Environment and Planning A 2012, volume 44, pages 31 ^ 41

doi:10.1068/a44180

Ethnographic circulations: space ^ time relations in the worlds

of poverty management
Ananya Roy

Department of City and Regional Planning, 228 Wurster #1850, Berkeley, CA 94720-1850, USA;
e-mail: ananya@berkeley.edu
Received 4 April 2011; in revised form 6 September 2011

Abstract. This essay takes up the challenge of global ethnography. Using the case of poverty expertise
and development capitalism, it presents an analysis of what may be understood as an ethnography
of circulations. Building on the emergent research on policy mobilities, it calls for an ethnography of
the apparatus or dispositif and its constitutive relations and practices. Here ethnography departs from
ontologies of immersion and is instead concerned with critique as a mode of defamiliarization.
Against the lament of anthropologists that such global ethnography may entail the loss of the subaltern,
the essay presents a different ethnographic muse: middling technocrats who negotiate the apparatus
of development and who embody the contradictions of market rule.
Keywords: ethnography, neoliberalism, development, assemblage, microfinance

``Painting is like a thundering collision of different worlds that are destined in and
through conflict to create that new world called the work. Technically, every work
of art comes into being in the same way as the cosmosby means of catastrophes,
which ultimately create out of the cacophony of the various instruments that
symphony we call the music of the spheres. The creation of the work of art is the
creation of the world.
The very word composition called forth in me an inner vibration. Subsequently,
I made it my aim in life to paint a `composition'.''
Wasily Kandinsky Reminiscences (1913, cited in Dabrowski, 1995, page 10)
It was a warm summer afternoon in Turin, Italy. Scores of poverty experts had packed
into a seminar room at the campus of the International Labor Organization to attend
a three-week training workshop on microfinance. This was no ordinary summer institute. Known as the Boulder Institute of Microfinance a reference to its previous
location in Boulder, Coloradothis summer event is one of the key sites of knowledge
production in the worlds of poverty management. Launched by the Consultative
Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a World Bank think tank on poverty, the Boulder
Institute trains microfinance leaders in best practices and benchmarks. It is here that
every summer experts authorized to disseminate a global consensus on microfinance
are trained. It is here that the norms of a global microfinance industry are established.
I was an interloper in the crowd of poverty experts, for my knowledge of poverty was
ethnographic rather than technocratic. But I had come to study the making and
unmaking of poverty expertise and in doing so to immerse myself in a different type
of fieldwork: the study of power and knowledge. Our seminar was led that day by
one of the Boulder Institute's board members, Marguerite Robinson. An anthropologist by training, she sported the simple descriptor ``consultant'' for her name tags.
Author of the influential text, The Microfinance Revolution, published by the World
Bank and the Open Society Institute, Robinson was firmly committed to the promotion of best-practice microfinance, which she defined as financially sustainable (read:
profit-making) microfinance provided by commercial banks. Hers has been the work

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of converting microfinance into a global asset class. That afternoon in Turin, in a

commanding tone, Robinson declared that the microfinance revolutionin the form
of global finance capitalhad arrived.
This scene is a glimpse of the historical conjuncture that I have called millennial
development (Roy, 2010). On the one hand is a reinvention of development as
an enterprise of building global industries and global asset classes. For such a task,
new types of development expertise those that proclaim the financialization of
development must be produced and circulated. On the other hand is the aspiration
that such forms of development can democratize capital and stretch market forces
to reach the world's bottom billion. Such contradictions, I have argued, can be best
understood as neoliberal populism.
But that afternoon it was not Robinson who commanded my attention. Instead,
it was a lively member of the seminar, Mr Mokhtar, who presented a sketch of microfinance that was riveting. In charge of operations at Egypt's best known microfinance
organization, the Alexandria Business Association (ABA), Mokhtar lamented the
decay of the Egyptian state. If Robinson told the story of building a global microfinance industry, then he told the story of development at the frontiers of global capitalism
and American imperialism. Mokhtar rejected the institutions of the Egyptian statefrom
the Parliament to the Social Fund as ``political''. In lieu of the political, he advocated the technical, specifically the technologies of microfinance, from credit-scoring
systems to the metrics of financial sustainability. These, he argued, had made the ABA
the ``market leader'', and he was now the ``trainer of trainers'', specially authorized
by CGAP to spread its consensus. ``It is important for the Arab world to adopt
best-practice microfinance, to understand market principles'', Mokhtar stated. That
afternoon Mokhtar was the self-appointed keeper of the market, valiantly striving
to keep this realm from being tainted by state practice, by what he designated as the
``political''.
I was to meet Mokhtar again a year later in Alexandria, as I visited the offices
of the ABA. As is the case with most microfinance institutions in Egypt, the ABA is
funded and indirectly managed by USAID. Its changing programs thus reflect the
changing conditionalities imposed by USAID on its beneficiaries. This ecology of
dependence gives the lie to Mokhtar's careful distinction between the political and
the technical, between state practice and best practice. In Alexandria this was evident.
I arrived soon after USAID had declared a new mandate: serving poor women. The
mandate itself can be traced to the intense scrutiny that USAID has found its microfinance programs facing on Capitol Hill as poverty-focused lobbying groups convince
conservative and progressive senators that microfinance is suffering from `mission
drift'. In Alexandria, ABA staff, including Mokhtar, found themselves launching a
new program that defied the norms of financial sustainability that Mokhtar, the trainer
of trainers, had so carefully learned. One of the ABA leadership team emphasized:
``Let us be clear: we were compelled by USAID to start this program.'' The `political'
had thoroughly permeated the realm that Mokhtar had taken such great pains to
designate as the `technical'. The ABA it turned out was no different than the institution
that Mokhtar had so vigorously critiqued: the Egyptian Social Fund. An artifact of
donors, the Social Fund was established to soften the harsh edges of neoliberalism in
Egypt. For all of Mokhtar's efforts to present the ABA as a force of the `market', it too
was such an artifact.
I start this essay with these two scenes, one from a World Bank knowledge institute
and the other from the offices of an Egyptian microfinance institution, because taken
together they demonstrate the `small worlds'kleine Weltenof poverty management. I
borrow this phrase from a series of compositions produced in the early 20th century by

Space ^ time relations in the worlds of poverty management

33

Wassily Kandinsky. These dynamic space ^ time abstractions, I will argue later in
this essay, point to useful methodological imaginations. Three in particular are worth
highlighting.
First, what is at work in this vignette is the circulation of truth and capital.
Especially evident is the circulatory capacity of centers of calculation, how worlds
are put into motion at and through such nodes. The familiar heuristic devices of global
commodity chains or the familiar geographical metaphors of core and periphery fail us
here. Instead, the worlds of collusion and collision depicted in these opening scenes
require what Appadurai (2001) has described as an ethnography of circulations rather
than an ethnography of locations.
Second, an ethnography of circulations requires a rethinking of the ethnographic
object itself. In his seminal work on French modernity, Rabinow (1989) argued that
such an ethnographic object was ``reason''. To trace the emergence of the norms and
forms of reason it is necessary to study something more than itinerant policies.
Indeed, it is necessary to study what following Foucault may be understood as the
`apparatus'.
Third, conducting ethnography in and of the apparatus is `awkward', a phrase that
several anthropologists from Tsing (2004) to the Comaroffs (2003) have used. Also at
stake is what Marcus (1995) has signaled as the ``loss of the subaltern''. But if we are
to take seriously the subject ^ effects of the apparatus, then it is evident that, in place
of the subaltern, ethnography may have a new muse: technocrats like Mokhtar. Amidst
the apparatus, and the vast reach of its global circulations, is the intimacy of this
professional subject as it seeks to construct a realm of market rationality. That such
subjectifications are fragile and fragmented makes such ethnography even more urgent.
From commodity chains to ethnographic circulations
``Our goal ... then, is to defetishize globalization as Marx defetishized the commodity
by entering its hidden abode of production.''
Michael Burawoy (2001, page 151)
The study of globalizationbe that of 17th-century routes of trade or 19th-century
colonial experimentshas always sparked the attendant question: how should globalization be studied? In the analysis of economic globalization one important contribution
has been the analytic concept of global commodity chains, most extensively deployed
by Gereffi. As Dicken (2001) notes, Gereffi's claim is that the global commodity chain is
the most appropriate `organizational field' for the study of economic globalization. Gereffi
(2001, page 1622) conceptualizes the global commodity chain as a set of interorganizational networks that structure the world economy. Within such networks, lead firms
exercise power and consolidate competitive advantage by seeking to coordinate the entire
chain as strategic asset. It is possible to apply Gereffi's methodological device of
global commodity chains to the study of policy networks. Global policy chains, like global
commodity chains, can be thought of as an organizational field where the control of the
chain yields competitive advantage for lead actors.
It is useful to think of policy as commodity. That analogy can yield important
questions: does the labor theory of value explain processes of production of professional knowledge? How does policy making implicate forms of capital that exceed the
economic: for example, symbolic capital? What are the forms of commodity fetishism
at work in the making of policy as commodity? How do these types of alienation
engender a certain politics of the professional as modern subject?
But the notion of a global policy chain may turn out to be too static for the dynamic
space ^ time relations that are at work in millennial development. In the emergent

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literature on `policy mobilities', geographers have sought to highlight the mobilizations

and mutations of transnationalized social policy (McCann and Ward, 2010; Peck and
Theodore, 2010). This is a promising methodological framework, because the emphasis
on mobilities reveals the recombinant character of policies on the move:
``Mobile policies rarely travel as complete `packages', they move in bits and piecesas
selective discourses, inchoate ideas, and synthesized modelsand they therefore
`arrive' not as replicas but as policies already-in-transformation'' (Peck and Theodore,
2010, page 170).
Let me suggest then that the study of policy mobilities necessarily leads us to
`ethnographic circulations'. I use this language deliberately. Although Appadurai
calls for an ethnography of circulations, a felicitous phrase, he nevertheless implies
that the act of ethnography remains intact in the shift of fieldwork from locations to
circulations. But this may not be the case since the ontology of immersion that
characterizes traditional ethnography can rarely be maintained in the study of circulations. The question at hand is whether such mobile methodologies can still be
designated as ethnographic. Particularly useful is Holston's (2008, pages 34 ^ 35)
notion of ethnography as critique:
``By critique I do not mean pronouncing what is right or wrong with the way things
are, judging them by some external measure. Rather, I mean pointing out the way
that thoughts and actions rest on taken-for-granted, unexamined assumptions and the
consequences that both the unexamination of the familiar and its defamiliarization
have for the construction of the way things are.''
If ethnography has been defined as a method of ontological presence and immersion, then I am suggesting that ethnographic circulation has to be conceptualized as the
process of defamiliarization. Here ethnography is less a practice of specific methods
and more an orientation, a way of undertaking problematizations of the world. I am
interested in those problematizations that confront what Lee and LiPuma (2002) have
called ``cultures of circulation'', be it the circulatory capacity of financial derivatives
or models of urban planning.
Lee and LiPuma (2002, page 192) conceptualize cultures of circulation as interpretive communities animated by the cultural forms that circulate through them. This has
at least two implications. First, it is necessary to take account of what Gaonkar and
Povinelli (2003, page 386) have called the `circulatory matrix'. They rightly note that ``it
is no longer viable to look at circulation as a singular or empty space in which things
move.'' Instead, cultures of circulation have to be understood as spaces
of subjectivation, as what Larner and Laurie (2010) have described as ``embodied
knowledges''. Second, if cultures of circulation are interpretive communities then it is
important to trace the ``performative constitution of collective agency'' (Lee and
LiPuma, 2002, page 193). Such performances of calculation, of calculability, are often
the work of ``middling technocrats''Larner and Laurie's (2010, page 219) phrase that
is reminiscent of Rabinow's delineation of a ``middling modernism'' in the time of
19th-century colonialism. Later in this essay, with Mokhtar in mind, I will return to
such middling technocrats.
The emphasis on `cultures of circulation' has important implications for the spatiality
of research. Global ethnographies are often imagined to be multisited endeavors. This may
be the case but the multisited character of such ethnographies is not necessarily their most
significant aspect. At stake in ethnographic circulations is a break with what Moore (2004,
page 74) has critiqued as the ``methodologism'' of traditional ethnography, one that
combines ``participant observation, the ethnographic, and the local'' to make up a
``procedure that is a theory''. Ethnographic circulations call into question the ontologies of immersion implied by participant observation. And by being located in the

Space ^ time relations in the worlds of poverty management

35

circulatory matrix, they draw attention to how sociospatial scales, from the global
to the local, are actively produced: for example, through the calculative practices of
middling technocrats.
From policy to apparatus
``Apparatus, then, is first of all a machine that produces subjectifications, and only
as such it is also a machine of governance.''
Giorgio Agamben (2009, page 20)
Ethnographic circulations entail much more than a shift from an ethnography of
locations to an ethnography of circulations. They also entail a shift from global knowledges to a study of the calculative practices that ``build up the `global' as knowable''
(Larner and LeHeron, 2002, page 760). Or, in other words, they entail a shift from
the study of mobile policy to the study of the practices through which policy is made
mobile (McCann and Ward, 2010), of how a parochial idea, rooted in time and place,
is rendered universal or at least transnational. At stake here is a very particular
ethnographic object: what, following Foucault, can be understood to be an apparatus.
I am interested not only in Foucault's well-known exposition of the apparatus but
also in Agamben's (2009) more recent mediation of this concept. As explained by
Foucault in that famous 1977 interview, the apparatus, or dispositif, is a ``thoroughly
heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory
decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral,
and philanthropic proposition'' (Foucault, 1980, page 194). It supports and is supported
by ``certain types of knowledge''. Important methodological implications follow.
Foucault is concerned with how ``the apparatus itself is the network that can be
established between these elements.'' Agamben (2009, page 7) thus argues that ``apparatuses are, in point of fact, what take the place of the universals in the Foucauldian
strategy.'' It is in this sense that Tsing's (2004) brilliant ethnography of ``global connection'' is a study of the circulation of universals. And it is in this sense that, in calling
for ethnographic circulations that take as their ethnographic object the apparatus of
millennial development, I am in effect calling for a study of the performative character
of universals, such as the `market' or `poverty'.
Such an approach, in turn, bears resemblance to the call by Ong and Collier (2005,
pages 4, 12) to study ``global assemblages''themselves the ``product of multiple
determinations''as ``anthropological problems''. Indeed, in recent years, the analytics
of assemblage has come to pose important methodological questions for the social
sciences. One such question is whether there is a difference between the apparatus
and the assemblage. Legg (2009, pages 239), for example, interprets apparatuses as
the ``re-territorialising forces within assemblages, that is, as the normalizing and
governmentalising elements of networks.'' For Rabinow (2003, pages 55 ^ 56), assemblages are an ``experimental matrix ... not the kind of thing that is intended to
endure'', while apparatuses are ``stabilized and set to work in multiple domains''.
But as McFarlane (2011, page 23) usefully notes, it is important to make a distinction
between assemblage as an object in the world and assemblage as a methodology attuned
to practice, materiality, and emergence. I am interested in the latter and see this
orientation to be very much in keeping with ethnographic circulations. In other words,
if I am asserting that the ethnographic object at hand is the apparatus or dispositif
then I am asserting that assemblage is an orientation for the study of such an object.
Especially provocative is McFarlane's (2011, pages 27, 164) argument that ``there is
no necessary spatial template for assemblage ... that as an imaginary, assemblage connotes
collage, composition, and gathering.'' It is for this reason that I am drawn to Kandinsky's

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compositions as a methodological orientation, because they seek to capture ``the

thunderous collision of different worlds'' in an abstract construction. Kuchler (2010,
page 304) argues that, in particular, kleine Welten (small worlds) can be understood
as a ``conceptual model'' of space ^ time relations, a ``miniaturization of pictorial
polyphony''. The study of the apparatus requires such methodologies of composition.
For Deleuze and Guattari (1987 [1980], pages 141, 155), the assemblage is a ``passional
regime of subjectification''. They insist that ``it is significance and subjectification that
presuppose the assemblage, not the reverse.'' As an orientation, such an interpretation
of the assemblage reminds us once again that ethnographies of subjectification are also
ethnographies of the apparatus. Agamben (2009, pages 13 ^ 14) expands on Foucault's
ideas by conceptualizing the apparatus as ``literally anything that has in some way the
capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures,
behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.'' For Agamben the world is thus
divided into two: living beings (or substances) and apparatuses. Living beings are
``incessantly captured'' in apparatuses that ``seek to govern and guide them toward
the good.'' Agamben's delineation of the claustrophobic subject ^ effects of the apparatus
rehearses Deleuze and Guattari's (1987 [1980], page 224) concern with ``abstract
machines of overcoding''. But it would be a mistake to take for granted such forms
of overcoded subjectifications, for indeed ethnography as defamiliarization compels
us to study subjects like Mokhtar who cannot be reduced to the abstract machines
of authoritarian neoliberalism, empire, and global finance capital.
Finally, for Foucault (1980, page 195) the apparatus has a ``given historical
moment''; it is ``the response to an urgency''. What does it mean to undertake an
ethnography of historical conjuncture? Conjuncture does not necessarily imply rupture.
I make this point because, if traditional ethnographies sought to capture a certain
timelessness to ``primitive societies'', then theories of globalization have too often
made the case for rupture. Instead of rupture it is more useful to consider how,
as Goldman (2005, page 24) demonstrates, a ``critical ethnographic approach'' can
emphasize ``historical conjunctures''.
There is now a well-established genre of ethnographic scholarship that takes as its
ethnographic object the apparatus, its historical conjuncture, and its subjectifications.
Notable in this genre is the seminal work of Rabinow (1989) on how the forging
of French fin-de-siecle modernity took place through technocosmopolitan experiments
in the North African colonies; Ferguson (1990) on the making of African sites of
development as an ``anti-politics machine'' and more recently (2006) as a `place-inthe-world'; Mitchell (2002) on the practices of expertise, at colonial frontiers, through
which the `economy' emerged as a sphere of government and calculation in the middle
of the 20th century; Goldman (2005) on the production of ecogovernmentality by the
World Bank in the closing years of the 20th century; Li (2007) on how `improvement'
came to be a project in rural Indonesia; Tsing (2004) on how the work of development
involves the production and circulation of universals such as `prosperity', `knowledge',
and `freedom'; and Elyachar (2005) on how structural adjustment in Egypt required the
making of microinformality and microloans as productive.
I mention this cluster of scholarshipalbeit without doing any of it adequate
justicefor it provides valuable templates for the task of ethnographic circulations.
But it is worth emphasizing that, without exception, these are studies attuned to the
colonial and imperial geographies through which capitalism is constituted. As Burawoy
(2001, page 147) has noted, it is difficult to conceive of a global ethnography that can
overlook the ``vast web of Empire''. Inevitably then ethnographic circulations are
implicated in the space ^ time relations of (post)colonialism.

Space ^ time relations in the worlds of poverty management

37

From subaltern to double agent

``To submit and become a citizen of such an exhibitional world was to become a
consumer, of commodities and of meanings.''
Timothy Mitchell (1988, page 162)
In her important ethnography of ``global connection'', Tsing (2004, page xi) depicts
such ethnographies as taking place in ``zones of awkward engagement''. Indeed, the
apparatus as a site of ethnographic circulations is such a zone, an ``awkward scale'',
to borrow a term from Comaroff and Comaroff (2003). Part of this awkwardness
has to do with the erosion of some of the foundational certainties of traditional
ethnography, be it ontologies of immersion or the encompassment of a bounded locality.
Particularly important is what, following Marcus, can be understood as ``the loss of the
subaltern''. Marcus notes that what is at stake in mobile ethnographies is a wholly
reconfigured approach to issues of power and resistance:
``In yielding the ethnographic centering on the subaltern point of view, one is also
decentering the resistance and accommodation framework ... questions of resistance, although not forgotten, are often subordinated to different sorts of questions
about the shape of systemic processes themselves and complicities with these
processes among variously positioned subjects'' (Marcus, 1995, page 101).
In my work, I have charted the shift from ``studying down'' to ``studying up'' as a
shift from a ``conscientious ethnography'' (Spivak, 1993, page 61) of subaltern subjects
and spaces to an intimate ethnography that has brought me face to face with the
professionals who research and manage povertypeople like myself. Instead of rendering
the strange `familiar'which middle-class researchers tend to do when they study the
poorthis type of awkward ethnography renders the familiar `strange', revealing
the forms of power and knowledge through which the ethnographer as subject is also
constituted. I have designated such defamiliarized subjects as `double agents', those
positioned within the apparatus and yet able to forge moments of subversion and critique
(Roy, 2010). This means then that it is necessary to study not just elites but also what
Rabinow (1989, page 13) identifies as the grounds of ``middling modernism''``a middle
ground'' where ``social technicians'' forge practices of expertise. These are figures like
Mokhtar, programmers of the technical, enthusiastic participants in the apparatus of
development, and above all embodied subjects who must manage the manifest contradictions of market rule. Their rebellions within and against the apparatus are often
fleeting, sometimes persistent. The task of the ethnographer is to capture this complex
terrain of complicity and resistance.
In her well-known ethnography of the project of improvement, Li (2007, page 2)
argues that the ``positions of critic and programmer are properly distinct.'' She notes
that programmers ``under pressure to program better ... are not in a position to make
programming itself an object of analysis.'' In my work I suggest that it is necessary to
understand the programmer as critic, to trace the ambivalences through which those
charged with programming negotiate the apparatus. It is these cracks and fissures, this
precarious making of expert subject, that are of interest to me. Li goes on to suggest
that the ``more incisive critiques of improvement are generated by people who directly
experience the effects of programs launched in their name of their well-being.'' In doing
so she draws a distinction between trustee and subaltern, between government and
population. But this is precisely this distinction that the concept of the `double agent'
renders ambiguous. It is worth noting that the study of double agents does not
necessarily imply a wholesale abandonment of the subaltern. The `loss of the subaltern'
marks the end of a particular idea of the subaltern, one that identifies the subaltern
as the popular, the nonelite, the subordinated classes. Drawing on Spivak's (1999)

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critiques of subaltern studies, I have argued against such ontological understandings

of the subaltern. Instead of an ontology of subordination, the subaltern must be
understood as marking the limits of archival and ethnographic recognition (Roy, 2011).
In other words, the subaltern indicates a relationship of power and knowledge whereby
subaltern subjects come to be (mis)recognized by conscientious informants, including
ethnographers.
Agamben (2009, page 15), in his brief treatise on the apparatus, presents ``the extreme
phase of capitalist development in which we live as a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses'', a phase in which an unprecedented ``desubjectification'' is unleashed.
I have used the historical conjuncture of millennial development to frame this discussion
of ethnographic circulations because I do not find `desubjectification' to be a convincing
description of the `passional regime' that is the new world of neoliberal populism.
The time of millennial development
``Universals are effective within particular historical conjunctures that give them
content and force.''
Anna Tsing (2004, page 8)
The e-mail that appeared in my inbox was colorful, with a euphoric subject line:
``Good News from the Arab World!'' The phrase seemed to counter neoimperial geographical imaginations in circulation, those that present the `Arab World' as the site of
terror and violence. This instead was the story of hope and it featured a microfinance
borrower in Egypt, Zeinab, who with a $45 loan had launched a microenterprise.
Disseminated by the Grameen Foundation, a global microfinance platform affiliated
with the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, the e-mail also told the story of another
woman, Reham Farouk, the director of the Egyptian microfinance organization,
Al Tadamun, which had made the loan to Zeinab. Reham was featured as ``working
on the frontlines of poverty'' in a ``troubled region''. Her briefly encapsulated life history
pivoted on sacrifice and compassion.
``Reham, who holds an MBA, was poised for a fast-track career in the financial
sector. Then she met an 80-year old borrower of Al-Tadamun during Reham's
interview for the CEO position. `When I saw her coming to make her loan payment, I realized how blessed I am to have a job where I can help needy
people survive independently,' she says with emotion in her voice'' (http://www.
grameenfoundation.org/welcome/international womens day/reham s story/
Here once again is a glimpse of a culture of circulation, one where the dream
images of millennial developmentin this case that of a poor woman miraculously
transformed into a microentrepreneur through the touch of a microloanare widely
disseminated. A `vast web of Empire' is at work as well, for in the context of the
`troubled region' that is imagined to be the Arab World, technologies of development
such as microfinance are deployed as ``safety-valves'' for ``disaffected youth'' (terms I
borrow from an interview I conducted with a top-ranking USAID official charged with
implementing development programs in the Middle East). Interlocuters like Reham
Farouk mediate such a circulatory matrix. As Mokhtar was faced with managing the
manifest contradictions of neoliberal development, so Farouk manages the ambivalences of a globally circulating script of gender empowerment. During my ethnographic
encounters with Al Tadamun in Egypt, these ambivalences were clear.
Supported by the Grameen Foundation, Al Tadamun is an important counterforce
to the USAID-sponsored microfinance organizations that dominate poverty alleviation
efforts in Egypt. Operating in poor neighborhoods like Imbaba and Bulaq, and lending
primarily to poor women, Al Tadamun has sought to build the case for a viable
propoor microfinance in Egypt, one inspired by the Grameen model. But like ABA,

Space ^ time relations in the worlds of poverty management

39

Al Tadamun is also steeped in ``best practice microfinance'', seeking to create a ``lending

culture'' based on ``financial discipline'' that can ``fight dependence''. I found that
Al Tadamun's senior staff are consumed by the need to develop calculative practices
that could mitigate fraud, delinquency, and default. Indeed, in one of many interviews,
Farouk stated to me: ``We have to build the reputation that we collect loans, that
Al Tadamun will not tolerate any delays, not even for a day.'' It is thus that Egypt's
premier propoor microfinance organization became an expert in building a `lending
culture'. It is thus that Al Tadamun, meant to stand against the consensus built by
CGAP and USAID, presented itself as opposed to welfare, subsidy, and charity. And it
is thus that the distinction between programmer and critic came to be erased, for at the
historical conjuncture that is millennial development it is the critic who was unable to
sustain a critique of the global program of microfinance.
It is a well-established ethnographic fact that centers of calculation like the World
Bank and USAID have circulatory capacity. In my work I have sought to demonstrate
how counterforces of developmentorganizations like the Grameen Bankseek to
exert similar types of circulatory capacity. It is for this reason that the global circulation of Zeinab's story twinned with that of Reham is significant. At the margins of the
apparatus, Al Tadamun consolidates the master narrative of bottom billion capitalism.
Such work also takes place through the intimacies of subjectification, through the
portals of poverty alleviation that connect conscientious and charitable consumers
in distant worlds to gendered embodiments of empowerment: the image of a smiling
Zeinab running her business, the narrative of a sacrificing Reham toiling tirelessly to
end poverty. As Black (2009, page 269) argues, it is through such ``sentimental tropes''
that the idea of a ``small world'' is forged and that a crucial question can be posed:
``How can we come to care about the fate of others far away?'' Such subject making
is also fraught with contradiction and ambivalence. I close with a glimpse of this
terrain of poverty management for it illuminates, I believe, the task of an ethnography
of middling modernism.
At our final meeting at the Cairo office of Al Tadamun, Farouk sketched for me
an ambitious vision of what she called ``financial democracy''. Trained in business
management, she noted that she had first thought of development as just another
type of accounting. ``But microfinance changed my mind; I came to realize what money
can achieve.'' Deeply critical of the global script of gender empowerment, she argued
that microfinance lenders could not claim to empower women.
``This is a fundamental contradiction in the idea of empowerment how can it be
empowerment if some organization is telling you how to run a business, how to
raise your children, how to be political. Poor women do not need empowerment;
they are already empowered. Financial democracy is about financial services.''
I had encountered such framings beforeat CGAP, at USAIDfor the talk of
financial democracy was at the very core of the financialization of development.
Neither mimicry nor rehearsal, Farouk's passionate statement has to be understood
as the performance of embodied expertise. In a manner characteristic of double agents,
Farouk ended our long conversation with a personal reflection:
``I did not realize this until I started working in microfinance, but this is about
collecting good deeds. It is about helping poor clients and being able to face God
at the end of one's life.''
On that day, Farouk as both programmer and critic foreshadowed the script of the
Grameen Foundation bulletin, a globally circulating script in which the empowerment
of poor women ultimately rests on the `good deeds' of middle-class experts and in which
the future of capitalism rests on the conversion of its poorest into heroic entrepreneurs.
It is the task of ethnography to render strange these familiar passional regimes.

40

A Roy

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