This article portrays the way life insurance as a consumer device lives through kinship ties of care in London in order to harness the uncertainties and limits of mortality and loss. A life insurance policy is a private contract people subscribe to, along with paying monthly premiums, to get money if the policyholder dies unexpectedly. Based on ethnographic material of the life insurance market in London, this work aims to illustrate life insurance as a social and cultural practice that informs family relations in contemporary western society. For Londoners, taking a life insurance policy is an anticipatory action that helps families cope with the irreducible possibility of early death, controlling and sustaining caring relations across time among intimate kin. Through the transformation of the policyholder into an immortal (monetary) figure that extends relations beyond death, life insurance becomes a 'technology of care' that mediates and bonds intimate kin in absence, as well as a 'technology of governance' that creates new subjectivities in the form of privatized risk inside the family. As such, this article seeks to address the ethnographic understanding of an everyday consumer practice within a wider scope of neoliberal modes of governance in western society, taking into account the consequences that buying a life insurance has for both the people and their families. In doing so, this study also contributes to the comprehension of the life insurance market and its specific situatedness in a contemporary neoliberal reality.
Bader, Christopher D., F. Carson Mencken, and Joseph O. Baker, Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture, 272 pp., appendix, notes, references, index. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Paperback, $25.00. ISBN 9780814791356.Bialecki, Jon, A Diagram for Fire: Miracles and Variation in an American Charismatic Movement, 288 pp., prologue, notes, works cited, index. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. Paperback, $34.95. ISBN 9780520294219.Blanes, Ruy Llera, and Galina Ous tinova- Stjepanovic , eds., Being Godless: Ethnographies of Atheism and Non-Religion, 154 pp., afterword, notes, references, index. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. Paperback, $27.95. ISBN 9781785335730.Canals, Roger, A Goddess in Motion: Visual Creativity in the Cult of María Lionza, 212 pp., notes, glossary, references, index. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. Hardback, $120.00. ISBN 9781785336126.Desjarlais , Robert, Subject to Death: Life and Loss in a Buddhist World, 304 pp., halftones, postscript, notes, references, index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Paperback, $30.00. ISBN 9780226355870.Espinosa, Gastón, Latino Pentecostals in America: Faith and Politics in Action, 520 pages, halftones, notes, index. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Paperback, $22.95. ISBN 9780674970915.Folk, Holly, The Religion of Chiropractic: Populist Healing from the American Heartland, 366 pp., halftones, notes, bibliography, index. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Paperback, $34.95. ISBN 9781469632797.Hannig, Anita, Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital, 256 pp., halftones, notes, references, index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Paperback, $27.50. ISBN 9780226457291.Haynes, Naomi, Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, 224 pp., illustrations, notes, references, index. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. Paperback, $34.95. ISBN 9780520294257.Ingman, Peik, Terhi Utriainen, Tuija Hovi, and Måns Broo , eds., The Relational Dynamics of Enchantment and Sacralization: Changing the Terms of the Religion Versus Secularity Debate, 292 pp., illustrations, notes, index. Sheffield: Equinox, 2016. Paperback, $29.95. ISBN 9781781794753.Jokic, Zeljko, The Living Ancestors: Shamanism, Cosmos and Cultural Change among the Yanomami of the Upper Orinoco, 296 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015. Hardback, $130.00. ISBN 9781782388173.Louis, Bertin M., Jr., My Soul Is in Haiti: Protestantism in the Haitian Diaspora of the Bahamas, 200 pp., notes, references, index. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Hardback, $75.00. ISBN 9781479809936.Robertson, David G., UFOs, Conspiracy Theories and the New Age: Millennial Conspiracism, 264 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Paperback, $35.96. ISBN 9781350044982.Rocha, Cristina, John of God: The Globalization of Brazilian Faith Healing, 288 pp., halftones, notes, references, index. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Paperback, $31.95. ISBN 9780190466718.Woodbine, Onaje X. O., Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball, 224 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Paperback, $22.00. ISBN 9780231177290.
Formal work is essential to gain legal residence in Chile and the reason why Latin American and Caribbean migrants purchase fake contracts on the black market. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with migrant Haitian women applying for work visas in Santiago, this article explores the effects of desired formality and its promises of a good life on contemporary statehood in Chile. The analysis shows how Haitian women’s efforts to become formal workers transform their experiences as racialized and gendered migrants in Chile, and impact how state institutions manage and control migration. Desired formality reveals the paradoxical character of state policies that help create a racialized and precarious labor force within its legal frameworks and explain why migrants attach themselves to fragile good-life projects in new countries.
This article examines the effects of racialization practices in quotidian encounters between migrant Haitian women looking for work and Chilean recruiters in job interviews and skills-training programs in Santiago. Drawing on ethnographic research, I show how racialized differences are made material and emotional based on a particular history of white supremacy and mestizaje. I argue that to become appropriate and hirable workers in the service economy, Haitian women transform their appearance, movements, feelings, and attitudes according to white pedagogies of affective labor. I show how the skilling of labor performed through these pedagogies is deeply affective, shaping Haitian women's sense of worth and their self-constitution as migrants beyond labor encounters. The analysis of how anti-Black racism toward migrant women perpetuates local manifestations of white-mestizo privilege reveals how affective labor and racialization practices articulate intimate experiences of transnational mobility with intersectional scripts of power.
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