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 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.