Habitus or Culture of Poverty? Rethinking the Moral Logic of Survival under Structural Constraint

This article revisits the longstanding contrast between Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and Oscar Lewis’s culture-of-poverty paradigm in order to explain how individuals living under persistent structural constraints navigate moral and material survival strategies. Drawing on 216 in-depth interviews from disadvantaged Dutch neighbourhoods, we demonstrate that poor residents deploy an embodied, relational agency—shaped by field-specific conversion capacities and symbolic valuations—rather than conform to a static sub-culture of deprivation. In the formal labour market, they confront conversion barriers and symbolic violence that devalue their existing capital; in the informal economy, they engage a morally regulated system of trust and reciprocity to generate unreported income; in welfare bureaucracies, they resist and sometimes withdraw under coercive compliance regimes; in their communities, they negotiate territorial stigma through moral boundary-making; and in social networks, they temper the “strength of weak ties” with honour and risk calculations. These findings reveal that survival under constraint is best understood through habitus-informed dispositions that both enable adaptive practices and reproduce field-specific logics. We argue that recognising “relational agency under constraint” offers a richer theoretical framework than culture-of-poverty stereotypes and carries significant implications for policy design, which must address both structural barriers and the moral dimensions of poverty.