 InsuranceErik Bähre Chapter 8 in Elgar Encyclopedia of Economic Anthropology, 2025, pp 87-91 from Edward Elgar Publishing Abstract: Carla faced significant challenges with her private health insurer during a medical emergency in Brazil. Her story serves as a lens through which to explore how private insurance practices reflect and shape human experiences of suffering, care, and social responsibility. People's experiences with insurance shed light on the bureaucratic obstacles and moral dilemmas inherent in private insurance and thus reveal how insurance is as a ‘moralizing technology’ that shapes individual responsibilities and risks. I draw on various scholarly perspectives to critique the historical neglect of insurance in economic anthropology and offer an explanation for that neglect. Studying private insurance contributes to a rethinking of the relationship between solidarity, markets, and suffering. Insurance offers the opportunity to develop a more nuanced understanding of the interconnections between solidarity, care, and mechanism of redistribution within capitalist markets that overcome deep-seated dualities that have characterized economic anthropology for much of the 20th century. Keywords: Insurance; Capitalism; Markets; Suffering; Redistribution; Health-care (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:22348_19 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing |
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