Popular Critique and Religious Interpretations of Programa Juntos in Peru, « Ethnographic Perspectives on Conditional Cash Transfer

Put in place in Peru in 2005, Programa Juntos, aims to integrate poor families into the market economy through conditional cash transfers that provide incentives to pregnant women and mothers of children under the age of 18, to obtain identity documents, health services and education. Since its inception, however, this social program has been subject to apocalyptic and mythical interpretations that portray its participants as willfully marked by the devil and controlled by dangerous forces. Following the work of James Scott (2000) and Michael Taussig (2010), this paper attempts to read these interpretations seriously, drawing out how they can be seen as critical discourses vis-à-vis social programs and the manner in which they are put in place in the Andean countryside