Money and morality in the Bolsa Família

Abstract

This paper brings some findings from research on the meanings of money from Brazil"s Family Grant Program (Programa Bolsa Família, PBF). The ethnography on which it is based was carried out between 2010 and 2012 in the cities of Alvorada and Porto Alegre. It shows, firstly, that even though it is received in cash, the PBF money is not just an abstract mediator. Rather, access to this kind of money, or to the PBF itself, is accompanied by a series of moral values that go beyond the legal conditionalities that characterize the program. Drawing on ethnographic instances, our discussion highlights some of the key elements of this morality: negotiations around the notion of vulnerability (a central concept for the social workers in charge of enrolling beneficiaries in the PBF), and the different meanings of the PBF money, from the beneficiaries" point of view. This diversity of meanings is presented synthetically in terms of some key domains: money of women and for women; money of children and for children; money interdicted and shameful to men.

O que faz o dinheiro da casa

“…11 As políticas públicas incorporam essa moralidade generificada ao privilegiarem as mulheres como titulares de políticas de transferência de renda, como no caso do Programa Bolsa Família, por exemplo (Eger;Damo, 2014).…”

Transfers

“…As policy tools these have mushroomed in importance since the mid-1990s (Ferreira et al 2009:4). Two of the earliest iterations of conditional cash transfers, Brazil's Bolsa Família and Mexico's Oportunidades (formerly PROGRESA), are now the largest social assistance programs in their respective countries, covering millions of households and families (Eger and Damo 2014). Anthropologically, conditional cash transfers can be seen as governmental attempts to exert control over the effects of, among other things, intrafamily transfers that thwart government's stated aims.…”

Entre condiciones expertas y negociaciones prácticas: la generización del dinero proveniente de las transferencias monetarias condicionadas

“…Algunos trabajos resaltaron la infl uencia de las dimensiones del género en la creación de prácticas y responsabilidades económicas específi cas (Benería;Roldán, 1992;González de la Rocha, 2006;Guérin, 2010;Kreutzer, 2004), sobre las prácticas fi nancieras cotidianas de las mujeres pertenecientes a zonas rurales de México (Villarreal, 2009(Villarreal, , 2010 y el valor y el estatus del dinero dentro de las economías familiares de vendedoras ambulantes de Potosí, Bolivia (Pascale, 2009). La particularidad de este trabajo es que se suma a los pocos intentos por problematizar las tensiones de género presentes en el dinero proveniente de las políticas sociales (Eger, 2013;Eger;Damo, 2014).…”