This dissertation explores the way in which current efforts to combat poverty seek to transform human sentiments and collectivities so as to allow the poor to produce the conditions of their own self-sufficiency. I study the implementation of Brazil's acclaimed "Zero Hunger Program" in its pilot town, a small rural municipality called Acauã located in the backlands of the country's infamously poor Northeast. My ethnography portrays the interactions between the cultivators and townspeople of Acauã and the Zero Hunger Program officials from capital cities who administered various anti-poverty measures.

I argue that through their implementation of the Program, officials deployed a set of techniques aimed at replacing loyalty, graciousness, and other intimate affects linked to patron-client politics with sentiments of compassion, indignation and forthrightness congenial to cooperative participation in the free market. I claim that such attempts to combat clientelism should be read in the context of broader political economic milieus. Thus, the three transformative techniques I posit--'mayorship bypass', 'induced nostalgia' and 'programmatic pilgrimage'—express both the genuinely emancipatory impulses of the Program officials, and the subsumption of these impulses under the broader philosophical and institutional norms of neoliberalism. More specifically, I understand this intended reorganization of affects and group-forms to be an important dimension of a second wave of neoliberal anti-poverty initiatives. Focusing on the affects and temperaments that the officials sought to inculcate within the beneficiaries, I take issue with scholars who understand the eradication of collectivities and the evacuation of sentiments from social life to be the main principles of neoliberal projects.

Zero Hunger Program officials' attempts to eradicate the cultural forms and power relations of rural clientelism did not succeed. While noting the Program's many positive contributions to the livelihoods of Acauã's cultivators and townspeople, my thesis illustrates the difficulties its officials faced in transforming the intimate power relations of everyday life. Through extensive ethnography of social change and contemporary clientelism in Acauã, I show how the beneficiaries' culturally-constituted interpretive systems undermined the Program officials' objectives. In this way, I produce an account of disjunctive policy implementation in neoliberal Brazil, one that has implications for other anti-poverty efforts in contemporary Latin America and elsewhere.