Anthropologists and institutional agents

Management in the State from the inside: the 90s and the first decades of this century

Abstract

In this essay, as a female anthropologist who managed a social policy in the 90's of the twentieth century and a male anthropologist who implemented an educational policy between 2009 and 2018, we propose a disciplinary view of the constitution of statehood, from the double perspective of the social actor and the institutional agent. We understand that the Maternal and Child Nutrition Program and the National Program of Integral Sexual Education express at the same time the socio-economic and political-cultural structural conditions in which they were implemented, as well as certain specificities of state management, that display some continuities. Those specificities would be present in the trajectories, and relationships that those institutional agents established with each other, with senior officials and also with the recipients; the heterogeneous and disputed character within the state institutions is thus revealed, allowing a more precise approximation of state management.