Securing The Future: Development Cash Transfers Against Ritual Prestations In An Eastern Yucatec Village

ANDRES DAPUEZ

Baltimore

Congreso; DEVELOPMENT AND COMMODIFICATION IN LATIN AMERICA: LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES; 2011

Johns Hopkins Unversity, Latin American Program

p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } The characters of this narrative are, then, people versus things, in a relationship mediated by labour (which I am not exploring here) and the commodity-form (cash tranfer), a sort of mirage or epiphenomena that confounds people over the properties of property or, in general on the “social life of things”. But things, I think, have more than a social life. p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }The basic idea behind cash transfers is providing poor people with a certain amount of money. Given that the givers presuppose that receivers of such transfers will improve their freedom of choice in the marketplace, a win-win game seemed to be settled. Rather than spending a lot of money on what were considered cumbersome and inefficient public services, these “monetarist” givers gave away a limited and much smaller quantity of money than Keynesian-like-developers spent previously (building roads, establishing schools or just hiring unemployed people to dig holes on the ground). According to these new-cash-transferring-developers or, better yet, according to their researchers, cash has a determined multiplier effect” among the poor. However, p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm;they tie to the monetary marketplace the receivers and  some people could get pleasure in imagining themselves as condemned to be free. Some other people could also need the need of freeing other people of poverty through distant acts. Even when cash transfers are not neither considered as reproductive-gifts, they are always portrait as transactions that entangle receivers into a bondage of conditionalities and opportunities. These conditionalities and opportunities always refer to an ideal marketplace as a perfect machine of allocation in which certain obligations, on the one hand, and certain possibilities constitute a certain subjectivity.