Cash Transfers

Abstract

Cash transfers—direct regular and non-contributory payments to eligible individuals—are one of the most discussed, celebrated, and contested social assistance innovations of the twenty-first century. They have helped alleviate poverty and provide quick relief during economic crises such as those triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. They are heralded for improving the position of women, increasing community resilience, making development aid interventions more efficient, and achieving a more just distribution of wealth. This entry outlines the history of cash transfers and discusses some of their key features. It shows that cash transfers’ variability and ultimate indeterminacy allows scholars, practitioners, and recipients alike to approach them in a multitude of ways. Cash transfers can be used to mould recipients into neoliberal subjects; they can be seen as vehicles to revolutionise the global capitalist economy; and they may be considered as reparations for historical injustices. The entry focuses on three distinctly anthropological approaches applied to the study of cash transfers: Their infrastructures, the human relations that they presuppose and forge, and questions as to what kind of transaction they really are. It shows that cash transfer programmes rely on, transform, and build infrastructures such as digital payment technologies. They also impact gender relations, state-citizens relations and local power relations, and affect the lives of marginalised social groups. Lastly, cash transfers encounter already-existing transactional orders, types of exchange, and categorisations of money which shape their local interpretations. In these and other ways, cash transfers reveal contradictions of an increasingly financialised global capitalist economy that depends on particular infrastructures, bureaucratised state power, patriarchy, and specific understandings of what an economic transaction is. The entry concludes with a call for further, ethnographically nuanced studies of cash transfers.