Ironies of Solidarity

Bähre, Erik

doi:10.5040/9781350220867

Cited by 20 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 81 publications

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“…Values are created within social and institutional networks that create and reflect particular worldviews. 14 When people take part in particular exchanges they gain recognition and prestige but also develop other aspects of moral personhood (Bähre, 2020;Brites, 2014;Guyer, 2004;Kusimba, 2020Kusimba, , 2021Zelizer, 1995Zelizer, , 2005. For example, Diana experiences empathy for her physical, financial and emotional problems on the part of the staff at the office of the Public Defender, and that they treat her with dignity.…”

Section: Paying Attention To Incommensurabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The value of dignity: Health insurance, ethics and court cases in Brazil

Bähre

2023

Critique of Anthropology

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This article examines court cases brought by clients against private health insurance companies and against Brazil’s public health system. When clients take private health insurers to court, they successfully claim that the insurer violated their dignity, which entitles them to a moral damage payment. Similar cases against the state did not include moral damage claims. In relation to public healthcare, it is somehow not possible to equate dignity with economic value. One might conclude that the dignity of consumers in the market is worth more than that of citizens vis-à-vis the state. Instead, I argue for a more subtle approach by concentrating on the ethics of incommensurability. What legal and ethical considerations lead to such a fundamental incommensurability between personhood and economic value? How do the actors involved in court proceedings (claimants, prosecutors, judges, and insurers) perceive the differences between cases against insurance companies and against public health authorities? What can we make of the differences between the legal and everyday understandings of dignity and morality?

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Section: Paying Attention To Incommensurabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The value of dignity: Health insurance, ethics and court cases in Brazil

Bähre

2023

Critique of Anthropology

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Financialization, Solidarity, and Conflict

Bähre¹

2020

Economic Anthropology

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Wealth‐in‐people and practical rationality: Aspirations and decisions about money in South Africa

Bähre

2020

Economic Anthropology

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This article explores crucial decisions made by Sylvia, a Xhosa woman living in the townships of Cape Town, during a period of approximately thirty years. These decisions involved large sums of money and had important consequences for her own life, for those of her son and grandchild, and for the relationships she had with her first and second husbands and in-laws. Sylvia's decisions continued to be influenced by gendered ways of belonging to ancestors and descendants but also show important changes in connecting wealth and people. The wealth-in-people approach offers important insights into how Sylvia's decisions are guided by power and control over people as well as by prestige. However, it also becomes evident that the wealth-in-people approach does not sufficiently explain or theorize the agency of people. By drawing on the philosophical notion of practical rationality as a complementary analytical perspective, I explore agency in relation to aspirations and the acquisition of new open-ended values. The perspective offered by practical rationality increases our understanding of how individual decisions, especially complex decisions around money, are made because of their transformative potential and the aspiration to cultivate oneself.Drawing on Miers and Kopytoff (1977), Guyer explores the connections between self-realization, the meaning of exchange, and different political and economic hierarchies in equatorial Africa (Guyer 1993; see also Guyer 1995). Using museum collections and archival records, she analyzes how material objects in precapitalist equatorial Africa constituted personal qualities. The way objects circulated within transactional systems was part of gaining rights-in-people, often the ability to mobilize them to particular acts or to lay claim to their loyalty. These rights-in-people could then be mobilized for economic or political purposes. The wealth-in-people approach highlights that these purposes can be individual pursuits as well as collective-particularly kinship-pursuits. Such pursuits were not (only) material but also forms of self-realization that shaped personhood. This approach shows how regimes or systems of circulation increase people's status and respectability and have far-reaching implications for power dynamics within and between communities. Guyer concludes that wealth-in-people offers important insights into the "contingent cultural and political process by which, in both capitalist and non-capitalist economies, some things and some people may be realized as assets" (1993, 261; see also Guyer 1995;Guyer and Belinga 1995). By carefully examining museum collections and archival records, the wealth-in-people approach offers a comprehensive analysis of how people in precapitalist West Africa established connections between material wealth, possibilities for political mobilization, and the valuation of people.Within the wealth-in-people approach, self-realization refers to the building of personhood. It shows how people try to gain status and prestige by how they are situated...

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Ironies of Solidarity

Cited by 20 publications

References 81 publications

The value of dignity: Health insurance, ethics and court cases in Brazil

The value of dignity: Health insurance, ethics and court cases in Brazil

Financialization, Solidarity, and Conflict

Wealth‐in‐people and practical rationality: Aspirations and decisions about money in South Africa

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