Overview

Set in one of the world’s most unequal and violent places, this ethnographic study reveals how insurance companies discovered a vast market of predominantly poor African clients. After apartheid ended in 1994, South Africa became a ‘testing ground’ for new insurance products, new marketing techniques and pioneering administrative models with a potentially global market. Drawing on Rorty’s notion of irony for understanding how the contradictions inherent to solidarity affect inequality and conflict as well as drawing on a vast array of case studies, Ironies of Solidarity examines how both Africans enjoy the freedoms that they have gained in financial terms and how the onset of democracy effected the risks faced in everyday life. Bähre examines the ways in which policies are sold and claims are handled, offering a detailed analysis of South Africa’s insurance sector.

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9781786998583

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'This is a critically important book that opens the door to what the author refers to as a conceptual space for exploring how suffering is at home within social relations and how this is central to people's interest in the abstract form of solidarity offered by large scale bureaucratic companies. The book warns us against nostalgic notions of social relationships as inherently good and caring, and the market and money as polluting this imagined paradise. Life is much more complex. This book should be required reading for every student of society, especially anthropologists in the 21st century.'Mamphela Ramphele

Author Information

Erik Bähre is Associate Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University, Netherlands. He is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Project Moralising Misfortune: A Comparative Anthropology of Commercial Insurance and author of Money and Violence: Financial Self-Help Groups in a South African Township.

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