Connecting Poverty, Culture, and Cognition: The Bridges Out of Poverty Process

This article highlights how one nonprofit organization deals with the controversial issue of culture and poverty through its interactions with low-income individuals. Through interviews and participant observation, we analyze its curriculum and process, which focuses on helping participants become more reflexive by analyzing their past life and potential futures through a social class analysis. At the same time, we discuss a key theoretical debate over culture and action/agency. Specifically, we examine the distinction between practical and discursive consciousness (or declarative and non-declarative culture), and issues of agency. We show how this theoretical process is accomplished in the organization by providing people with the opportunity to change their habits, skills, "cultured capacities" and "repertoires," which can help them get out of poverty. We also show other factors, such as social support, are crucial and how the overall process works more for some than for others.