Who’s Afraid of Oscar Lewis?

In the 50s and 60s, Oscar Lewis could easily have been the world’s most famous anthropologist.  He wrote a whole series of painstaking ethnographies of poor families from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and India.  My 12th-grade AP Government class actually made his Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty required reading.  Only recently, though, have I realized that these books aren’t just fascinating in their own right; they’re also illuminating at the meta level.

Here’s how.

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