James Ferguson (1959-2025) was an American anthropologist critical of traditional development theories. He published his last work at Prickly Paradigm Press, Presence and Social Obligation, a short and dense pamphlet about a deceptively simple question: who gets what, and why, from schemes of social support? His answer cuts against two of the most familiar justifications for social provision — that benefits only flow to those who work for them, or only to citizens of a nation state that are entitled to them. Both frameworks, Ferguson argues, are increasingly inadequate as growing numbers of people fail to qualify: either they can't find stable formal employment, and they lack documentation or citizenship. So what are the foundations of a just distribution of services and benefits when those two pillars are no longer meaningful?
Drawing on a rich anthropology of sharing, Ferguson's alternative is the concept of presence: the social fact of being here, among others, sharing the same space, the same infrastructure, the same vulnerabilities. You don't have to have earned it, and you don't have to have been born here to benefit. Ferguson draws on the experience of marginalized urban populations across the global South who access state services, however unequally, and suggests how such sharing with non-nationals and the unemployed is not some sort of utopian proposal but part of the everyday life of the modern welfare state — at least, in some places.
Ferguson died tragically in the first year of the second Trump administration at a moment when his argument became most relevant. Since his inauguration, informed by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and by his own cruel and mean-spirited character, Trump has systematically sought to dismantle the federal system of care, if not the modern welfare state itself. In January 2026, the administration froze $10 billion in TANF, childcare, and social services funding to five Democratic states, framing the move as a response to fraud rather than a structural position on obligation (and a form of political retribution) (CNN). Most recently, his FY27 budget proposes to increase the bloated military budget by 44 percent to $1.5TN while ending federal funds for child care. His claim that "the government shouldn't do daycare" (Newsweek) treats distributive obligation as conditional on a particular vision of the proper role of the state, one that simply excludes large categories of people – especially vulnerable people. The FY27 budget also calls to eliminate Community Services Block Grants entirely, programs that serve more than 10 million people annually (Center for American Progress) — one of the most direct forms of what Ferguson would call presence-based distribution.
Ferguson's framework illuminates what is genuinely new — and genuinely shocking — about this moment. The Trump administration is not simply cutting programs for fiscal reasons, nor is it only using federal funds to punish and intimidate its political enemies – causes enough to be shocked, and to sue. Even more dramatically, Trump and his minions are actively contesting and reframing the grounds on which social obligation rests, the cultural and political norms that bind us together in community. By insisting the federal government does not "do" child care, Trump is making an argument about who counts as present, and to whom the state is obligated by their very presence among us. Ferguson's claim is that presence isn't optional — that co-inhabiting a space creates obligations whether you acknowledge them or not.
What Ferguson would help us see is that the administration's linguistic framing of exclusion — "fraud," "abuse," “immigrants,” “criminals” — is the mechanism by which presence gets un-recognized, by which people are excluded and become socially invisible. Making certain groups and families invisible, treating their needs as someone else's problem, is not a neutral administrative judgment. It is a political act, one with a long history, and one that Presence and Social Obligation gives us the vocabulary to name, and the rationale with which to resist.
Get a copy of James Ferguson’s Presence and Social Obligation here.
