The role of cultural belief systems in the enactment of poverty

Abstract

Drawing on an in-depth field study of low-income Muslim households in Turkey, this research theorizes poverty as a cultural enactment rather than a purely economic state. Our findings show that consumers mobilize religious and moral frameworks to interpret, relationally evaluate, and materially manage deprivation in ways that render hardship emotionally sustainable and socially dignified. Through moral enactments (e.g. divine testing, gratitude, prohibitions against waste), relational enactments (e.g. moralized social comparison and recalibrated needs), and embodied enactments (e.g. thrift, repair, reciprocity, and stewardship), participants transform objective scarcity into lived sufficiency and moral coherence. These culturally grounded processes reveal how poverty becomes meaningful, virtuous, and socially validated, challenging deficit-based assumptions that low-income consumers uniformly experience deprivation as psychologically damaging. By conceptualizing poverty as a culturally enacted moral order, this study offers a new framework for understanding how consumers sustain dignity, agency, and emotional resilience under structural constraint.

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