贫困研究:结构解释与文化解释的对垒

This paper reviews and discusses western sociological theories and research about poverty in structural and cultural perspectives. Structural explanations focus on how social and economic forces produce and reproduce poverty; cultural explanations, on the other hand, approach poverty problems from the viewpoints of poverty culture and environmental adaptation, analyzing such underlying factors as social anomie, absence of values, inconsistency between expectation and reality, tensions out of broken promises, discrimination, social isolation and exclusion. Comparing the two perspectives, the author maintains that when poverty is structurally produced and reproduced, cultural factors become important in either reinforcing or reducing poverty. Thus, the paper is intended to show that these two sets of explanations are complementary to each other: while structural explanation fails to fully account for poverty, it is cultural explanation that shows its interpretative power.