Towards an anthropology of Promises: A yucatec Village between Development and Ritual Exchange

ANDRES DAPUEZ

Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de Villa María

Año: 2015 p. 261

978-1-874671-10-7

Mexico´s Procampo and Progresa-Oportunidadesnon-refundable cash transfers were ideated and implemented in the 1990s to alleviate poverty, multiply household income, modernize the agriculturalsector, and level agricultural prices in a transition towards a free market economy. Since this first large-scale implementation cash transfers have become the most rapidly growing public policy response to poverty throughoutthe world. Cash transfer programs further certain monetary ideals but they also frequently meet local ideologies, practices and imaginations to produce rightful expectations, rather than simple gratitude (Ferguson 2015: 178). In my extensive doctoral fieldwork, spanning over 26months, I carried out participant observation and in-depth interviews in an indigenous village in Yucatan, Mexico. where these development promises encounter conflicting conceptualizations of the future based on promissory ritual gift-giving, known as "cargo or fiesta system" in the anthropological literature.