Granting the future? The temporality of cash transfers in the South African Countryside

Abstract

In the past five years, anthropologists from the global South have come to consider public cash transfer programs as an alternative to both work-centered policies and national development projects. These studies suggest that grants today go beyond the domain of traditional social policies and government bureaucracy and point to a new future in view of the scarcity of work. This future has become even closer with the pandemic of COVID-19, and with governments, non-governmental entities and the political left reaffirming the importance of a basic universal income. Considering these discussions, my article focuses on an income transfer program in South Africa after the Apartheid period, placing an ethnographic account in relation to the design of a 'progressive' policy of social grants. I present a longer history of salaried work in relation to rural African households and show how the emancipatory promises of cash transfer projects were read as a risk to local traditions and morals. In addition to this reduction in political hopes invested in transfers, I examine the temporal aspect of cash transfers, as well as the possible futures they evoke. By considering the futures that grants enable, I conclude by suggesting that it is premature to affirm that they have overcome wage work and its attendant sociality.

Free money's ideological nature: A comparative analysis of unconditional cash transfers in Eastern Africa

“…By ethnographically illustrating these four different interpretations of UCTs, our article complements the extensive literature dealing with cash grants in Southern Africa that shows, among other things, that many young male South Africans perceive such grants as emasculating (Dawson & Fouksman, 2020), that UCT programs tend to perpetuate and reproduce racial stereotypes (Torkelson, 2021), and that UCTs have the potential to reinforce notions of neoliberal individualism instead of bringing forth more inclusive forms of sociality (Dubbeld, 2021). In light of these remarkably different receptions of UCT programs, we suggest that CTs should not be seen as a politically neutral "technological quick-fix" (Fouksman & Klein, 2019, 498) offering a solution to the problem of the world's increasing "surplus population" (Li, 2017).…”

Financial inclusion and the contested infrastructures of cash transfer payments in South Africa

“…While precarious welfare states are characterized, as Levenson (2017) argues, by a lack of state capacity, this does not always produce forms of popular contestation as we have seen in struggles over housing or education. Dubbeld (2021) has argued that 'grants might unwittingly produce an extremely individualized set of social arrangements that looks like neoliberalism and in which something like a collective belief in common shares . .…”

Redistributive politics and the temporalities of crisis: Reconfiguring social protection in a post-pandemic South Africa

“…If a policy is supported but not preferred, then it is unsurprising that it is not demanded. This distinction between support and preference is also, as we will argue in more detail below, linked to people’s temporal understandings of different policy interventions, with productivist policies seen as engendering long-term transformation and grants understood as necessary measures for the hardships of the present, but not something that can transform, sustain or be counted on in the long term (Dubbeld, 2021; Fouksman, 2020). The differing temporal dimensions of different policies – some good for the immediate present, others for the long-term future – thus play into important differences between the political demands people make on the state, and thus have a key role in the ways demands ‘from below’ shape policy decisions ‘from above’.…”