Poverty and the Brain: The New/Old Language of Cultural Deficit

In this essay, we consider recent narratives in the science of brain development under poverty in relation to the older idea of the culture of poverty. We argue that in theorizing poor parenting and deficient linguistic stimulation as the primary pathways of influence through which poverty exerts its damaging effects on the brain, brain science builds on and offers new evidence for the supposed cultural deficits of those in poverty even as anthropological evidence from studies of learning under poverty challenges the deficit narrative. Brain development science has further catalyzed global iterations of the culture of poverty that obscure not only the material and structural forces that make poverty salient but also the sociocultural situatedness of learning and development.