Seguros para os pobres: ironias da financeirização da pobreza na África do Sul

Abstract

This text makes a Bibliographical Critique of the book "Ironies of Solidarity: Insurance and Financialization of Kinship in South Africa", written by the Dutch anthropologist Erik Bähre and published in 2020. The book brings an original reflection on the processes of financialisation of everyday life and poverty in the so-called Global South. The sensitive ethnography, conducted in Cape Town, shifts assumptions and brings a relevant contribution to social studies of the economy and the relations between moralities and markets. More than that, it brings relevant insights and methodological propositions for an approach to global financial capitalism based on the contradictions and ironies produced in people's daily lives. The book draws attention to how insurance, especially in its form marketed by large financial institutions, is a type of solidarity distinct from the forms usually studied by anthropologists. Anthropological theory has devoted itself more thoroughly to the study of community forms of solidarity and usually apprehends "the market" or "neoliberalism" as a force that corrupts the spheres of intimacy and personal ties. The book allows us to develop more sophisticated strategies for understanding such social processes from an anthropological approach.