Living with Poverty and Dependence in England

By Katherine Smith

Addresses the effects of poverty on multiple interdependencies in kinship, neighbourly and friendship relations, exploring how interpersonal relationships are made, unmade, recuperated or ended by people who are living with poverty in one of England's most deprived neighbourhoods.

Based on over a decade of ethnographic research, this book interrogates the conditions of social life and survival in one of England's most deprived neighbourhoods. It provides in-depth insight into the actual, everyday experiences of people living with poverty in their own words and from their perspective. Addressing ongoing debates concerning neoliberalism, austerity and moral panics concerning poverty, Living with Poverty and Dependence in England explores the effects of poverty on multiple interdependences in kinship, neighbourly and friendship relations, and how interpersonal relationships are made, unmade, recuperated or ended, with a focus on reciprocity as a survival strategy. Emphasising the acts of ethical attunement that go into the maintenance of relationships, this book develops a sophisticated relational anthropological analysis of interdependence that extends political critique into new ethnographic terrain.
Adding to our understanding of the agency and moral reasoning of the urban poor, complicating the fatalism of some accounts of poverty, this book marks a theoretical contribution to a field of great contemporary social and political importance and concern nationally and globally.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 183999178X
• ISBN13: 9781839991783
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Length: 250 Pages