The embodied counterfactual

Abstract

Abstract This short piece focuses on the anthropological quality of the RCT research design to understand the current appeal of experimental approaches to poverty alleviation. Drawing on ethnographic material, this essay discusses how the specificity of RCTs stems from artificially creating an “embodied counterfactual” as the possibility of a different life. It details how the RCT identifies not only a descriptive comparison between two groups but generates parallel realities: what happens with the program and its counterfactual. The counterfactual and the double-present are a trick but, as discussed by several scholars in the social sciences, counterfactual reasoning has long been an important normative tool. Overall, this paper shows that the RCT is a powerful means to imagine and guide the future because it sketches what I conceptualize as “the better life”, in contrast to the good life: improvements which perhaps try to make up in certainty and immediacy the ambition they lack in scope.