PROMISSORY PRESTATIONS: A YUCATEC VILLAGE BETWEEN RITUAL EXCHANGE AND DEVELOPMENT CASH TRANSFERS by Andrés Francisco Dapuez A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland October 2013 Dissertation Abstract Religion and development promise the people of a Mayan-speaking village of Eastern Yucatan, Mexico, regeneration and well-being. Through interrelated regimes of futurity, the implementation of cash transfers and ritual transactions unfold different aspects of reality. Drawing on twenty four months of ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and in-depth interviews with development officials in Yucatan, Mexico city and the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington DC, I explore what gift-giving, in particular, conditional and unconditional Cash Transfers (PROGRESA-OPORTUNIDADES and PROCAMPO) and cargo ritual exchange, contribute to these nested regimes of futurities. These regimes work to determine the sort of economy that should rule human life now, by teaching what should and should not be expected, developing moral anguish, physical endurance, recurrent joy and gratitude. Development prestations support a long-term transition based on personal, moral and intergenerational change while ritual transactions pattern the future in short-term cycles of ontic renewals that support the long-term enduring power of the elderly. Advisor: Jane I. Guyer Readers: Jane I. Guyer, Deborah Poole, Emma Cervone, Sara Berry and Margaret Keck ii Sweet your soul (“UOL”), beautiful Man; you go To see your heavenly father face. He will not Return you, here, above The earth, under the feathers of The small hummingbird, or Under the skin […] of the beautiful deer, Of the great jaguar, The little nightingale Or of the little pheasant. Give yourself courage (“UOL”) and think Only in your father. Do not Be afraid. It is Good what is going to be done to you…Have a good laugh Sweet your soul (UOL) Because you are the one To whom it was commended To take the word Of your neighbors To the beau/ tiful lord The one who has descended Here on the earth… (Dzitbalché Songs. Song one. In Nájera Coronado ed. 2007) Therefore that's basically what we finally come to, you and me, it is the importance of a notion of expecting, of waiting for the future, which is precisely one of the forms of collective thinking. We are among ourselves, in society, for expecting, among us, at such and such a result; this is the essential form of community. The terms: coercion, force, authority, we have been able to use them once, and, they have their value, but this notion of collective expectation is in my opinion one of the basic concepts on which we should work. I know of no other generative concept of Law and Economics: "I expect" is the very definition of every act of collective nature. It is at the origins of theology: God will hear—I am not saying (s)he will fulfill with, but hear—my prayer. Violations of these collective expectations can be measured, for example, in the crashes in the economy, panic, social outbursts, and so on. (Mauss [1934] 1968, II: 117) iii Acknowledgments Understanding gratitude has been one of the consequences of this very long process of reading, writing, asking and engaging on gift-giving that I started more than fifteen years ago. Expressing mine in a few words, calling names in this section, seems to me scarce but ineluctable. However, I do trust the loved and admired people these names refer to, will understand that nothing in me and in this written work is worth a penny without them and, thus, forgive my spare words. I am very thankful for the always right guidance and the generous support Jane Guyer provided me during the last nine years. I also wish to thank the other members of my committee, Deborah Poole, Emma Cervone, Sara Berry and Margaret Keck for their suggestions. Colleagues and friends were a nourishing company, especially Ivana Espinet, Bryce Taylor, Kim Nguyen, Guillermo Cantor, Sabrina Gavigan, Pablo Lopez, Alicia Degano, Mariana Falconier and Cesar Constantino, Pablo Tasso, Anila Daulatzai, Roger Begrich, Elizabeth Drexler, Chitra Venkataramani, Miguel Guemez Pineda, Misgav Har-Peled and Norberto May Pat. Especial thanks go to Sabrina who proof read the whole manuscript and made insightful comments. Valentina Vapnarsky generously discussed with me some of the Maya Yucatec linguistic and conceptual categories explored in this work. Seminars and conversations with Marcel Detienne were fundamental in helping me rethink rituals, life in books and regimes of historicity. At the Yucatec village where I spent most of my fieldwork time, I would like to mention the friendship of Andrés Dzib May, Honorio Nahuat Canul, Lázaro Kuh Citul and their extended families and the kucho’ob, j mèeno’ob and nukuch from this and iv surrounding villages. They all know that I will be back there dead or alive many times for the Gremios festival. Laura, my wife, Angela, Eliseo Francisco and Gracia, my children have borne most of burden of this painful learning process. My family and Laura’s had released some of it in many different moments. Adolfo Francisco, Amelia Antonia, Mariana Inés, Paula, Hugo, Beatriz, Mariana, Martín, Cecilia, Franca and Davina, their children, grandchildren, friends, husbands and wives are privileged witnesses of my frustration and joy. Fieldwork research was made possible by IIE-Fulbright, the Latin-American Program and the Anthropology Department of the Johns Hopkins University, as well as a National Science Foundation Research Improvement Award (BC0921235). v vi Table of Contents Acknowledgments iv INTRODUCTION 1 Sources of Promises CHAPTER I: Chronology of policies. Cash to the peasants for political “support”. The reversible temporality of economy at the interface of bureaucracy and the people 51 Interfaces CHAPTER II: Calendrics of Development and Ritual Transfers 104 CHAPTER III: Reception and deployment of the money by the people 143 Promises in the Life and Politics in Ixán CHAPTER IV: Arranging livelihoods, the dead, and obtaining ontic gains 174 CHAPTER V: Making and remaking of the promissory 224 CONCLUSIONS 285 Glossary of Terms 309 Bibliography 311 Curriculum Vitae 337 vii INTRODUCTION 1 In a village of around 2000 persons in Eastern Yucatan—referred to here as Ixán—livelihoods have depended for generations on farm incomes and the people’s own propitiation of favorable forces in their worlds. The majority of all adult males in Ixán say that their main economic activity is growing corn, beans, squash and chiles in their field plots (milpas). While their milpas provide them with maize, their main staple food, almost all of them find it necessary to engage in other economic activities as well. The most accommodated families, those who are small holders of land, complement agriculture by raising cattle and keeping bees. Selling honey is the most profitable venture but requires initial investment costs that can be prohibitive, such as paying to rent land outside the village and having access to transportation. During dry years beekeepers must be able to transport their hives to more suitable places where their bees can access flowers and water. Other young people have found steady employment in Valladolid. These positions range from cooks and maids to mid rank state functionaries (among them two bilingual state promoters, two school teachers, watchmen and janitors). Young men in their twenties and thirties, however, most frequently migrate to the tourist centers in Cancún, Tulún, Cozumel and Playa del Carmen to sell their labor as construction workers and manual laborers. For the most part, these men only stay for short periods of time, which they calculate in weeks and months, before returning to Ixán to take care of their families who remain in the village because it is safer and qualified as having a healthier and “even” way of life. Recently, since the middle of the 1990s, state support, in the form of cash transfers, has been introduced. These cash transfers derive from international and national policies that also depict the dynamics of the present in terms of a future. These different 2 futures, and the different means of bringing them into being, meet in daily life, in agricultural seasonality and in the annual ceremonial cycle of community renewal. Unlike many situations of differentiation between state and people, in this case both sides have—or have had in the past—both written and practice-based frameworks with which they approach the vistas of their future. And both have their own experts. This introduction offers a preliminary depiction of their histories. It also develops the concept of “the interface” (Guyer 1994), exploring the non-binary, multiple character of that on-going dynamic, in a case where there is a third major cultural-historical framework at play beyond and in addition to the local Maya, the national and transnational frameworks. In this case the Spanish concept of “promesa” is integral, coming as it does to this population through the Spanish colonial influence and Roman Catholicism. To analyze its meaning and power, I draw on the work of Mauss (1925, 1968, II: 117), Searle (1964), Austin (1976), Vitek (1993), Sheinman (2011) and Testart (1993: 63). The ways in which the people of Ixán now approach the combination of regimes of futurity are described and interpreted in chapters III, IV and V. 3 Procampo and Progresa-Oportunidades cash transfers have been devised by empirically informed policy makers that, having acknowledged the importance of burden, cargo and supporting repetitive actions for the Mexican indigenous people, have further developed an ideology of monetary support or “apoyo” for the rural poor. Cash transfers were intended to compensate adult peasants for the harsh transition towards free agricultural markets and for the economic reconversion of their children, specifically those born between 1990-2010.