Intergenerational Poverty Reproduction and Lower-Class Habitus: Social, Cultural, and Economic Capital in the Perpetuation of Structural Inequality A Bourdieusian Perspective

Abstract

Intergenerational poverty reproduction—the systematic transmission of economic deprivation and social exclusion from parents to children across successive generations—represents one of the most persistent and theoretically challenging problems in contemporary sociology and development studies. While economic approaches have long dominated the analysis of poverty transmission, emphasizing income deficits and material inheritance, sociological approaches grounded in Pierre Bourdieu's field theory offer a qualitatively richer account of how poverty perpetuates itself through the reproduction of dispositions, practices, and social positions that extend far beyond the economic domain. This article develops a comprehensive Bourdieusian analysis of intergenerational poverty reproduction in Indonesia, examining how the interplay of economic, cultural, and social capital deficits, mediated through the formation of lower-class habitus, produces self-reinforcing cycles of structural inequality that resist conventional policy interventions. Drawing upon systematic review of empirical literature and secondary analysis of BPS Susenas, SMERU, and World Bank Indonesia poverty data, the study identifies four central mechanisms of poverty reproduction: (1) the capital deficit trap, wherein households in the bottom income quintiles face simultaneous deprivation across economic, cultural, and social capital dimensions that mutually reinforce each other; (2) the habitus of necessity, wherein material scarcity generates durable cognitive and behavioral dispositions—short-term planning horizons, educational resignation, and network enclosure—that, while adaptive under conditions of poverty, generate practices that reproduce exclusion from capital-accumulating positions; (3) symbolic violence and self-exclusion, wherein lower-class subjects internalize dominant class-based cultural hierarchies as natural and inevitable, leading to preemptive withdrawal from upward mobility trajectories; and (4) field exclusion and institutional misrecognition, wherein the cultural logics of formal educational, financial, and civic institutions systematically disadvantage those who lack the cultural capital to navigate them effectively. The findings challenge dominant policy frameworks focused narrowly on income transfer and demonstrate the need for multi-dimensional poverty alleviation strategies that address the cultural and social dimensions of poverty reproduction alongside its economic foundations.

Keywords

Intergenerational poverty; Bourdieu; habitus; social capital; cultural capital; structural inequality; poverty reproduction; Indonesia; symbolic violence; field theory