Human Capital, Alternative Sovereignity and Monetary Promises

ANDRES DAPUEZ

Vancouver

Congreso; LASA 2021; 2021

Latin American Studies Association

Primarily focused on people?s imagination of money, this paper moves towards a general theory of promises and promissory exchange based on fieldwork conducted on Mexico?s Oportunidades-Prospera and Procampo programs in an indigenous village of the Yucatan state and the city of Paraná, Argentina. Using an anthropological case studies approach, it theorizes how monetary transactions, and particularly cash transfers, has been used as a development response to poverty, linking various stakeholders through the promise of human capital accumulation and the alternative sovereignties of capital. Through surveys, observation and interviews I analyze cases in which decisions taken on the basis of peoples? trajectories are finally framed as part of the cash-transfers policy?s ultimate objective: To support the creation of human capital in the beneficiary on the basis of formal education. However, questions arise concerning the nature of human capital formation due to the incarnation and disembodiment metaphors that emerge from the way money is perceived. Ultimately, the paper traces and interrogates the extent to which the political governance and monetary economic management of lives and resources can be fully translated into the alternative lives that the sovereign money and the promisor state proposes