Managing transience: Bolsa Família and its subjects in an MST landless settlement

Bolsa Familia, the world's largest conditional cash transfer, provides welfare payments to 13 million Brazilian households - and creates dilemmas for Brazil's rural landless movement, the MST. Through ethnographic analysis in two villages, this paper explores the daily practices and political conceptions of the program's beneficiaries. Bolsa Familia does not, as is often believed, create a de-radicalizing sense of contentment. Instead, the program generates a temporality that makes the benefit feel unreliable to beneficiaries. These beneficiaries must mediate the tension between citizen' and manager' identities, the latter being a salient subject-position produced by Bolsa Familia. The precarity of this position helps explain why Bolsa Familia has not inspired significant mobilization by social movements.