According to the Qwhatis.com called What is culture? “Culture is a way of life at a particular time, it includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities, and habits acquired by man or woman as a member of society. Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discussions and material expressions. Which over time express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held in common.” In her essay “On the Meaning of Plumbing and Poverty,” Melanie Scheller examines the cultural identity of the rural poor. The author bring the reader’s attention to explore and nominate the problem of poverty in America while using facts and personal background. While caring for a woman in a psychiatric ward, Scheller witnesses the woman’s obsession for flushing the toilets in her unit. This …show more content…
memory creates an opportunity for her to write an essay about growing up in rural North Carolina. Unlike Melanie Scheller, I grew up in the large capital city of Kabul, city of Afghanistan. With Melanie Scheller, focus on poverty, and my identity is stronger related to my faith in Islam? Islam is the way of my life because my family thought me the way that I have to follow it. Growing up in poverty, gave Scheller a negative attitude about poverty, while my positive attitude developed as a result of my strong belief in my religion.
According to analysis of Melanie Scheller’s culture of poverty, “with the help of scholarship I was able to go away to college” (322). When she went to college based on the grade that she got for her hard studying and then scholarship made her future very different and she felt so much happiness and joy for the dozens of dormitory toilets as many hot showers as she wanted . She said in her speech “I was very happy for the showers and facilities that I had never used and seen in my life but also she expressed on her speech” (322). She could not show her happiness at that moment of time to other students that were living in the same dormitory they will label her as a hick. She tried to keep her feeling secretly and this kind of felling put her in complete isolation. And I surprised why she cannot expressed her joy she has the rights to express it or at least inform the higher ups of the college for her good feeling that she had but I don’t know why she keep it with
herself. On the other hand, my personal culture identity is different than Scheller’s; it is based on my religious values and those values are based on Great God speech that have been mention clearly in holy Quran. While I was a child my parents sent me to Mosque (Masjid) to learn basic information about my religion Islam and all the time when I went to Masjid I learned the basic verses of holy Quran and my identity was different from Scheller’s;. In my religion if someone face with financial problem or some other problems Great God said everyone should have patience and never loss hope and always struggle and I am the one that I change financial problem, health problem or any other problems that I give each individual just for test and also in my religion if people face with financial problem the rich people should pay a part of their wealth to poor people and that is an order from Great God and they call it purification of wealth and these kind of help is not bad stigma for poor people in the society and this show the big difference between Melanie Scheller and the poor people who are living in my country. In spite of these differences, we share some similarities and differences in our attitude toward cultural identity. The similarity that we have it is about education, religion, and bullying. Everyone have their own attitude which make them different from each other. “On the Meaning of Plumbing and Poverty,” Melanie Scheller showed culture identity of the rural poor people. On other hand, my identity is based on my religion and I explain the regulations of my religion which is Islam. Her family moved one place to another place for affordable rental houses, where I lived in my own house. Moreover Scheller describe how “in the south “of her childhood, if a family did not have indoor plumbing they were labeled as white trash. On other side we have no indoor plumbing and electricity but we were not labeled by something. We have also some similarities especially in education, religion and bullying which we have differences in general. Melanie Scheller was Christian, I am Muslim .She got scholarship for studying but I study for free. She was bullied in school but no one bully me in school and I was bullied in the cities because of my disability. In conclusion, people can be defined based on language, beliefs, history, religious, traditions, customs, knowledge and skills but they come together on social circumstances. There are many difference between Melanie Scheller and my cultural identity. Although, Schaller explores the cultural identity of the rural poor people, I have positive attitude for my personal cultural identity because I have wonderful childhood memories based on my religion celebration. My personal cultural identity based on my religion which gives me positive attitude and joy of life. Although, Melanie Scheller personal cultural identity was based on poverty.
David K. Shipler in his essay At the Edge of Poverty talks about the forgotten America. He tries to make the readers feel how hard is to live at the edge of poverty in America. Shipler states “Poverty, then, does not lend itself to easy definition” (252). He lays emphasis on the fact that there is no single universal definition of poverty. In fact poverty is a widespread concept with different dimensions; every person, country or culture has its own definition for poverty and its own definition of a comfortable life.
In the essay “Achievement of Desire”, author Richard Rodriguez, describes the story of our common experience such as growing up, leaving home, receiving an education, and joining the world. As a child, Rodriguez lived the life of an average teenager raised in the stereotypical student coming from a working class family. With the exception, Rodriguez was always top of his class, and he always spent time reading books or studying rather than spending time with his family or friends. This approach makes Rodriguez stand out as an exceptional student, but with time he becomes an outsider at home and in school. Rodriguez describes himself as a “scholarship boy” meaning that because of the scholarships and grants that he was receiving to attend school; there was much more of an expectation for him to acquire the best grades and the highest scores. Rodriguez suggests that the common college student struggles the way he did because when a student begins college, they forget “the life [they] enjoyed
According to Rivkin and Ryan (1998), the word ‘culture’ acquired a new meaning in the 1960s and 1970s. Prior to that time, ‘culture’ was associated with art, literature, and classical music. To have ‘culture’ was to possess a certain taste for particular kinds of artistic endeavor. Anthropologists have always used the word ‘culture’ in much broader sense to mean forms of life and of social expression. The way people behave while eating, talking to each other, becoming sexual partners, interacting at work, engaging in ritualized social behaviour such as family gatherings, and the like constitute a culture. This broad definition of the term includes language and the arts, but it also includes the regularities, procedures, and rituals of human life in communities.
Poverty has been a growing problem in America, and it most likely will never stop being one. Someone who is identified as being in poverty lives beneath the poverty line determined by the Federal government. The poverty line in 2015 for a family of four was $24,250. These are the people who are really considered poor. Poverty isn’t just a problem in the United States; in fact, other countries struggle just as much, if not more, than the United States does. Many people struggle to keep themselves above the government’s poverty line, shown by the fact that the percent of poor people in America hasn’t drastically changed over the years. However, it is possible to get out of, and ultimately stay out of, poverty.
The culture of poverty suggests that the poor people have bad hygiene, have diseases, lack education and can only be able to work hard manual labor, and this has been the prejudice associated with poverty-stricken people. People with a culture of poverty have no sense of history. They are people who hold strong feelings of helplessness, not belonging and marginality. The culture of poverty states that poor people are unmotivated and have poor work ethics. It also states that poor parents are uninvolved in their child's learning process because they do not value education, and this creates the cycle of poverty. In that, the children will lack the necessary skills to succeed in society. The culture of poverty also states that poor people are linguistically deficient and they tend to abuse drugs and alcohol, (Phillipe 2001).
How can there be so much misery and insecurity in the midst of such abundance? One of the first things we see is that poverty doesn’t exist all by itself. It is simply one end of an overall distribution of income and wealth in society as a whole. Poverty is both a structural aspect of the system and consequence of how the system is organized and how people participate in it.
Broadway Middle School’s candy fundraiser might have alienated students who come from low-income families in multiple ways. Unlike the students who come from high-income families, the low-income students may not have family members who can afford to pay for the candy bars. Their parents may also be very busy working so they do not have the time to drive their children around to sell the candy bars. Since these low-income students were unable to sell many candy bars, social class biases began to form. For example, one of the high-income parents said that his son worked hard to sell all his candy bars, and that the low-income student was simply not trying hard enough to sell them. They were basically saying that these low-income students are lazy and need to try harder, when in reality they were trying just as hard, if not harder, to sell the candy bars. Relating to the idea of deficit views in the course reader, The Myth of The Culture of Poverty, the high-income families believed that because the students were not trying hard
According to Webster’s Dictionary, culture is defined as tradition or a way of life. It is also a defining principle in how we live our life and the type of people we become. The Salish Indians of the Montana and Celie, the main character of the book The Color Purple, are two examples of cultures that made them who they are. Celie is a poor, black, woman growing up in Memphis, Tennessee in the mid-twentieth century. The men have constantly put her down, through beatings and rape, for being a woman with no talent at all. Her husband’s lover comes to town and gives Celie a chance to see a culture where a woman can stand up for herself and teaches her that love is possible. The Salish on the other hand have a culture that has gone on through the ages and still is a part of each person today despite the obstacles they have had to face. Culture does shape us because from birth it is what tells us our ideals, laws, and morals that we live by each day.
Oscar Lewis asserts that the term “culture of poverty” is the theoretical label that describes in positive terms a subculture of western society with its own structure and rationale. Also, Lewis argues that these attitudes and beliefs are handed
The concept of culture of poverty is a contentious theory, according to which individuals belonging to the lower income societies follow cultural patterns that make poverty a way of their lives. The society adopts practices and methods that differ from the conventional methods in order to adapt and survive economic deficiencies. The theory stands for a set of principles and morals which are thought to exist among
Poverty can be defined as the state of being extremely poor. This means that a person has very little to no financial resources or provisions necessary for survival. It proves to be a serious issue that many families in the United States have to face on a daily basis. Poverty is a serious issue because it influences employment rates, which in turn hurts economic growth when the rate is low, and it also contributes to the number of Americans whom are actually homeless today. From a sociological point of view, poverty can be looked at using several perspectives such as the functional perspective, which shows how poverty exists to keep society up and running; the symbolic interactionism perspective, in which stereotypes come into play, showing
Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people…Culture in its broadest sense of cultivated behavior; a totality of a person’s learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning (http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/choudhury/culture.html).
The second measure is poverty gap index (P1) it measures the extent to which household fall under the poverty line (the poverty gaps) as a proportion of the poverty line. The addition of these poverty gaps gives the lowest cost of eradicating poverty, if transfers were perfectly targeted. But this measure does not show changes in inequality among the poor household. The third measurement is squared poverty gap (“poverty severity”) index (P2) it is averages the squares of the poverty gaps relative to the poverty line (All JH, 2005).
According to Cambridge Dictionary, the definition of “culture” is “the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time”. On the other hand, accroding to Raymond Williams, it is more complicated. However, ther is something that is certain: Culture is ordinary, which happens to be the title of an article he wrote to define and explain what culture is.
Culture is the totality of learned, socially transmitted customs, knowledge, material objects and behavior. It includes the ideas, value, customs and artifacts of a group of people (Schaefer, 2002). Culture is a pattern of human activities and the symbols that give these activities significance. It is what people eat, how they dress, beliefs they hold and activities they engage in. It is the totality of the way of life evolved by a people in their attempts to meet the challenges of living in their environment, which gives order and meaning to their social, political, economic, aesthetic and religious norms and modes of organization thus distinguishing people from their neighbors.