Managing transience: Bolsa Família and its subjects in an MST landless settlement

Abstract

Bolsa Família, the world's largest conditional cash transfer, provides welfare payments to 13 million Brazilian households – and creates dilemmas for Brazil's rural landless movement, the MST. Through ethnographic analysis in two villages, this paper explores the daily practices and political conceptions of the program's beneficiaries. Bolsa Família does not, as is often believed, create a de-radicalizing sense of contentment. Instead, the program generates a temporality that makes the benefit feel unreliable to beneficiaries. These beneficiaries must mediate the tension between ‘citizen’ and ‘manager’ identities, the latter being a salient subject-position produced by Bolsa Família. The precarity of this position helps explain why Bolsa Família has not inspired significant mobilization by social movements.

Keywords:

• Bolsa Família
• MST
• conditional cash transfer
• welfare
• manager
• neoliberalism
• temporality

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Science Research Council and the Inter-American Foundation for this research. Thanks go to Rebecca Tarlau, Anthony Pahnke, William Sites, Julie Chu, E. Summerson Carr, Dain Borges and Jean Comaroff for their insightful comments. This paper is dedicated to the person whose wide-ranging lectures and far-reaching advice first made me love anthropology, Professor Enrique Mayer.

Notes

¹‘Bolsa Família’ is roughly translatable as ‘Family Grant’, ‘Family Scholarship’ or ‘Family Purse’.

²People's names, and the names of villages, have been altered.

³On the Washington Consensus and neoliberalism, see Fortes and French (2012).

⁴CCTs seem to be producing a form of ‘policy lock’, in which political parties have difficulty disowning the transfers because these transfers assemble sizable constituencies. (Thanks go to a wonderfully astute anonymous reviewer for this point.) For a good summary of relationships between parties and CCTs outside of Brazil, see de la O (2013). In the Brazilian case, a massive political science debate surrounds the question of whether Bolsa Família did or did not sway the 2006 presidential election. For an overview of arguments in favor of a Bolsa Família effect, see Zucco (2008) and Canêdo-Pinheiro (2009); for arguments against, see Shikida et al. (2009) and Bohn (2011). Rennó and Hoepers (2010) offer an interesting model, and Kerbauy (2011) and Peixoto and Rennó (2011) examine the 2010 election.

⁵Indeed, landless farmers frequently report that it is Bolsa Família that permits them to stay in the movement and out of the city. In the words of one of my interlocutors, ‘A opção aqui, se não tiver Bolsa Família, é todo o mundo ir para a cidade trabalhar.’ (‘What we'd have to do here, if there were no Bolsa Família, is everyone go to the city to work.’) Thanks go to Gabriel Ondetti for making me realize the importance of this effect.

⁶Data comes from a house-to-house census that I conducted between October 2011 and February 2012. I estimated annual household income for 2011 by making use of a survey instrument based primarily on the PNAD (Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios, or National Sampled Survey of Households) with some modifications for the rural context. Households were judged ‘likely eligible’ for Bolsa Família if they had an annual income below (or within $R5 of) $R140 per person/ month. For details, see Morton (2013a).

⁷Bolsa Família does not include work requirements. But its temporariness makes it resemble workfare in certain regards. It is instructive to listen to the explanation offered by a municipal Bolsa Família administrator whom I interviewed. For him, the program had a dual aim. First, it was designed ‘to alleviate immediately the hunger of thousands of people who are going hungry’ (‘para aliviar de imediato a fome de milhares de pessoas que estão passando fome’). In the long run, he thought, Bolsa Família should be part of a broader effort towards ‘emancipation [ … ] training courses, put women into the labor market’ (‘emancipação [ … ] cursos de capacitação, colocar elas no mercado de trabalho’). This administrator was a devoted PT (Workers’ Party) activist, and his use of ‘emancipation’ is striking. To emancipate did not mean to free people from labor, but rather to put them in the labor market.

⁸The debate over how CCTs affect autonomy, and what ‘autonomy’ means, is too extensive to detail here. For an optimistic assessment, see Thomas (1990), Hoddinott and Haddad (1995), Suárez and Libardoni (2007) and Rego and Pinzani (2013). For more critical views, see Morton (2013a) (and especially the works cited therein) and Molyneux (2009).

⁹On uncertainty as a form of power, see Bauman (2000, 119).

¹⁰On women's efforts to make Bolsa Família permanent inside households, see Morton (2013a).

¹¹Indeed, perhaps the most important behavior change associated with the program is not that recipients learn to send their children to get vaccines and schooling, but rather that recipients acquire the skills needed to engage with an unpredictable administrative system. This involves its own type of ‘struggle’: a particularist negotiation over the terms on which one gets inscribed in state records. Such administrative negotiation, because it focuses on the details of one's case, may end up becoming (although it does not necessarily have to be) inimical to social-movement organizing. Bill Sites deserves the credit for this insightful point.

¹²For more on questions of ownership of Bolsa Família, see Morton (2013a).

¹³Note, here, the similarity to the Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s. This form of work has often been referred to as ‘reproduction’ (although, in my view, the distinction between production and reproduction risks enacting a subtle sort of segregation; the distinction is an unwarranted one, since all labor fundamentally ‘reproduces’ society).

Additional information

Gregory Duff Morton studies changing forms of labor in the Brazilian sertão. His research focuses particularly on Brazil's landless movement, the MST, and on Bolsa Família, the world's largest conditional cash transfer.