Caring Cash by Tom Neumark

Author:Tom Neumark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

PART II

3

Under the Aegis of Mistrust

Anthropologists studying what is often particularly familiar to them, including bureaucracies, have drawn attention to the problems of studying those knowledge practices and forms that are shared between the anthropologists and interlocutor (Riles 2001; Ballestero 2019). Drawing on Maurice Bloch’s observation that certain types of more familiar expertise, such as scientific ones, have not been the privileged object of anthropological enquiry, Marilyn Strathern argues that certain more esoteric practices are ‘more likely to dazzle than others’. To be dazzled, she suggested, is to be afforded the impetus for further analysis and revelation (Strathern 1999, 10–11). In my own fieldwork, I similarly came across things both in the grants and the wider charitable economy that were overtly familiar: meetings, documents, policies, algorithms, and the other material infrastructures that characterise bureaucratic worlds.1 Unable to be dazzled by such objects, anthropologists have approached them in different ways. Often this has meant an ethnographic attentiveness to what jars, from the odd invocation of kinship in high finance (Riles 2004) to the ways our interlocutors see the mundane in ways that are unfamiliar to us (Ballestero 2019).

My own fieldwork around the bureaucracy of the cash grants posed a very different problematic. While prepared, because of my familiarity with diverse forms of development and humanitarian interventions, to see the conventional bureaucracies and their knowledge practices, I was taken aback by their relative absence in the cash grants. That is, studying as I was an attempt to build a social assistance system, I was surprised when the bureaucracy I was expecting rarely seemed to materialise. Expecting to regularly sit in on and observe meetings relating to the grants, I was instead met by their sporadic occurrence. The intensive bureaucracy involved in the registration process of the urban grant, explored in the previous chapter, was, as I quickly discovered, somewhat of an anomaly. After the recipients had been identified and registered, on the whole they, along with those on the urban grant, seemed to be left alone by the charitable, bureaucratic apparatus. The cash payments would arrive either, in the case of the urban grant, in the recipient’s mobile money account, or, in the child grant, in their Posta account. Repeatedly during my fieldwork, I was struck by the absence of workshops, or training sessions, or even the individual surveillance of grant recipients. This was in stark contrast to activities associated with other programmes that I sometimes encountered during my fieldwork, for instance, the distribution of food in a malnutrition clinic or a legal aid camp for residents at the Chief’s Camp.

When it came to the cash grants, the bureaucrats who are conventionally involved in these, and who had been involved, albeit in a minimal capacity, in the survey processes, were effectively stood down. Existing bureaucratic hierarchies within the charitable economy were being flattened out, reversed, and even, by eschewing the intermediary, hollowed out. Missing in the grant programmes, then, were those sites – traditional in the bureaucratic apparatus common to both governmental

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