Crisis, Risk, Control

Anthropologies of Insurance

Insurance is a nascent area of study for anthropology, but is productive for current scholarship on finance, credit and debt, economic development, public health and medicine, and crisis. Janet Roitman characterizes crisis as an “enabling blind spot for the production of knowledge,” in that certain historical events uncritically become junctures for political assessments of morality, normality and progress. As a point of reflection happenings in the past, events turned crises generate anticipation and speculative practices. Comparatively, anthropology has found diviners, prophets, and other experts to be cultural brokers who traffic in speculation by mediating present conditions and uncertain futures, and insurance operates as one such medium to control conditions of crisis. This brief essay considers how the global circulation of insurance in market expansion and development projects presents new landscapes for research. Anthropology is well poised to document the consumption, commercialism, and capillaries of structural power (in states’ social policies, market regulation or lack thereof) that inform local insurance cultures.

Insurance has been less an object of study than a familiar analytic to describe social action and formations that mitigate potential harm. In Risk and Blame, Mary Douglas wrote that non-industrialized culture groups obligate processes like gift giving and extensive support networks to avoid neglect and transgression. Difficult situations are routinely circumvented and these processes operate as a kind of social insurance, in Douglas’ words. Gifts and social support remain standard means for harm reduction, and are more often bound up with money: there is a price for protection and prevention. Formal insurance is a pricey engagement, built up in sequenced premium payments (“consideration” in insurance industry terms) over the long term or even a lifetime for credit against risk.

Insurance itself is a complex technology of risk management that conceptualizes and operationalizes risk with technical precision. Economic understandings of risk express the randomness facing an economic agent in terms of numerical probability. Agents who cannot or do not assign or assess probabilities to possible occurrences exemplify uncertainty. Risk, in the insurance context, is the mathematically derived probability of loss, and actuarial sciences calculate loss potential based on the policyholders’ age, mortality for former claim rates, and other variables. Douglas and Wildavsky noted the persistent conceptual divide between actuarially informed experts and lay-consumers about risk and its accommodations, a divide that has not collapsed despite experts’ efforts to ingrain their own ideas about potential harm.

Insurers contractually agree to pay a designated amount to the insured when potential risk becomes material reality: the risk of disease is realized in illness, and the price of illness and recovery are re-claimed; the risk of death is realized in one’s passing, and the price of a human life is re-claimed, however in-commensurate cash may be with life itself. Insurance reveal differing hierarchies of value, and the strategies to re-produce or undo that valuation, and I show a few ethnographic examples of how this plays in one small place in Southern Africa.

The Macabre Market: Life Insurance in Swaziland

Researching ritual and the life course amid demographic shift from the HIV/AIDS crisis in Swaziland led me beyond conventional domains of household events and churches and into the suit-and-tie world of insurance sales. Indeed, many funerals are today produced through the money claimed from insurance policies. I visited corporate insurance companies and state market regulators, collected product specs and technical reports, and followed contracted insurance brokers on the road as they went on sales pitches and made product presentations to prospective policyholders. I also worked with burial co-ops, often-informal groups of women, kin or workers’ unions that also pool money and other funerary resources.

Following national neoliberal economic development initiatives, the government of the Kingdom of Swaziland de-monopolized its financial services sector in the mid-2000s, and the market expanded with an influx of South African life insurance corporations. Citing concerns for foreign financial predation and accountability, the Government established a large regulatory body and legislation to assure ethical business practice. The legislation also aimed to formally incorporate many burial co-ops, but many co-ops have resisted market inclusion. Some insurance industry personnel quietly noted that high mortality associated with HIV/AIDS made Swaziland an attractive market. Because “whole life” insurance required a medical test, obviating many Swazis who are living with HIV (32% prevalence) from coverage, the policies sold were by and large term life, the industry term for burial insurance.

Companies and brokers were ethnopreneurial (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009) in their marketing by using language and symbols of ethnic identity. The stated prospects of families’ financial wherewithal made policies very attractive. Industry personnel perceived consumers to struggle with saving responsibly or gauging future needs, but felt unable to translate their key term risk into siSwati. The contractual logics and monetary aspect of insurance also made some consumers suspicious. For some consumers, insurance had an uncanny resemblance to witchcraft as an individuated, intangible and invisible form of accumulation that produces value from death. Like witches and sorcerers draw out productive capacity and spiritual vitality from humans for their own gain, so do policyholders reap benefits of cash from deceased beneficiaries. Some policyholders greedily filed multiple contracts on multiple people. Despite these underlying fears, both consumers and industry personnel saw insurance as a means for future vitality as money, even if the truth of long-term private accumulation emerged at moments of crisis in death.

Insurance policies have also reshaped kinship and the redistribution of value. The dying off of able-bodied adults from HIV/AIDS has left a generation of orphaned and vulnerable children, some of whom are often entrusted across households in customary fostering and caregiving. When guardians of entrusted children wish to include them as policy beneficiaries, they are encouraged to take them through state social services for legal adoption to qualify children as heirs and show legal relatedness as a birth certificate would show for biological descendents. Who to insure and who not to insure become prescient questions and play out politically along inter-generational and –household axes.

New Research and Prospects for Applied Anthropology

Like biomedicine or finance, insurance tends to travel globally as a culture-free form of knowledge, but recent ethnographic research shows how insurance is consumed, reworked or rejected in novel ways. Recent anthropological approaches include Erik Bähre on South African commercial life insurance, and a 2012 roundtable I organized with Robert Benjamin Frey for the American Ethnological Society titled “Making Claims: Anthropological Engagements with Insurance.” This roundtable featured works in progress on insurance cultures. Rebecca Adkins Fletcher explored the role of insurance and unemployment for Appalachian households, and Sohini Kar detailed the attachment of insurance policies to micro-finance projects in India. Robert Frey documented wounded US military contractors’ medical and burial claims going unfulfilled by the US Department of Labor’s Defense Base Act, and I presented research from the Swaziland case. At that conference, in his keynote talk, Arjun Appadurai noted that insurance is key for research on futurity, a site where “visible and invisible” worlds of finance can meet.

Insurance in its many forms has come to the fore in national and international policy debates. In July 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which established the Federal Insurance Office within the Department of the Treasury. The Office monitors aspects of the insurance industry including companies’ attempts to generate “access to affordable insurance by traditionally underserved communities and consumers, minorities, and low- and moderate-income persons.” The International Labour Organization’s Micro-insurance Innovation Facility aims to “develop an “insurance culture among the [working] poor,” and assure that economically disadvantaged peoples can access risk management technologies like crop, livestock and community-based insurance.

More recognizable has been the discussion of national health insurance in the United States and worldwide. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) notes “culture” or “culturally and linguistically appropriate” practices at least 45 times, evidencing provisional commitments to insurance communications and operations that are inclusive and accessible to diverse social groups. New grant opportunities, as outlined in PPACA, that seek to address healthcare and access disparities for women and the elderly also warrant nuanced anthropological intervention in the forms of program development, research and long term monitoring. In December 2012, the United Nations adopted a resolution on affordable universal healthcare. A select number of nations currently have or are developing coverage for all citizens, and questions of financing quickly turn to questions of a nationalized system and whether or not this should operate on investment or mutual risk pooling. Finally, the interest group Critical Anthropology of Global Health has charted a promising rubric, STAND on Health Insurance Reform, for health insurance studies and intervention on PPACA in a comparative and global perspective.

If crisis has become a word to characterize facets of the world—in finance, housing, and health—attention has to be paid to how experiences and indices of crisis are produced and distributed. Insurance matters to the study of crisis, as its industry searches for signs in risk assessment and offers technologies for managing that risk. Insurance should also matter for anthropology as a domain of expert knowledge production that comes to affect national policy and peoples’ social and economic livelihoods. Anthropology’s professional code of ethics states, “do no harm” to our interlocutors, and we might benefit from understanding how potential harm is otherwise manufactured and controlled in cultural and politico-economic context.

Casey Golomski is a cultural anthropologist (PhD, Brandeis U, 2013) and a Lecturer at U Mass Boston. His research explores ritual and religion, life course, work, labor and power in Africa.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/crisis-risk-control/