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The idea of giving cash, no-strings-attached, to the poor has become popular in the 21st century. While hardly a radical form of global redistribution, these cash grants, often known as unconditional cash transfers, claim to offer a new type of care that is less paternalistic than other forms of assistance.
Caring Cash explores the caring practices that these grant experiments produced in the Nairobi ghetto of Korogocho. After receiving the grants, people there did not only look after themselves and their family, friends, lovers, clients and patrons, but also maintained the bonds that held them all together.
Putting his interlocutors' lives in conversation with ideas around care, ethics and economies, Tom Neumark argues that for those in the ghetto, caring for relationships is as important as the care that takes place within relationships. Seeing care in this way reveals the importance of managing one's proximity, distance and detachment to others, and raises questions about the disquieting decisions that allow people to live together amidst violence and poverty.
List of contents
Prologue
Introduction: Grants and the Care for Relationships
1.The Ghetto: A Place of Refuge and Charity
2. Scoring the Poor
3. Under the Aegis of Mistrust
4. Detaching from Others, Surviving with Others
5. A Mother's Care
Conclusion
Bibliography
Notes
Index
About the author
Tom Neumark is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment and the Institute of Health and Society, at the University of Oslo. He was awarded his PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge.
Summary
An anthropological study of the impact of cash grants on the economic dynamics and relationships among Kenya's urban poor
