in absolute terms. Almost everyone maintains, nurtures and cares about such relationships. In some instances, these are obvious while in other cases they are implicit. There are many instances of such relationships found in the village Subhanpura. Raju Kori is associated with Hari Prakash Tiwari who manufactures agarbatti (incense sticks) in the village. Raju takes loans from H.P. Tiwari quite regularly and also takes his help and suggestion in case of any personal decision to be taken by him. Raghunath Nai and Hemraj are similarly associated with Hari Singh, the kotedar9 and a progressive farmer of the village. They also take loan (without any interest) from Hari Singh. In return, they do begar (work without payment) for him. Hemraj spends

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quite a bit of his time at the fair price shop of Hari Singh and weighs grains for his customers. Mahesh Pal, a small farmer is associated with Rajesh Tiwari, a retired government servant. Mahesh Pal receives loan, counsel and guidance from Rajesh Tiwari. He also does begar for him off and on. These relationships are maintained within the class as well. Reciprocity at the level of households, through exchanges of grains, money, utensils, labour, fodder and other household objects, etc., help to consolidate it. These exchanges are usually found amongst castes which are above the lowest ranking castejamadars (considered untouchable in the village). This is most common in middle castes, such as nais (barbers), darji (tailors), kahar (water carriers), lohar (blacksmiths), etc. Scott (1976) also talks about many forms of self-help amongst peasant smallholders. Culture of daily life develops appropriate forms and conventions in different contexts to meet everyday concerns and necessities of people of different social classes. Based on these empirical evidences and review of literature, I have tried to concretise the concept of culture of daily life by taking help from the ideas of the noted theorist of everyday life, Agnes Heller. Heller (1984) defines everyday life as that part of human life which makes any person reproduce not just oneself but also make social reproduction possible and one has to do that with existing set of resources and conventions. Everyday culture includes patterns of cooperation and conflict, and facilitates maintenance and subsistence. Heller (1984) makes a distinction between everyday and non-everyday modes of thinking. For her, the everyday mode of thinking is heterogeneous in character and mostly concerned with making space in the readymade world into which one is born. It focuses on maintenance and self-preservation. The basic structure of everyday life and thinking is relatively stagnant, and it is only with a lot of difficulty that changes occur in it. The content of non-everyday thought is not directly derivable from everyday life, although it is based on it, she says. It aims at bringing about order and homogenisation and emerges as part of attempts to move from specific to the general. Morals, religion, art and science are beyond the domain of what we call everyday in terms of facticity, in her words, and heterogeneity of everyday life (Heller, 1984). She adds further that everyday and non-everyday are not always found to be mutually exclusive in practice but, as activities, are ideal types for analysis (Heller, 1984).

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Here it may be useful to distinguish between two kinds of needs everyday needs and non-everyday needs of human beings. This should not be confused with the distinction made by Malinowski (1969) between basic needs and derived needs in his classic work, A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. For Malinowski, derived needs develop as necessary cultural responses for meeting basic physiological needs, but in the process they themselves become as important as the other needs for human living (Malinowski, 1969). I have used the term non-everyday in terms of being extraordinary and should not be understood as any need leading to homogenisation of everyday life. On any given day, the poor live for that day as well as for the days to come. And for that present day also, they must have lived (that is, anticipated, planned and worked for) in the days preceding it. While, being engaged in social action the poor, as any other person, try to meet two different types of needs of livingeveryday and non-everyday. The everyday needs of living of the poor are related to meeting the requirements of subsistence and other pragmatic considerations related to living. Everyday culture facilitates meeting the requirements of these everyday needs. Non-everyday needs are invented needs, and poor people also work towards meeting them as they aim at modifying the everydayness in their lives. Heller (1984) refers to Henri Lefebvre distinguishing between repetitive and inventive praxis. Inventive praxis leads to innovations and novelties. Non-everyday needs also emerge from everyday lives and practices, but are not directly derivable from the latter. It aims at making the quest for meeting the present level of everyday needs easier. Michel de Certeau (1988) says there is space for creativity and initiative for the subject, and distinguishes between strategies and tactics. Strategies are ways to take control of some specific spaces that act as the base for exercise of power while tactics are contrastingly scattered, shortlived and emerge as specific responses to actually existing realities. In a recent study by World Bank on poverty in India, agency of people has been found very important in helping them move out of poverty. This study carried out a systematic analysis of 2,700 life stories in India and found that individual initiative was a very important factor for mobility of the poor and chronic poor (Narayan, Pritchett & Kapoor, 2009). Apart from hard work and aspirations to improve, taking initiatives contributed

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to upward mobility of both the poor and chronic poor (Narayan, Sen & Hull, 2009). However, despite making efforts, some do not succeed because they are not able to support their initiatives and hard work with other resources, such as capital, equipment, social connection, etc. (Narayan, Sen & Hull, 2009). People are located within structures of power, status and class by the accident of birth. The majority of people continue to live at approximately the same level at which they were born. Some of them improve themselves while others decline in fortune. There has been much discussion on the socio-economic structure of society and the factors that lead some sections to remain poor. There is no doubt that this structure plays a very important role in maintaining the inequalities into which one is born. In addition, culture also predisposes people to react to the external world in specific ways. This culture is not the one that Lewis is said to have discussed, but is like the culture that influences and structures everyday relations between the better off and the poor, as well as relations among the poor themselves. Although stated in a different context regarding changes in the production structure in a village in Malaysia, the following statement by Scott (1990, p. 305) is appropriate for my purpose:
These transformations of the material base and their economic and social consequences for class relations have worked themselves out within the context of a given, normative environment. Two general facts about this normative environment are worth noting. First, it is not some Parsonian value consensus in which actors conform to a normative order that is somehow outside and above themselves but rather a normative environment of conict and divergent interpretations...Second, this normative environment was itself, in part, a product of the material conditions of production prior to double cropping and mechanization. We are not therefore dealing with purely mental constructs outside day-to-day practical activity but rather with values that were rmly anchored in a host of commonplace material practices. The main point for my purpose is that the peasants of Sedaka do not simply react to objective conditions per se but rather to the interpretation they place on these conditions as mediated by values embedded in concrete practices.

Both culture and structure maintains or reinforces poverty among the majority of those who are already poor. However, some amongst them through their inventiveness, everyday efforts, and the creative use of

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available opportunities, manage to break out of the cycle of poverty. Following are three cases that show how they have been able to move out of the rank of the poor. They were part of the official BPL (Below Poverty Line) list10 of 1997 in Subhanpura but had improved substantially since then. Human agency shown by them is due to an aspiration to improve, to adopt new tactics and do hard work along with many other timely supports from different quarters.

Mohan Prasad: Case of an Industrious and Flexible Nai (Barber)

Mohans father still subsists through jajmani relations in the village. Following this could have been a natural choice for him. However, right from his childhood he did not like the traditional occupation of nai. It involved a whole lot of responsibilities such as hair cutting, shaving, nyota or bulawwa (customary invitation on behalf of jajmans) and other ritual roles for households of jajmans. In return, nais used to get five kgs of grains per person for six months from each household. He never found this package adequate and hence did not take to it. Mohan is 45 years old (present age) and educated up to intermediate standard (senior school). He is landless. He runs a paan (betel leaves) shop and a groundnut thelia11 at chowk (crossing of roads) in the village Subhanpura. He had an early marriage which took place in 1982 when he was 18 years old. After marriage, he went to Ahmedabad and worked there for four years. He was an operator of a label manufacturing unit. Then he came back and worked in Kanpur for many years. Coming back to the village was expected for quite sometime as his family remained in the village while he worked in cities. In 1998, he opened a shop of Mainpuri tambaku (a variety of tobacco) in the village in a gumti (a wooden shop). Later, he began keeping paan, masala12 and cigarettes. Initially, he found it difficult to run his business from the gumti instead of operating from a concrete building. But gradually, he came to terms with it. He later on found that overhead cost of managing it was lower there, thereby making his business more profitable. He has four brothers. All except one are married and each one of them is having separate chulhas.13 The youngest one who is not married lives Psychology and Developing Societies 22, 2 (2010): 331359

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with his father. He said that this shop was helping him manage his family well. His earlier savings while working in Ahmedabad had put him in a good condition. He fondly remembered his stay in Ahmedabad. He said he worked very hard there. Sometimes, he worked to the extent of 48 hours or more at a stretch. He has three children. The eldest of his children is a daughter who is doing B.A. second year. Another son who is studying in a school at Mahnoti is appearing for his 10th standard examinations. He is also receiving private tuition. He goes to Mahnoti in the evening, studies for a couple of hours under supervision of a teacher and sleeps there in the school. He gets up early in the morning, does some exercise and studies in the school itself. After that he goes home. He comes back to the school in the morning before classes begin. Mohan is supportive of his sons efforts and routine. Mohan said that he had initiated the search for a good match for his daughter. He was looking for a well-educated groom and was talking to a bank employee about his son who was doing B.A. (Bachelor of Arts). He had savings from his earlier days and he said that he could spend reasonably well on his daughters marriage. He wanted his son to do B.A. as well. He added that he had mastered the skill of making labels14 for clothes and that even now he could get a job of ` 5,000 per month, if he so desired. He had maintained many professional contacts that he had developed while working in cities. There would always be jobs like this available for him, he added. He is happy with his business of the paan shop. He set up a small shop for selling groundnuts in the winter of 200405. This he started because one bharbhuja (a caste which fries grains) from the same village had begun to keep his thelia beside his gumti. This resulted in the floor being strewn with groundnut husks and Mohan had to keep on cleaning it. To counter this, Mohan himself began to keep a thelia and hence posed a serious competition to the thelia owner of bharbhuja caste. As winter was coming to an end there was little sale of groundnut and hence he closed it down. Further, the construction of the connecting road to highway forced both thelias to be removed from the road. He has a BPL ration card. He said that he was close to Hari Singh, the kotedar, and hence got his ration card changed to an antyodaya15 card. He gets 35 kgs of grains per month, that is, 23 kgs of wheat and 12 kgs of rice at a highly subsidised rate. This is quite surprising as antyodaya card has come to him with higher level of well-being. He does not have Psychology and Developing Societies 22, 2 (2010): 331359

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to purchase rice but he needs to purchase some wheat for household requirements. He does not expect any more support from the government. He has constructed his pucca (concrete) house on portion of family land in abadi (habitation) area. He said that his father still did kisani in the village and provided services of a nai to jajmans. He does not want his father to continue doing kisani in the village at his advanced age.

Ramgopal: Case of Recovery on Road to Livelihood Security after Sickness

Coming back to Subhanpura for almost a landless person of nai caste was not an easy decision after having lived and worked in a city for many years along with his family. At the community level, coming back to village with family is seen as a mark of failure to earn ones own livelihoods in urban areas. Another factor that could have dissuaded him from coming back was that there were very limited opportunities for earning livelihoods in a dry village such as Subhanpura. He has one bigha16 unirrigated land. Ramgopal is 58 years old (present age) and educated up to third standard. He spent most of his younger days in Kanpur and has come back to the village only 10 years back. Ramgopal worked in a factory in Panki industrial area of Kanpur for many years as a casual labourer. He used to just manage the basic needs of the family in the city. He had to buy all necessary household items there only and there was no support from the village. The decision to come back home was taken after he recovered from a serious illness. Ramgopal said that he had developed a type of brain fever and on treatment incurred a total expenditure of ` 35, 000. He had borrowed it both on vyavhaar17 and 2% interest loan. Having recovered, he realised that he had turned terribly weak and would not be able to handle hard work expected of him in the factory. One of his brothers also advised him not to work in the factory anymore. He could have settled for some less strenuous job in the city. As his sons were growing, they could have also worked to support family livelihood requirements. But he chose to come back to the village. Ramgopal has three sons. The eldest son is educated up to 8th standard, the second son up to 7th; the third son is studying in 9th standard in the village school. Psychology and Developing Societies 22, 2 (2010): 331359

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When his family returned to village it was in bad economic condition and looked for some regular source of earning. The family condition has since improved substantially. Ramgopal and his family keep a thelia along the road that goes to the nearby railway station. They prepare snacks like tikki (snack made of boiled potato), jalao ki Gujia (a variety of sweet), samosa (a snack made of potato and wheat flour), chaat (spicy and hot snack made of potato, curd, tamarind, wheat flour, etc.) and omelette. They have put a gumti for paan shop and masala beside the thelia. The two elder brothers manage it. On bazaar (weekly market) days they put up another thelia in bazaar while they continue with the main thelia on the railway station road. Ramgopal had earlier worked very hard in setting up this business but now becomes active on bazaar days only as he handles one thelia. His items are clean, good in taste and mostly fresh. This is a family vocation and the entire family remains engaged in preparations of dishes. Ramgopal goes to farms and charagah (pastureland) to collect dry leaves, roots and branches. These are used to boil potato and green peas for preparation of samosas and tikkis. It is all done by his wife inside the house. They have a gas cylinder which is used on thelia for preparing omlettes and tikkis of mashed potatoes. His thelia is usually stationed at a distance from the country liquor shop in the village, still he gets a good number of customers. Other such shops near the liquor shop cater to requirements of those drinking who hover around the place and need something to eat while drinking. One former Pradhan had settled Ramgopal and his brothers on railway station road. All his brothers live in separate houses. Three of his brothers have received Indira Awas Yojana grant.19 He has, however, not received any Indira Awas Yojana grant for constructing his house. He has a yellow card and gets only kerosene oil at subsidised rates from the fair price shop. The decision to come back, hard work and the consistency with which Ramgopals family has approached business is the secret of his success and the way he has recovered economically.

Laluram Darji: Case of a Hardworking and Self-respecting Darji

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subservience and associated exploitation existing in the village. He has been a loner through this journey. He speaks little and works very hard in the day time and drinks almost daily in the evening. He is landless. He has over the years stayed away from the village politics and focused mainly on his work. He has been able to develop himself as a good tailor in the process. He, however, maintains some reliable relationships for rainy days. He has good contacts with Narain Dikshit and Raghu Singhs mother. It helps him access loan whenever he badly needs it or whenever he needs any sound suggestion on any tricky issue. He is 45 years old (present age). He is educated up to 5th standard. He does not have any land though his father has some. He runs a tailoring shop on railway station road. He has a stitching machine as well as a peeku19 machine. He acquired the peeku machine much later. He said that tailoring was the main source of livelihood for his family. He is the eldest son of Chhotkau darji. In his childhood, his family was financially well off. Chhotkau was known as uncha karigar (good tailor) in the area and his work was valued. He also used to do gold and silver embroidery on clothes. Laluram said that the fortune of the family had since then declined. After his birth, his father developed complaints of hernia. Since then he had been facing this problem intermittently. His family fortunes declined mainly because his father fell in bad company (sangat). He had begun taking afeem (opium) to get relief from pain. He gradually got addicted to it leading to both loss of money and health. While referring to the decline of family fortune, he said that in his childhood his family had 16 bighas of land. By 2005, his family was left with only 3 bighas, he said. Around 13 bighas of land had been sold off by his father. These three bighas remain with his father and he has given it for bataidari (sharecropping). Laluram said that he began working at a very early age and had been working at this tailor shop for almost 30 years. Initially, he used to assist his father. In the early years, he operated from home. This shop started about seven years ago. Laluram has five brothers, all of whom live separately. One of his brothers, Sinod, helps Laluram in his tailoring work occasionally. Laluram has five children. The eldest son works in Rajshri Zarda Factory in Lucknow. He handles two machines there. He earns ` 5,000 approximately every month. His daughter is in class 9. Other children are young and all are studying. Laluram is assisted a great deal by his wife. She Psychology and Developing Societies 22, 2 (2010): 331359

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keeps on working along with her husband so long as he keeps working on the stitching machine. She stitches buttons, does turpai (sewing with hands), presses clothes, etc. at the shop. Laluram said that he did not get his ration card made. Earlier his name was included in his fathers ration card. Kotedar once used foul language while talking to him and since then he stopped going there. It happened a long time back. The license for kote ki dukan (Fair Price Shop) has remained with the same family for the last 25 years. He, therefore, did not get a separate ration card made. He said that he would prefer roti with salt than listen to galigalauj (humiliating words) by anybody. He has got a pucca house built and lives off peacefully in the village. He has grown out of the spell of bad fortune of his father, by systematically working on himself and his vocation. He had, all the while, tried to insulate himself from the village politics. It was not an easy task to do in any local community as people pull them in to expect or make commitments that are political in nature.

Discussion
The three cases mentioned above have been chosen to make the point that they did not take easy decisions, but it paid them back. Mohan Prasad did not participate in jajmani relationships though it was more common those days. He made this choice some 25 years back. He did not opt for it even after having come back to the village. He retained his outside contacts while doing some other business in the village. These contacts offered him some security in case of any possible loss of livelihoods in the village. The coming back of Ramgopal to the village, after staying for a long time with his family in a city, was also a difficult choice. This was especially so because he had little land in the village to fall back upon. Individual labourers come to the city to work and then go back to their respective villages. But once they get settled for a long time in cities with their families, coming back is seen in the community as an indicator of not being able to cope up with the requirements of city life. Coming back with the family is associated with lowering of prestige in the local community. This was not a piece of conventional wisdom for Ramgopal but he took this decision courageously and followed it with his efforts. Laluram efforts to position himself in the village, as if he did not exist Psychology and Developing Societies 22, 2 (2010): 331359

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politically, was nothing sort of extraordinary. He systematically tried to depoliticise himself to keep away from main links of patronage and subservience in the vicinity. These relationships have been offering some security of livelihoods but have all the same been exploitative and debilitating. They also take away freedom of choice and decision making in a big way. The penetration of market economy in the village allowed him to offer his services and function relatively independently. Culture of daily life, oriented towards meeting subsistence requirements of households, in any context, is usually impregnated with contradictions of class, status and power and, therefore, expects people to be ordinary, conventional and conformist. These three cases are instances of initiative and inventiveness demonstrated by ordinary men. This has been made possible through their agency and ingenuity to look beyond the culture of daily life they were faced with and pursue what they chose to do with perseverance and consistency. The discussion of the problem and empirical evidences lead to conclude that there exists a possibility for creativity and initiative of some to be rewarded in the existing opportunity structure. These cases are testimony of that. This article helps us reach four main points. First, there is no disputing the fact that culture remains an important variable in explaining phenomena linked with poverty and development. Second, without advocating the case of the culture of poverty, I would instead like to hold daily culture majorly responsible for structuring the responses of the poor to real-life situations amidst a host of structural factors. It provides for cooperation notwithstanding contradictions across and sometime within classes. Third, this daily culture is not a homogeneous or compatible bundle of cultural values, norms, mores, or traits, but a conglomeration of diverse, sometime partly contradictory, and emergent symbols and values that are often refined and reconstituted in the grind of daily life itself. Fourth, the culture of daily life is accommodative and status quoist, and hence diversities within it generally do not press hard enough to challenge the very structure of the society in which the poor live. Acknowledgements
I express my gratitude to V. Xaxa, T. Patel, Shubhangi, Suman, Shashi and villagers of Shubhanpura for having contributed to this work in a variety of ways.

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1. Himmelfarb (1984) refers to discussion of a separate culture of the poor after 1820s in England. The chapter in which it is discussed is Culture of Poverty. She discusses in details description of lives and times of the poor in London by a contemporary writer known as Henry Mayhew. 2. Names of people, village and road have been changed to protect identities of people. Main ethnographic fieldwork was done in this village in 200405 by the author. 3. Bourdieu (1974) made an argument that unequal distribution of cultural capital leads to reproduction of inequalities of class structure. 4. Caste is a unit of social stratification specific to India. It is a status group formed on the basis of unequal distribution of social honour. 5. In Subhanpura jajmani is better known as kisani where service castes such as nais, lohars, kahars etc. provide services to the kisan (farmer). Ritual services offered by brahmins to other castes are, however, known as jajmani. 6. Mayer (1993) questions the antiquity and universality of jajmani and says that it is an invented tradition and attributes its emergence to the practice of keeping village servants in common. Fuller (1989) also finds many evidences such as private property in land, cash revenue payment and existence of common servants of the village in pre-colonial days militating against jajmani being called a system with certain definite attributes. 7. Wolf (1966) discusses the nature of relationship between patron and client while attempting to understand informal structures and relationships that play a critical role in maintenance of any system. Patron pays more in tangible terms and receives in return in intangibles. He points out that client pays back mainly in three waysone in the form of demonstration of esteem, the other in the form of information of different sorts about others and the third in the form of both promise of political support as well as actual support. Jajmani functions broadly in similar ways. But in jajmani clients also contribute in tangible ways, i.e., by providing services or by putting in labour. 8. Those who receive services as part of jajmani relations. 9. Contractor of Fair Price Shop run on behalf of the government. 10. At the time of the main fieldwork, 1997 Below Poverty Line (BPL) list was operational because 2002 BPL surveys findings were not put in practice due to a legal battle. 11. A small four-wheeled manually driven cart. 12. Made of betel nut, lime and tobacco and used for chewing. 13. Literally means hearth and is usually considered a criterion for defining a household. 14. Stickers attached to readymade clothes bearing the name and trademark of the brand.

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15. Ironically, he gets antyodaya card with improvement in well-being. Antyodaya is a scheme/facility by Government of India whereby very poor people get grains at highly subsidised rates. 16. Bigha is a locally used unit for measuring land. 17. Loan on reciprocity without any promise to pay interest. 18. A scheme of government of India that supports construction of house for people below poverty line. 19. A type of stitching machine used for stitching borders of clothes.

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Mukul Kumar is Faculty at the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), Gujarat, India. He is a development practitioner turned academic scholar and has vast practical experience of working on issues of poverty and livelihoods affecting rural communities. His research interests are human poverty, public action, livelihoods, rural transformation and governance. He is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India.

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