Proof of Poverty: Monitoring and Moral Precarity in “Post-Neoliberal” Peru

• In Event: Precarity and the State in Latin America

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, the Peruvian state has heightened its efforts to “target” social assistance programs more precisely, couching rigorous documentary requirements and enhanced monitoring activities in discourses of inclusion, transparency, and fiscal responsibility. In practice, however, these activities promote insecurity among recipients of state assistance and force Peruvians to place themselves at the margins of law and official morality to retain much needed benefits. To keep their juridical identities as members of the deserving poor, recipients of state assistance must conjure documentary ghosts and borrow official identities from friends and neighbors to construct an image of poverty that aligns with state mandates and categorical ideals. Government agents frequently collaborate with and coach recipients in this endeavor, producing a state comprised of irrational rationalities and sympathetic gate-keepers. While this two-faced state can mitigate otherwise harsh institutional determinations, it also transforms impoverished citizens into fraudulent subjects whose access to state resources depends on the precarious maintenance of official fictions. Drawing on 22 months of ethnographic research in Peruvians shantytowns and social assistance organizations, this research exposes the obfuscations at the heart of the transparent, fiscally responsible, and ostensibly “post-neoliberal” state in Peru.

Author

• Kristin J Skrabut, Harvard University