Dissertation Research Improvement Grant: Promissory Prestations. A Yucatec Village between Ritual Gifts and Development Cash Transfers

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Johns Hopkins University doctoral student Andres Dapuez, with the guidance of Dr. Jane I. Guyer, will conduct research on the relationship between traditional ritual gifting for agricultural regeneration and development program direct cash transfers intended to produce social and economic change. The researcher will focus on PROCAMPO (Program for Direct Assistance in Agriculture), which for fifteen years has been giving money to Mexican farmers to stabilize incomes in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). PROCAMPO cash transfers and calendar-based ritual offerings to fields each invoke different but interrelated ideas about planning, the future, and profits. The researcher will investigate how these contrasting temporalities differ qualitatively, are intertwined, and affect the implementation of the PROCAMPO program. The research will be conducted at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C., in government offices in Mexico City, and in an indigenous village of Yucatan, Mexico. Dapuez will employ a mix of social scientific methods, including in-depth interviews, content analysis of official documents, and in situ observations. The overall goal is to construct an ethnographic description and analysis of how the PROCAMPO program develops and communicates religious and secular attitudes toward the future, and, how these concepts interconnect with the complex calendrics of politico-spiritual life known as the cargo system.This research is both timely and important. It will shed light on how indigenous agriculturalists and development functionaries prefigure the future of the rural sector of Mexico. After more than fifteen years in operation, PROCAMPO has been integrated into peasants' everyday life. Currently, the future of PROCAMPO, begun as a transitional program to support the Mexican agricultural sector's incorporation into NAFTA, is being evaluated. In addition to updating social science theory of gift giving, the resesarch will have the practical application of helping to understand how and why PROCAMPO has or has not been successful. The research also will contribute to the education of a social scientist.