This chapter discusses studies in psychological anthropology of the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of people dealing with material hardship. It provides an overview of several themes: conflicting cultural models of causes of poverty; how low-income people selectively incorporate some models into their self-understandings while rejecting others; ecocultural and biocultural studies of coping with material hardship; how material hardship can shape experiences for mothers caring for infants and children; homelessness and mental illness; and the subjective effects of downward mobility, which may be more disruptive of one’s sense of self and social relationships than chronic economic insecurity. Despite theoretical and methodological differences, these studies reject both Othering attributions of a “culture of poverty” and a-cultural accounts of people as economic maximizers.Cultural meanings matter not because people dealing with economic adversity have a “culture of poverty” but because they matter to everyone. Newer accounts of cultural meaning recognize cultural dynamism, diversity, noncoherence, and individual variation.

For the past two decades, the cowboy who inhabits country music narratives has appeared with increasing frequency in a seaside setting or beach environment that appears to contradict the well-established conventions of place and space in the genre. Where rural farms and ranches, for instance, evoked codes of white, male working-class sustenance, physical labor, and pride in forging a symbiotic relationship with the land, the new beach imagery offered a different catalog of associative meaning: leisure, escape, travel away from one’s home and roots, and a sense of unbounded freedom. This chapter traces the rise of beach imagery as a setting and reference point in country music, both in song narratives and music videos, since the 1990s. Ultimately, this chapter suggests that, in spite of their ubiquity, these beach settings are only comprehensible to their audience because the underlying cultural meaning of country music has fundamentally changed.