This project has made it possible to have a much better understanding of people’s experiences with insurance products and services, particularly how these experiences matter to moral questions regarding the value of life, the limits of solidarity, and the way in which private companies are intertwined with care provided for by the state, kinship networks and voluntary associations. The ethnographic focus, particularly the case study approach, has made it possible to understand how the experiences, narratives, and moral evaluations of clients relate to these products and services, and how these products and services are also the outcome of decisions that are made by the professionals working in the insurance sector, politicians, and public debates about who is responsible for which adversities.
The theoretical contribution is particularly salient in revealing the value of an ethnographic approach to finance. More infrastructural and Foucauldian approaches to finance have highlighted how financial products and services produce moralities while development and policy oriented approaches highlight how financial products and services can be used to change or introduce moralities that benefit societies. The project contributed to an alternative analytical framework that puts people’s live worlds center stage. This, we show, offers new ways to analyze structural power, and individual decision making in relation to particular worldviews. The project’s approach has made it possible to gain a better understanding of how these worldviews shape insurance and how to analyze insurance as a dynamic sight of struggle between insurance professionals, political actors, professionals that depend on insurance for their livelihood, as well as the clients and their personal networks, especially kin. The project has thus importantly nuanced universalizing claims about what insurance is, what it does, and what moral issues it introduces. The project has contributed to a comparative approach that is reflexive of the categories that are used for comparison. It developed an approach where the case study, and the different experiences, views, decisions that people make within one and the same case, can be fruitful ground for a serendipitous comparison. These insights are crucial to our understanding of how insurance, as a form of solidarity, as a place where professionals evaluate how to develop financial products and services, and as a site of struggle over resources, ideologies and moralities, has become fundamental to our understanding of risks and adversities in everyday life.
