Name Oscar Lewis | Role Anthropologist | |
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Awards Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Nominations National Book Award for Nonfiction, National Book Award for History and Biography (Nonfiction) Books The Children of Sanchez, Five Families, Tepoztlan, Living the Revolution: An Oral H, Living the Revolution: Four men | ||
Trabajo Social, Oscar Lewis, antropología de la pobreza, familia Martínez, Uruapan, Michoacán..
The Jay (2013) by Oscar Lewis
Oscar Lewis, born Lefkowitz (December 25, 1914 – December 16, 1970) was an American anthropologist. He is best known for his vivid depictions of the lives of slum dwellers and his argument that a cross-generational culture of poverty transcends national boundaries. Lewis contended that the cultural similarities occurred because they were "common adaptations to common problems" and that "the culture of poverty is both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor classes to their marginal position in a class-stratified, highly individualistic, capitalistic society." He won the 1967 U.S. National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Religion for La Vida; A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty.
Contents
- Trabajo Social Oscar Lewis antropologa de la pobreza familia Martnez Uruapan Michoacn
- The Jay 2013 by Oscar Lewis
- Early life and education
- Career
- Books
- References
Early life and education
Lewis was the son of a rabbi, born 1914 in New York City and raised on a small farm in upstate New York. He received a bachelor's degree in history in 1936 from City College of New York, where he met his future wife and research associate, Ruth Maslow. As a graduate student at Columbia University, he became dissatisfied with the History Department at Columbia. At the suggestion of his brother-in-law, Abraham Maslow, Lewis had a conversation with Ruth Benedict of the Anthropology Department. He switched departments and then received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia in 1940. His Ph.D. dissertation on the effects of contact with white people on the Blackfeet Indians was published in 1942.
Career
Lewis taught at Brooklyn College, and Washington University, and helped to found the anthropology department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He died in New York City of heart failure, at age 55 in 1970, and was buried in Montefiore Cemetery in Springfield Gardens, Queens.