This paper brings some findings from research on the meanings of money from Brazil"s Family Grant Program (Programa Bolsa Família, PBF). The ethnography on which it is based was carried out between 2010 and 2012 in the cities of Alvorada and Porto Alegre. It shows, firstly, that even though it is received in cash, the PBF money is not just an abstract mediator. Rather, access to this kind of money, or to the PBF itself, is accompanied by a series of moral values that go beyond the legal conditionalities that characterize the program. Drawing on ethnographic instances, our discussion highlights some of the key elements of this morality: negotiations around the notion of vulnerability (a central concept for the social workers in charge of enrolling beneficiaries in the PBF), and the different meanings of the PBF money, from the beneficiaries" point of view. This diversity of meanings is presented synthetically in terms of some key domains: money of women and for women; money of children and for children; money interdicted and shameful to men.
Bolsa Família (Family Grant); money; morality; anthropology; public policy