What if the worst happened? Life insurance in London as a two faced technology

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(1)Article. What if the worst happened? Life insurance in London as a two-faced technology. Journal of Consumer Culture 2018, Vol. 18(1) 43–59 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1469540515623610 journals.sagepub.com/home/joc. Sofı́a Ugarte Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile. Abstract 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. Keywords Life insurance, care, governmentality, risk. Corresponding author: Sofı́a Ugarte, Programa de Antropologı́a, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Macul, Casilla 306, Correo 22, Santiago, Chile. Email: asugarte@uc.cl.

(2) 44. Journal of Consumer Culture 18(1). Introduction Susan is a 50-year-old woman, married to a businessman and mother of two 20-year-old men; she lives with her family in a house in Clapham, South London, and for 10 years, she paid a life insurance policy. Susan and her family moved away from their hometown in the North of England, and away from her extended family years ago, travelling all around Europe due to her husband’s job. They have arrived in London more than 15 years ago. She worked as a volunteer in a children’s hospital and at home raising her children. With her husband constantly travelling abroad for work and far away from her family, she felt alone and by herself raising her two boys in the big city. The thought came to her that if she died, she did not have any backup to fill her absence when the kids were growing up. She thought that taking life insurance was a ‘Band-Aid’ to make sure that ‘if she happened to go’, the mortgage and school fees would be covered and her husband could take time off work to spend time with the kids. With life insurance, her children would not be a burden to the rest of the family because the company would financially provide for them. Like many other policyholders in London, Susan considered the premium a fee to make sure her kids had a house and could go to school no matter what happened to her. Susan remarks, We took it for the children . . . we took a life insurance for me because if anything happened to me, that would’ve been very significant. Of course, if something would’ve happened to my husband it would be significant, but I didn’t have any backup at all . . . If anything happened to me I was covered, I felt happier and more content and secure once I done that, and I never thought of it again. Until we thought years after, ‘why am I paying for this?’ and then I stopped.. Life insurance is a market device that entails a multiplicity of social and cultural phenomena of different scales and intensities that go from the global level of security, financial market flows, a more national level of withdrawal of the welfare state, to a more immediate level of intimate relationships where the nuclear family is almost always involved. This article is about life insurance in London, discussing the way policyholders and their families experience the decision-making process of buying a policy as a practice of ordinary consumption, neither highly visible nor in any way special (Gronow and Warde, 2001: 4). It will explore how this everyday practice is lived through core and intimate family relations and through kinship ties of care in order to harness the uncertainties and limits of mortality and loss. These findings contribute to the understanding of the consumption of life insurance as a significant practice that transforms Londoners’ lives beyond the actuarial rationale that explains the financial movements of the life insurance market at a macro-level, showing how real life, however uncertain, becomes integral to how Londoners value relationships of nurture, care and act out future possibilities they envisage for themselves and their close others. Moreover, it brings into discussion the relationship between kinship and economy and the ways in which the forces of global markets penetrate family ties, unmasking the technologies of power.

(3) Ugarte. 45. performed by the risk industry onto the intimacy of contemporary western families. This study 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, but also account for macro-political economic and social processes (Slater and Miller, 2007). In doing so, this study also contributes to the comprehension of the life insurance market and its specific situatedness in a contemporary neoliberal reality, extending Viviana Zelizer’s (1979) research on American life insurance in the 19th century as a cultural practice and contrasting with Bill Maurer’s (2005) ethnographic accounts of the Indonesian takaful, an Islamic life insurance that stands as a moral and ethical alternative to western insurance, and Cheris Chan’s (2011) study of the Chinese life insurance market and how it dialogues with cultural taboos rooted in folk religion and philosophy on premature death and fatal happenings. In contrast to the perspective on population, actuarial and statistical studies, and based on my findings, policyholders in London have a future that calls us to a deeper understanding of their everyday experience. In order to make a meaningful account of the consumption of life insurance policies, I selected the case of life insurance in London as a bounded field-site, an arbitrary location and an incomplete version of its complexity. This article is based primarily on 40 indepth and biographical interviews with life insurance policyholders, carried out during ethnographic fieldwork of the life insurance market in London, Great Britain. These interviews were conducted between November 2012 and July 2013, to 10 different families where one or two people had taken a policy. The ages of the interviewees range between 30 and 60 years, distributed evenly between gender (female/male) and marital status (married, divorces, single, widowed). These interviews were supplemented with content analyses of literature on the history of life insurance in Britain, the life insurance market and contemporary actuarial science. In general terms, this article examines how the consumption of life insurance in London as a multi-layered practice encompasses western contemporary values of parental care, as well as a specific relationship between the modern family and neoliberal governmental institutions. I begin with an outline of the life insurance market in London and in western developed societies. In the following section, I explore how Londoners face the existential uncertainty of death, which moves them to act in anticipatory ways in order to control and sustain across time caring relations among intimate kin. The idea is to transform the self into an immortal and virtual parent who is able to extend his or her relations. Life insurance works as a ‘technology of care’ that materially and virtually extends care between parents (guardians) and dependants beyond death and in their irreversible absence. However, insurance also shows to be a Janus-faced dispositive of neoliberal governmentality, under the privatization scheme of social security that internalizes risks in the self and the private realm of the modern family, working as a ‘technology of governance’..

(4) 46. Journal of Consumer Culture 18(1). Life insurance in London England has a long history of life insurance business since an incipient insurance market was created for overseas merchants in the 16th century. It was during the 17th century that the insurance market in England expanded its social and cultural horizons, being able to insure birth and death (Clark, 1999). Life insurance was outlawed everywhere in Europe except for England and some territories in Italy. This was due to the idea that life insurance encouraged fraud and murder, profaning the sacred sphere of human life with speculative and monetizing practices (Clark, 1999). The work of Pat O’Malley (2000, 2002, 2003) and Liz McFall (2007, 2009, 2011) is useful to understand the underpinnings of life insurance from the 19th century onwards. In Britain, the liberalism of the 19th century thought of ‘thrift’ as a moral attribute every individual should have. Insurance politics designed by liberal welfare planners transformed life insurance into a risk technology that contributed to the construction of individual and social responsibility and the moral development of the working poor, obliging factory workers of the city to have an insurance that could cover them and their families during work (O’Malley, 2002). Likewise, life insurance companies had to construct the market to sell the policies, making life insurance desirable and reliable to the public through advertising media, transforming the city of London into a commercial and financial centre (McFall and Dodsworth, 2009). The emergence of the life insurance industry, particularly in London, was one of the main developments of the Victorian economy, associated with the prudentialist culture of the Victorian liberal government (McFall and Dodsworth, 2009). According to O’Malley (2003), the relationship between thrift, risk and insurance changed over time, determined by major political transformations, uniting itself in Thatcher’s neoliberal economic policies. In the late 20th century and parallel to the privatization of risk, finance markets have become ever more central to capitalism and to managing risk (Calhoun, 2006). Nowadays, the insurance industry in the United Kingdom is the largest in Europe. In 2010, around 35% of households in Great Britain had life insurance, which meant 28.4 million policies were in force (Association of British Insurers, 2013). These numbers can be thought of as impressive considering that life insurance products are not compulsory in England nowadays. A life insurance policy is a contract a person signs in order to receive a determined amount of money upon death before a determined age. All this is calculated according to the policyholder’s age, health condition and the premium settled. If the policyholder dies unexpectedly and before a certain age, a lump sum is given to the beneficiaries who are most commonly dependants and family members. However, if the policyholder survives, the money cannot be claimed as a savings account, as it happens in other countries such as Indonesia (Maurer, 2005), China (Chan, 2011), and even the United States (Zelizer, 1979). In order to evaluate the premiums paid, the amount given to families and the risk associated with the investment, life insurance companies use actuarial science,.

(5) Ugarte. 47. which includes statistical methods to assess risk in insurance. Actuaries analyse mortality through the production of life tables, which show the probability of death of a person of every age. Ethnographic approaches are able to break open the totalizing assumptions of the life insurance industry and apprehend some of the specific ways families and personal lives are embedded and valued in larger institutional and economic arrangements. As anthropologist João Biehl (2012) has written in his research on pharmaceutical economies of care and disregard, ‘Ethnography can help us resituate and rethink social death within various familial, technological, and political economic circuits and concrete struggles over belonging, voice, and care of others and self’ (p. 247). Life insurance plays on the idea that a certain type of mortality can happen, a young and early death. It is not about the natural process of dying when you are old but about ‘that horrible thing happening tomorrow’. The precipitation of mortality makes people realize the existential problems of human finitude and the irreversibility of death. For many of the people I met in London, becoming aware of their own mortality – that is, the ‘problem’ of unexpectedly dying – came along with becoming parent, becoming adult and sometimes becoming a middle-class homeowner. The life insurance industry plays its marketing strategies highlighting that family life is full of uncertainties and that nobody can guarantee everybody will live long enough to see their kids grow up safe. Taking a policy is an emotional and sensible decision for the people I met in London because it is their way of preparing for an unexpected and early death and of economically providing for children and dependants. One of the policyholders I interviewed, an adult man in his early 60s, had decided to take life insurance 30 years ago, when he first got into post as a chaplain after having his first and only child. He felt that having an insurance policy and planning for death and its repercussions was at the time ‘what one does’. The idea behind it was the danger of suffering emotionally and financially, for his wife and child left behind after he died. For him, insurance was a way of helping people in difficult situations, by doing it with money as opposed to practical things, by making financial provision for his dependants if he were to die. Another interviewee, an extreme sports fan, a college professor in his mid-50s who got married at a mature age, took a policy after he had his first child when his wife began to think of the idea that he died and she was left alone with their child. His wife took it for him, he agreed because he thought it was the only way he could have continued climbing expeditions. Although he had experienced the death of close kin and friends, he had never thought of his own predicament until he had a child in whom he could project his own death. The precipitation of mortality may make people realize the existential problems of human finitude and the irreversibility of death. Death means the person will disappear from daily life and his or her relationships will come under threat and even vanish completely (Hallam and Hockney, 2001). Life insurance serves as a mechanism that gives peace of mind in front of this possibility. By paying monthly premiums, the policyholder assures his or her dependants will have economic stability to at least cope with his or her death. But then, why do some people get so.

(6) 48. Journal of Consumer Culture 18(1). anxious about it and why does life insurance turn into the best possible way to overcome the economic problems mortality carries? The anthropology of risk developed by Mary Douglas (1994, 1999; Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982) would suggest that the perception of the risk of dying depends on cultural factors: ‘people select their awareness of certain dangers to conform to a specific way of life, it follows that people who adhere to different forms of social organization are disposed to take (and avoid) different kinds of risk’ (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982: 9). For Douglas, risk is a contemporary strategy of Western society to deal with danger and otherness. Her explanation of the identification of risk lies on the social groups and the way they maintain boundaries between the self and others, obtaining social order and installing a blaming system to make sense of their misfortunes (Douglas’s, 1994). Following Douglas’ argument, anthropologist Pat Caplan (2000) adds that people do not make decisions around risk as isolated individuals; they talk about it with relatives, neighbours, friends and advisers, drawing upon their personal experience. A female interviewee in her late 30s, who lived in an upper-middle-class young neighbourhood in Central London, thought that taking life insurance was a ‘security’, to make sure that ‘if she happened to go’, the mortgage and school fees would be covered and her husband could take time off work to spend time with the kids; this idea was confirmed by her own mother who also had taken a life insurance policy when she was younger. With life insurance, her children would not be a burden to the rest of the family because the company would financially provide for them. For her, the premium was a fee to make sure her kids had a house and could go to school no matter what happened. Also, she felt she had been supported financially and emotionally by her parents throughout her life and life insurance was one of the ways to make certain that she would leave something behind to her children if she died young. However, life insurance companies work with ideas of risk that differ from the policyholders’ main motivations behind taking life insurance. They calculate profits on rational, statistical, archival and calculative probabilities and financial matters (Ewald, 1991). In order to calculate the premiums paid, the amount given to families and the risk associated with the investment of insurance, life insurance companies use actuaries, which are numbers based on demographical mortality tables and rates of the overall population. Also, within their calculation, they assess the behaviour of the policyholder as an individual who takes rational decisions based on incentives. Risk can be thought of as probabilities of physical harm, confined to mathematical and statistical outcomes (Beck, 2007; Boholm, 2003). Life insurance companies use what Douglas and other scholars call ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ risks (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982). When the policyholders talk about their future and what would happen ‘if I am not here anymore’, they narrate this existential condition using symbols based on a representation of life as opposed to death, drawing upon personal memories of deceased kin. The chance of dying and leaving behind children and spouses is emotionally intensified and existentially problematic, which overlaps with cultural values.

(7) Ugarte. 49. of family reproduction, care and nurture. Among some policyholders I encountered in London, the feeling of security was an effect of the decision of having life insurance because their close kin would be economically provided in case ‘anything happened’ and could be taken care of without being a burden to family and friends, forgetting the role of the state if present. An interviewee remarks the financial problems that would emerge if she or her husband, both in their early 30s and with a newly bought house in London, would die all of a sudden: If you were suddenly moved from the scenario . . . our children have grandparents far from London, and there are costs of travel, costs of education, university fees, which are most likely to be higher by that point. If you are not here to do that, it is good to cover things for when you are not there. You are your kids’ parent; you want them to be as comfortable as they possibly could be. Even though we have family, we wouldn’t like them to be a burden to them, not financially.. Life insurance as a Janus-faced technology Life insurance is more than a financial instrument or a contemporary form of investment; it is a technology that mediates, constructs and prolongs kinship ties when faced with mortality in the family. As a system of efficacious knowledge, it involves technological processes that precipitate relationships of care. This section will focus on the ways in which the practice of taking a policy stresses ideas of kinship and economic relations in contemporary society and how relationships of care among intimate kin can be extended temporally and be developed in absence. With this discussion, I wish to portray life insurance as a ‘technology of care’ that lives through kinship ties to harness the risks and limits of mortality and as a ‘technology of governance’ that shapes the subjectivities of contemporary families in neoliberal societies.. Technology of care Life insurance illuminates contemporary kinship as a product and practice of relatedness. Taking a policy can be considered a moral decision regarding the safety of nurturing relationships between parents and dependants, specifically when the parents are not there to nurture anymore, in the event ‘if anything happens’. Most of the people I interviewed during fieldwork often considered taking life insurance when they had children who depended on them so that in case they died, the ones left behind would be financially secure. This is reflected in the reasons a female interviewee in her early 40s, and mother of two kids, had when she took a life insurance policy for her and her husband: The decision to take life insurance for me was dependents, entirely to keep with mortgage and school fees, . . . If both of us are not here anymore, the children will be set up, the children will be financially provided for..

(8) 50. Journal of Consumer Culture 18(1). Londoners who take a life insurance policy are preparing themselves for an unexpected death, the young death; in the words of a male interviewee, ‘Is not about a horrible thing happening in forty or fifty years when I will actually die of a natural cause, it is about dying young’. This is for many ‘a sensitive thing to do’, or as a female interviewee in her mid-60s and already retired from work determinedly expressed, ‘what one does, what had to be done when kids are born’. The latter is in line with what a male interviewee suggested about his own death in connection to taking a policy: I don’t think about my own predicament, I think more about the other people . . . that is why I got the life insurance, I think it fits very comfortably towards an attitude to displace death to others of your family.. Hence, Londoners consider taking life insurance when they had children who depended on them, as part of their good parenting practices, so that in case they died, the ones left behind would be financially secure. Some policyholders felt complete because they were acting as a good mother or father since they had taken a policy, as if paying every month extended their parenthood for when they died. In this case, life insurance priced intimate relations between mother, father and children, rather than the life of the policyholders with their actuarial statistics. This pricing of intimate relations is clearly expressed by a female interviewee in her early 40s married to a successful lawyer, who considers her parenting skills are connected with how she manages her finances with her husband: I put a lot of importance on leaving things behind for our children. We are also in a very lucky position that we are able to afford a house, insurance, and a pension, and we can think of what will we do with our savings . . . we will leave it to them most likely. I don’t want to limit it to the finances, I want to be a role model to them, but the financial aspect is connected to that because many of my choices have been influenced by the fact that I wasn’t worried about money and that I had that security.. In accordance with the policyholders in London, the economic sociologist Viviana Zelizer (1979) develops in Morals and Markets the cultural problems of establishing monetary prices for sacred things, such as the death of children. Historically, in the United States in the 19th century, life insurance put death on the market, transgressing a system of value that sustained the sanctity of human life and defying the divisional normative between the nonmarketable sacred and the marketable profane (Zelizer, 1979). Along the transgressed system of values, life insurance came to break magical and superstitious beliefs that considered as morally apprehensible commercial pacts dependent on death. Life insurance and its marketing strategy turned into a new ritual, with distinct symbolic values putting aside its utilitarian and sacrilege logic, marketed not as a monetary investment but as an altruistic gift to kin left behind. The ritualization of life insurance, according to Zelizer, took the.

(9) Ugarte. 51. shape of a secular ritual, required by the ‘good death’, as a form of economic immortality (Zelizer, 2011). A good death meant economic provision for dependants after the breadwinner had passed away; new social forms of immortality replaced religious beliefs and emphasized remembrance through money (Zelizer, 2011). In the case of contemporary London, life insurance policies are means for caring in intimate family ties, fulfilling the desire of a transcendent relationship of care that overcomes death. A couple, who I interviewed several times, never considered having a life insurance policy before they had a daughter 2 years ago. They were a young married couple in their early 30s, and both of their parents were still alive and they had plenty of brothers and sisters who could take care of their child in case they both died. They had not taken a life insurance policy before because, according to them, they didn’t have what they called ‘a sense of mortality’. Nobody in their immediate family or friends had died before, so they felt they were sheltered from death. As one of the youngest interviewees in his early 30s and working independently as a commercial producer says, ‘we were so young and we didn’t think we were going to die, obviously we were incorrect. It seemed so remote, but also, we didn’t have any deaths around’. Interestingly, it was the sales agent of the new house they bought who talked them into the idea that they were mortal, who was keen enough in letting them know that although they were young and healthy now, the feeling of security that their little girl was protected ‘if anything happened’ was priceless. The words of the salesman resonated to both of them because it coincided with the death of a grandparent in the family, which, according to them, it really disrupted family life, not that we resent it. It was before death, there was all the caring that changed daily life . . . it was exhausting and emotionally draining. After that, we thought of the idea that we didn’t want to be a burden on our children.. So to speak, life insurance in London and what it means for most of the insured people I met contribute to the understanding of life insurance as an ‘economy of absence’, giving security and certainty and opening the possibility to establish caring relationships between the dead and the living. With a life insurance policy, intimate relations may be enacted in absence, turning care into a parenting practice that surpasses spatial and temporal presentness. With its ‘ability to act at a distance’, life insurance introduces a temporal dimension in the relationship of care and nurture within intimate kin ties, delocalizing and extending care to different and unknown others, including the sales agents, but also the banks, insurance companies and even the financial market. This is important as it shows pragmatically how life insurance can actually give security and comfort after death and what it means for the desired continuity of caring and nurturing relationships between parents (guardians) and children. A life insurance claim translates into money given to the designated beneficiaries, which is supposed to give peace of mind, a sense of security and material aid when coping for the death of the policyholder..

(10) 52. Journal of Consumer Culture 18(1). At the same time, Londoners who take a policy to secure their intimate caring relationships with their dependants after death do not visualize the money they will receive ‘if’ they die, but rather the peace of mind they get is based on a figure in a contract and the monthly payments. A male interviewee in his early 40s with a postgraduate degree explains in relation to the economic decision and how it affects everyday life: In the end of the day is not much money you are paying every month, so it is kind of why I ended up having it. A lot of people have it because, who knows what is going to happen, and it is a small price to pay for a peace of mind.. Life insurance policies translate the premium and the lump sum, not into ‘what is needed’ to care for your loved ones if you die, but into ‘how much’ in terms of a monetary value that depends on actuarial science and premiums that are paid each month. The mechanism the life insurance industry in London has in order to appear as an economic benefit rather than major financial cost to the families is through payment with direct debit, which makes the policyholders even forget they have life insurance on their daily basis. This is reflected on what a female interviewee, divorced and in her mid-40s, pointed out about how life insurance is not perceived as a routine economic practice: Once the decision of having life insurance was made, we forgot about it, it became part of our monthly costs. We set it up in direct debit so although it is part of our income, it is gone before we see it, we don’t see it, and so we don’t feel it anymore.. Life insurance allows families in London to ‘keep going while they are coping’, when one (or both) of the parents dies young while still having dependants, a school fee to pay or a mortgage. This means that taking a policy is an economic transaction where the one who pays does not get anything in return while he or she is alive. This is clearly shown by a female interviewee in her 50s, who gives different reasons why buying life insurance seems a sensitive thing to do if one is to think of dying suddenly: Taking the policy was kind to make sure, if we needed the space if I happened to go, that my husband would be able to take time off to be with the children and keep paying the mortgage, and things like that. Largely, it was to make me sure that if anything happened, we were covered. And also, that if we left, the children would be set up, and that was the primary motivator for having it, because we don’t do anything particularly dangerous in our lives.. Moreover, the life insurance contract is a form of extended reciprocal exchange within the family, where the giver is supposed to get a reward in the name of the close kin he or she named as claimants of the policy. This exchange is part of a family relationship in which care and nurture by the policyholder are replaced by a.

(11) Ugarte. 53. lump sum when the policyholder dies, an ‘event’ that can happen anytime soon. As a male policyholder asserts when asked what he thinks of life insurance, To my mind it is really about making financial provision for one’s dependents if you die. Insurance really is about helping a family found in a difficult situation, by doing it with money as opposed to practical things. It is a way people do to help one another, at the level of money.. Policies fulfil the desire of an infinite relationship of care that overcomes the death of the breadwinner. The withdrawal of universal social security, and the privatization of security in the family and the individual consumer in contemporary neoliberal society, positions private life insurance as a constructive resource of certainty among kin ties. In a sense, care is diffused in private consumer devices, shaping particular family relationships over time. Temporal extension and contractual obligation play a part in the channelling of mortality and loss into resourceful relationships in contemporary society. Life insurance gives security and certainty of post-mortem reciprocity establishing caring relationships accordingly; with a life insurance policy, intimate relations may be enacted in absence. In this sense, death poses other problems different from distance of kin because ‘irreversible’ death can be considered an extreme form of alterity, posing questions on how to recognize these relations as significant (Strathern, 1992, 2005).. Technology of governance Life insurance is not only an economic device that plays with the limits of intimate kin relationships of care and nurture, it is a political technology as well. The different layers life insurance in London takes, from the insured to the agents and the brokers, show how people who take life insurance are entangled in a privatized system of care regulated by the market. This is tuned with what has been discussed on governmentality and the biopolitics of insurance in contemporary society. Insurance in contemporary society can be thought of as a ‘technology of governance’, a moral technology that defines how people act, focusing on the regulation and moral assessments of the people and the harms involved (Ericson et al., 2003). This form of governance is also lived by the life insurance policyholders in London, in their intimate realm of family life and their experience of personal consumer decisions behind taking a policy. In the life insurance market in London, care is diffused in private consumer devices, shaping particular family relationships over time. Nonetheless, the limits of care are discovered in the core of institutional relationships between the family and the overall privatized welfare system, where each nuclear family is responsible for their own protection and provision. From the point of view of most of the policyholders who had children, taking a life insurance was a privileged mechanism to assume the responsibility of providing for their own family without the help of.

(12) 54. Journal of Consumer Culture 18(1). anybody else. The idea of ‘not being a burden’ encompasses the idea of life insurance as a device that detaches the families from wider political institutions. This coexists with the reductions of government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and in the everyday lives of its citizens. Since Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s, social institutions have been changed into neoliberal economic consumer devices, limiting welfare protection and privatizing risk, weakening the provision of public goods (Harvey, 2005). Neoliberalism, as a mode of political rationality, extends market values to all institutions and social actors, turning citizens into ‘clients’ and ‘consumers’ of public goods (Brown, 2003). The extension of economic principles to non-economic realms of human life has convened ‘free’ subjects figuring rational and calculating individuals whose moral autonomy can be measured by their capacity for ‘self-care’ (Brown, 2003). Following Nikolas Rose’s (1990) work on contemporary forms of governmentality, the new technologies of citizenship formation use consumption as a technique to commit subjects to values because consumer choices – that is, the buying of life insurance policies in this case – must be experienced and justified as personal desires. In the case of the policyholders I interviewed in London, this personal desire was also a normalized consumer practice, a non-problematic choice that allowed them to complete their duties as adults, as parents and as homeowners in London. As a male interviewee in his early 60s explains on his choice of taking a policy, It was a choice, nobody forces you to take life insurance, but there are choices and choices. I felt at the time ‘this is what one does’, a measurement of maturity. The sales person reinforced the notion of ‘this is what one does’. It was just what we did, the question was how much money and who to do it with.. In contrast, another interviewee was more critical about this choice as he portrayed it as something characteristic of middle-class families: People just behave like flocks of sheep, and they take what has become fashionable or what has become a normal practice in a certain class, in this case, as middle-class. Everybody does a little bit of reading; everybody persuades themselves that they understand. But actually, when it comes down to it, they may understand but they don’t know very much, they just do it for no reason.. Taking a life insurance policy is not only a non-problematic and normalized personal desire but also a process of physical subjectification, where every policyholder is a subject with an associated risk of dying, according the their age, gender, family genetics and habits. Through actuarial science, this risk is translated into a monetary figure, which is paid through premiums and translated into a sum of money to be received if the policyholder dies before a determined age. As it happened to a.

(13) Ugarte. 55. female interviewee and her husband, both in their 40s, working in financial consultancy and with a small kid, who had to be submitted to a thorough medical exam, My husband and I had to have a medical check, have our blood tested, and take hair samples by a doctor who tested people for insurance purposes. I don’t know if it is because we used to be smokers, and we ski a lot during winter brakes. Also, the people of the company put the fear on you of not being absolutely honest with all this medical stuff.. The medical examination, along with the calculation of premiums, turns life insurance into a consumer device that shapes governable subjectivities. Insurance creates what Geeta Patel (2006, 2007) calls ‘risky subjects’. With insurance people turn their lives and deaths into some sort of ‘investment’, imbricating with financial instruments; ‘the self is a property owner converted into a risk bearer, someone who shares a risk profile with others’ (Patel, 2006: 44). The person insured becomes an enterprise, a capitalization, a self-investment through the mitigation of risks related to health, work, accidents, illness, unemployment and death (Patel, 2007). This is clearly shown when a male interviewee narrates the bureaucratic process of taking a life insurance and what he thought of it: I remember going to a medical exam and having to pay for it, and I didn’t even knew what was going on. The doctor got paid I think by the insurance company. I don’t remember filling a form or not, maybe the salesman filled a form for us, he used to come here and ask us a lot of questions. My rationale was that, I guess, if insurance companies are correctly assessing the risks of things, they add up and calculate how much is that risk and they then are adding a premium on top of it because they are trying to be profitable.. Moreover, the life insurance industry establishes its costs and benefits in actuaries, which use demographic statistics of populations to assess risk in insurance. In this sense, actuaries are a powerful indicator on the politics of life (Fassin, 2009). Age, race, gender and individual risk factors turn into social and economic realities that impact the process of dying, transforming it into powerful scientific representations (Biehl, 2005). Among the policyholders I met in London, there was the generalized idea that if they were younger and healthier, they would be paying cheaper premiums each month, or their dependants would receive more money if they happened to die. This cost–benefit analysis done by the policyholders themselves encompasses a schema of political, economic and demographic rationality, transforming the lives of individuals, making persons speculate with their own pain, injury, disease or death, making insurance operate as a ‘technology of risk’ (Ewald, 1991). As a technology of risk, insurance transforms the lives of individuals, by insuring the capital associated with those lives and lifestyle, transforming the.

(14) 56. Journal of Consumer Culture 18(1). perception of their own bodies, habits and biographies. A male policyholder in his mid-40s says, It is financially prudent to have life insurance, but also it is so wind up with emotional things. There is something about life insurance, the name and the role it plays in society, and that it is going to take care of whoever is left over.. His statements are in accordance with the positioning of private life insurance as a constructive resource for certainty and care inside the family, the withdrawal of universal social security and the privatization of risk. The lives of the policyholders I met in London are entangled with large-scale processes of neoliberal contemporary society, transforming family ties, values and roles. As a technology of governance, life insurance creates new moral tenets of what it means ‘to take good care of your loved ones’ and normalizes the domestic sphere of the household through affects that circulate between the home, the (absent) state and the market (Das et al., 2008). A female interviewee, divorced and mother of two kids, comments, I don’t think it is necessarily evil, it’s just necessary common sense and especially if you want to protect the people you are leaving behind, your children. In my case, you don’t want them to be left with a financial burden or worries.. The works of the market and neoliberal political economy are then lived through relations within the family because forces of the market are not abstract values that come from somewhere else; rather, the devices of the market – such as life insurance in this case – become resources for care, and governance, among intimate kin, configuring intimate relations contemporary neoliberal families.. Conclusion Life insurance, as an economic device and a monetary benefit, creates the sense of security and continuity in front of death, rupture and loss. It turns into a technology that will bind the deceased with his or her intimate kin, connecting them across temporal distance and becoming a monetary presence in the lives of who were supposed to be taken care of. The sudden awareness of mortality makes Londoners realize they can die unexpectedly, disappearing from daily life and threatening or even vanishing their intimate kin relations. The chance of dying and leaving behind children and spouses is emotionally intense and existentially problematic, becoming an uncertainty that families have to control. This sense of mortality overlaps with cultural values of family reproduction, care and nurture, elevating itself into a feeling of insecurity that is emotionally unbearable for many. Taking a life insurance policy gives security to people in London because it provides for economic aid in case he or she dies, allowing the caring relation between parent (guardian) and dependant to survive the loss and subsist in the future. Thus, having a policy is a.

(15) Ugarte. 57. future-oriented practice whose narrative transforms the experience of intimate kin relations in London. Life insurance gives the certainty of a reciprocal exchange after death, establishing caring bonds that enable intimate relations to be enacted in absence. Care systems can be understood in different scales, from the intimate family level to the institutional and political realm, and the domestic sphere can be understood as a multi-layered modality. Life insurance’s different layers, the insured, the agents, the brokers, show that people’s intimate dynamics among the family are crossed by private systems of care regulated by the market. Transnational neoliberal economy and state welfare withdrawal are scaled down – or rather into – the lives of middle-class families in London; their policies and abstract value market become resources for caring, even after death. In a sense, life insurance as a technology opens up the possibilities of family assemblages, in the context of vanishing welfare institutions, which can mutate our thinking of the political in the domestic sphere and intimate relations. What the governmentality theories have failed to account for when addressing life insurance as a ‘technology’ is the way these economic and political assemblages live through intimate kin, being constitutive of care relations as well as forms of subjectification and control. The ethnographic approximation to the life insurance market points to the concrete ways and in the name of which morals, policyholders use life insurance, and how it can be understood as a significant consumption practice. In this sense, life insurance is a Janus-faced consumer device for caring and nurture, for subjectification and governance, presenting itself in complementary and not contradictory ways. It is both a ‘technology of care’ and a ‘technology of governance’ transforming the finite and mortal ties of family members into infinite relationships of care into and moral economy of absence, as well as informing the specific and embodied situatedness of a contemporary neoliberal reality. Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr Allen Abramson and Eduardo Wiegand for their support in conceptualizing this research, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback on earlier versions of this article.. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.. Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.. References Association of British Insurers (2013) Insurance industry statistics. Available at: https:// www.abi.org.uk/ (accessed 28 June 2013)..

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