Abstract

The approach supports the current emphasis on justice and freedom as the condition of development. Both culture and poverty are confused topics. This paper summarises the problems inherent in approaches to poverty based on material needs. It criticises the tendency to blame culture for economic backwardness, and the tendency to write as if there were only two cultures, one like ours, individualistic and rational, and the other kind, traditional, backward-looking, and opposed to economic development. It introduces a theory of culture which is based on types of coordination; it distinguishes four incompatible kinds of organization, and associates with each its appropriate cultural type. Cultural theory assumes that any community supports a combination of the four types which are in continual dialogue with one another, individualism, hierarchy, sectist, and apathy. The first three are not inherently hostile to development. If one cultural type does constitute a hindrance to economic development it is the culture of apathy, which itself is only too often caused by the actual process of development. Worse than a passive culture, much worse, is the prospect of a cultural breakdown.