PROMISSORY PRESTATIONS: A YUCATEC VILLAGE BETWEEN RITUAL EXCHANGE AND DEVELOPMENT CASH TRANSFERS
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Date
2013-10-23
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
Religion and development promise the people of a Mayan-speaking village of Eastern Yucatan, Mexico, regeneration and well-being. Through interrelated regimes of futurity, the implementation of cash transfers and ritual transactions unfold different aspects of reality.
Drawing on twenty four months of ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and in-depth interviews with development officials in Yucatan, Mexico city and the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington DC, I explore what gift-giving, in particular, conditional and unconditional Cash Transfers (PROGRESA-OPORTUNIDADES and PROCAMPO) and cargo ritual exchange, contribute to these nested regimes of futurities.
These regimes work to determine the sort of economy that should rule human life now, by teaching what should and should not be expected, developing moral anguish, physical endurance, recurrent joy and gratitude. Development prestations support a long-term transition based on personal, moral and intergenerational change while ritual transactions pattern the future in short-term cycles of ontic renewals that support the long-term enduring power of the elderly.
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Keywords
gifts, development.