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Accepted Paper:
Post-neoliberal social assistance and the outcast poor in Indonesia
Robbie Peters
(University of Sydney)
Paper short abstract:
This paper details how Indonesia's new cash transfer program creates an outcast poor person unable to fit its objective parameters of eligibility. Accounting for around half of all poor people in Surabaya, such a person is now without economic citizenship rights in the city.
Paper long abstract:
This study offers the first anthropological account of Indonesia's new Hopeful Families conditional cash transfer program, arguably the biggest program of its kind in the world, and an example of what anthropologists now consider a model of development that is the opposite of neoliberalism. Through those I term its user, non-user and provider poor people, I highlight how cash transfers create a hierarchy of economic citizenship among the poor due to what Georg Simmel considered the state's control of poverty through its objectively visible and quantifiable aspects. I focus on those who are anterior to the visible: those who in this study make up half of all poor people in the large Indonesian city of Surabaya, and who are now surplus to the needs of its economy and struggling to reclaim their old right to its streets and neighbourhoods.