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Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the moral and temporal frames through which a range of development and social protection programmes are interpreted in rural India. By exploring discourses of care and dependency in a village community, I aim to shed new light on the terms used to understand poverty alleviation.

Paper long abstract:

In rural north India, people are well-acquainted with the potential benefits to be gained from a range of poverty alleviation programmes available through the state’s distribution system, short-term schemes, and public-private partnerships (PPPs). At the level of village governance, programmes such as economic assistance, food rations, and construction subsidies are often mediated by similar bureaucratic procedures that emphasize their shared qualities. However, such programmes also have distinctive histories, objectives, time frames, funding structures, and moral imperatives that determine how they circulate within communities. As histories of poverty alleviation efforts in India have shown, the constellation of developmental and distributive models that coexist today often reflect different policy eras, values, and priorities, yielding a complex repertoire of conceptual terms to describe and understand them (e.g. development, social security, or welfare). In this paper, I seek to offer ethnographic specificity to these terminological complexities by exploring how notions of care, dependency, and self-sufficiency are invoked among rural residents in Rajasthan, India. I show how the temporalities and moral assumptions of different state programmes converge in the daily lives and imaginaries of rural residents, generating new interpretations of responsibility and social support. I argue that this ethnographic vantage point can begin to reconcile normative distinctions between approaches to poverty alleviation and foregrounds the importance of lived experience for the study of social protection.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how cash transfers and subsidies impacted indigenous Guarani populations who live in Argentina’s Gran Chaco. I argue that social protection worked at the interstices of socio-political scales even as it generated new political relationships and identities.

Paper long abstract:

Between 2003 and 2015, the Argentine state oversaw a concerted attempt to expand the amount and reach of its social protection programmes. New programmes were aimed at incorporating un- or underemployed populations who had previously been left out of welfare policies that were tied to formal employment. Contrary to older forms of welfare, these programmes specifically aimed to break cycles of intergenerational poverty by enhancing recipients’ ‘human capital.’ This paper explores the impact that programmes like cash transfers and subsidies had on indigenous Guarani populations who live in Argentina’s Gran Chaco. These populations had not previously enjoyed access to forms of social protection that were as widespread, consistent and dependable as the ones that were rolled out during the first two decades of the 21st century. In charting how state benefits were accessed from bureaucratic offices and also channelled within kinship networks, I will shed light on the contradictory moral economies that social protection generated in Guarani settlements. Experienced as both populist clientelism and a-political distribution, as gendered payments and monetised forms of care, I argue that social protection worked at the interstices of socio-political scales even as it generated new political relationships and identities. In doing so, it brought the state into the home and the home into the state, all the while challenging and enabling a masculinist form of politics at the heart of Guarani settlements.

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This paper examines how claims to deservingness contest categorizations of poor and non-poor in social welfare schemes in India. Failing, however, to yield any substantial outcomes, these claims shed light on how different state and non-state actors navigate, assess and process these claims.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, India – a country known for its under-funded and under-resourced healthcare sector – has started to introduce health insurance schemes in order to address the WHO’s call for UHC (2005). These so called publicly financed health insurance schemes qualifying as social welfare schemes aim to provide accessible and affordable quality healthcare to the country’s low-income population. The newest and most widespread scheme is the Ayushman Bharat - Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (scheme, henceforth). Introduced in 2018, the scheme, identifies its eligible and entitled beneficiaries based on a poverty survey known as the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) 2011. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research at a public hospital, a private hospital, and a government office in Haryana, India – this paper examines how claims to deservingness (Streinzer & Tošić 2022) contest categorizations of eligible and non-eligible, poor and non-poor created through such poverty surveys. In so doing, I show how notions of entitlement to the scheme are challenged by beneficiaries on account of being “genuinely poor”. Failing, however, to yield any substantial outcomes (Kruks-Wisner 2017), these claims to eligibility (through, prayer letters and contacting brokers) shed light on how different state and non-state actors (e.g., public and private hospital staff, government employees, CSC owners) navigate, assess and process these claims. Most importantly, as social welfare schemes are increasingly being distributed in digital ways, this paper investigates how these claims are subsequently entangled with being visible in a digital database and on a digital portal.

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How are social policies received in the Peruvian Amazon, marked by state-indigenous conflicts? Based on a 10-month ethnographic study with the Maijuna, this paper analyzes how their paradoxical responses from appropriation to resistance reflect practical needs, expectations and state distrust.

Paper long abstract:

In 2012, the Peruvian government initiated social policies, including cash transfers, old age pensions, and a National School Food Program. How are these programs received in the Peruvian Amazon, where sociopolitical and ecological conflicts between the state and indigenous communities are intense? Based on a 10-month ethnographic study conducted from 2013 to 2017 with the Maijuna, Western Tukanoan indigenous peoples, this paper focuses on their complex reception of social policies in the light of the school food program which provides agribusiness-produced foods. While the anthropological literature previously emphasized either forms of appropriation or resistance among Amazonian groups in the Amazon when confronted with external initiatives, this analysis reveals the simultaneous presence of both processes. On one hand, the Maijuna express gratitude for the food and financial support, referring to them as 'gifts' (regalos), 'assistance' (apoyos), or 'aid' (ayuda). These provisions partially fulfill some of their expectations, providing them with financial assistance and enabling their children to learn to “become mestizo” in school. On the other hand, they develop negotiation strategies and present some forms of resistance. Some Maijuna, particularly mothers, spread rumors portraying their children as potential prey of the state, depicting it as cannibalistic. Cash transfers are interpreted as the state 'buying' their children, with the implication that the state might one day kidnap them, kill them, and then return them in tuna cans. These paradoxical responses reflect local practical needs, expectations, and infrapolitics vis-à-vis the state, within the context of contradictory policies aimed at indigenous peoples.

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Development, rights, and humanitarian oriented approaches to cash transfers seek distance from connotations of charity. This paper examines how such aspirations are frustrated as the bourse familiale is drawn into idioms of subsistence, contributing to calls to reconsider the place of charity.

Paper long abstract:

The bourse familiale cash transfer was introduced in 2013 as a 'grand projet' at the heart of the Senegalese government’s development plan. It is a conditional cash transfer, backed by the World Bank, and as in the name, was inspired by the more famous bolsa família in Brazil. Drawing on doctoral fieldwork carried out in a small informal settlement in Dakar in 2017-18, and periods of fieldwork since, I ask what kind of social contract emerges in relation to the bourse familiale. Conditionality largely falls away in the Senegalese context, frustrating World Bank development-oriented approaches. The temporary nature of the cash transfer precludes suggestions that this might move it in the direction of rights. More recently the bourse familiale is drawn into logics of assistance increasingly characterised by humanitarianism and crisis. Whether in the name of development, rights, or humanitarianism, different attempts are made to put distance between assistance in the form of cash transfers and charity. In this paper, I examine how such attempts are frustrated as the bourse familiale is drawn into idioms of subsistence centred around rice and oil (ceeb ak diwilin). I argue that what might be described as a moral economy of subsistence contributes to anthropological calls to reconsider the place of charity in the twenty first century.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses attention on the moral value of zimmedari (responsibility) in how cash transfers are understood by informal workers in India. I argue that state responsibility for informal workers is a subject of conflict, but cash transfers are also strategically used to generate solidarities.

Paper long abstract:

Cash transfers are often derided in India across the political spectrum—from the Right, who term them as ‘revdis’ (sweets), and equally by those on the liberal-Left, who argue that they turn citizens into passive ‘labharthis’ (beneficiaries) and distract from structural issues. Equally, recent scholarship on informal work in India emphasises how workers have successfully demanded such benefits from the state, seeking to assert their rights as citizens and voters, and not as employees (Agarwala, 2013). What is less well-examined are the consequences of this shift to the state, and how informal workers themselves understand cash transfers.

In this paper, I draw on fourteen months of participant observation in an informal workers’ union and clinic in Rajasthan, India. I describe contestations around a State policy that pays a cash transfer to workers diagnosed with silicosis, a lung disease caused by hazardous working conditions. Specifically, I interrogate how the moral value of zimmedari (responsibility) is mobilised within the union and among civil society activists. Importantly, the question of assigning monetary responsibility for workplace disease to the State is a subject of conflict among union members and activists, who recognise the value of benefits in providing relief but worry that cash transfers do little to regulate employers who continue to extract surplus value from exploitative working conditions. Far from being passive recipients, I show that the silicosis cash transfers are engaged with in a variety of ways to generate solidarity and bolster attempts to hold the state and employers accountable.

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Using the case of a multigenerational female-headed household in the South African township Khayelitsha, I trace the state slippages and women’s survival strategies to "access" social protection to meet their immediate needs, while grappling with dementia, HIV and a growing childcare burden.

Paper long abstract:

Following the apartheid regime that only provided for the white minority, social protection and redistribution of services and resources remain a pressing and perhaps insurmountable task in South Africa. From the mid-to late-1990s, progress towards achieving racial equality and redistribution were threatened by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. HIV/AIDS claimed and disrupted lives, orphaned children and called for assistance from a wide range of local and international actors that could provide care, treatment and support beyond the government’s capacity.

Despite the rights and entitlements enshrined in South African law, today township residents continue to struggle with persistent unemployment and lack of access to basic services, including housing, sanitation, healthcare and education. The majority of households are multigenerational, and heavily if not solely dependent on government social assistance- most often in the form of the older person’s grant (for people over 60 years) and child support grants. Drawing a decade’s ethnographic data collected in Khayelitsha township, I problematise the notion of “access” to social protection, in the context of a single household of three generations of teenage mothers. This paper traces the state slippages and women’s survival strategies in attempt to meet their immediate needs, while caring for a great grandmother with dementia, a grandmother living with HIV and growing burden of childcare needs. I argue that families like this use creative and flexible strategies to make even precarious gains towards the creation and sustenance of a familial social and financial safety net.

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As the question of employment is increasingly left to ‘market forces’, this paper draws on oral histories with ex-mining employees to analyse the moral economies of extraction and public sector work in the context of a decommissioned iron-ore mine in south India.

Paper long abstract:

Across disciplinary boundaries, as well as in the Indian context, the state form has been shown to be concomitant with neoliberalism, development goals, as possessing corrupt, elite, and inefficient, and with a monopoly over violence. Equally, recent work on the Indian state has shown that it has been held accountable through collective political action, petitions, and the demand for redistributive functions. In a moment where the question of employment is increasingly left to ‘market forces’, this paper grapples with the question, ‘What is the (social) state good for?’ Drawing on oral histories with mining engineers and contract employees who worked at a now decommissioned mine in southern India, and bringing together ethnographies of engineering, theorisations of the ‘public good’ and the moral economies of industrial work, this paper analyses how ex-state employees frame their demand for state employment as a form of ethical imperative. Across these accounts, I show how the work of iron ore extraction when tied to the state is not only framed as a ‘public good’ which 1) generates substantial foreign exchange value for the nation-state and prevents “resource wastage”— but 2) also engenders what I term as ‘affects of everyday security’ tied to ideas of place, identity, and access to stable work. By examining what everyday practices of state capitalism make visible, I suggest that aspects of the ‘social state’—specifically its capacity to provide stable work, and what this stability means in turn for a meaningful life—is an integral aspect of imagining socially-just environmental futures.

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This paper draws from ethnographic research with older people living and working in a diverse Kampala neighbourhood to situate claims for social protection and critically reflect on current policy narratives, particuarlly the roll-out of the Senior Citizen's Grant in Uganda.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws from ethnographic research with people over 50 living and working in a diverse Kampala neighbourhood to situate claims for social protection and critically reflect on current policy narratives. It leads from participants’ explicit reflections on where state and global infrastructures fall short of expectations for providing formal social protection, such as secure employment and healthcare. Related moral imaginaries are embedded within the social history of the neighbourhood where this research took place, a particularly contested site of 'economic development' since late colonial times. They are also located in a landscape of land struggles, dispossession, regional identity and the ‘conviviality’ of such multi-ethnic urban contexts (Nyamnjoh, 2017). And they are forged through transnational encounters, in dialogue with a ‘social imagination’ (Coe, 2020) of state welfare abroad, as both disparaged and aspirational alternative. In a global context of 'development' and inequality, many people are increasingly reliant on projectified healthcare and unstable forms of employment and mutual support in later life. This paper outlines such relational ‘infrastructures’ (Bear et al, 2021) encountered in Kampala and the cooperative moralities that underpin them, for which the middle generation play a particularly crucial role; neighbourhood organisations, family responsibilities, self-care and precarious self-employment. The focus on ageing and social protection relates to anthropologies of moral personhood, resource distribution and care work. It also allows for timely reflection on current policy narratives around social protection, particularly regarding national health insurance and cash transfers for the elderly in Uganda.

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This paper examines the dynamics of a state-subsidized agricultural insurance program in central India. Against a backdrop of agrarian distress, it explores how insurance shapes farmer-state relations, and reconfigures moral and political economies of risk and responsibility.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the central Indian region of Malwa, this paper examines the workings of a state-subsidized, privately-operationalized agricultural insurance program, the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY). The program provides compensation to farmers in the event of natural calamities which lower crop yields below an estimated average yield within a given insurance unit (usually a village or cluster of villages). In this paper, I draw on observations of yield-assessments and interviews with farmers, claims adjusters, insurance agents, and local bureaucrats to show how insurance becomes a site of political claim-making in rural India. While the program has been critiqued as a mechanism of financialized accumulation and narrowly technical calculation, I argue that farmers deploy it as a space of contestation through which they make demands for compensation for crop loss, appealing to the state as both benevolent patron and source of entitlements. Specifically, I show that the dynamics of assessing and calculating loss on fields and farms opens up possibilities for the forging of social solidarities and the articulation of agrarian citizenship. Against a backdrop of agrarian distress, the paper explores how insurance shapes farmer-state relations, and reconfigures moral and political economies of risk and responsibility.