Following the end of apartheid in 1994, financial services and insurance companies increasingly targeted their products to previously ignored and predominantly poor Africans in South Africa. Erik Bähre’s Ironies of Solidarity: insurance and financialization of kinship in South Africa provides a powerful ethnographic account of the expansion of insurance, and its impacts on solidarities at the family, neighbourhood and state levels. This work builds on manifold ethnographic material collected primarily in one of the world’s most violent and unequal places, Indawo Yoxolo, a squatter camp in Cape Town, supplemented by popular music and survey data. Bähre mobilizes Richard Rorty’s philosophical approach to irony in an attempt to reveal contradictions embedded within insurance, whereby ‘you say one thing, but mean the exact opposite’ (p. 3). Rorty used the term ‘irony’ to explore the contingency of morality and the public–private divide. ‘The irony of solidarity,’ for Bähre, ‘means that people and societies help mitigate and overcome adversities, while simultaneously producing new forms of exclusion and suffering’ (p. 24).
Indeed, the book demonstrates how insurance both frees individuals from social obligations and refashions old ones, creating new tensions and conflicts, fear and distrust. In the early years of democratization, the African National Congress (ANC) government pursued racial equality and social justice, making the equal distribution of public services, such as social grants, its primary task and attempting to ensure control over resources and markets rather than ‘liberating’ them from state control. Yet, despite such democratization policies, apartheid-created tensions and inequalities were reproduced in contemporary South Africa. In the book, insurance is situated within classical economic anthropological discussions of gifts, focusing on the aggressive, violent side to them. Rather than drawing on abstract economic models such as neoliberalism, the book shows the messy, lived reality of those who must navigate between the oppressive and liberating characteristics of the financialization of social relations. Thus, this book contributes to a growing body of scholarship that breaks down unnecessary dichotomies that serve to emphasize social relations as warm and caring and economic and markets as cold and coercive. Ultimately, this book offers an exceptional account of the interdependency and co-constitution of the state, market and kinship.
Irony in solidarity is examined through multiple empirical cases, shedding light on the actual workings of and interaction between insurance actuaries, sales agents, local insurance brokers and their clients. These empirical cases illustrate how insurance companies in post-apartheid South Africa have established markets in low-income townships, deploying insurance classification schemes that mask and reproduce racialized inequalities and exclusion, rather than mitigating them. To make insurance affordable for the poor yet profitable for companies, insurance companies reduce their operational costs by outsourcing the risks to local brokers or intermediary institutions, such as churches and burial societies. This results in social anxiety as brokers target their uncertain businesses to their friends, colleagues and relatives, who live in hand-to-mouth economic conditions, making them fear for the future. In vulnerable conditions, ‘when life is insured, death seems more likely’ (p. 140); this is illustrated by ruthless cases where people insure others only to kill them to claim reimbursements. Bähre states that, ‘when there is no relationship between people, even the most fundamental human values can be ignored’ (p. 148). Consequently, people might avoid funeral and life insurance policies that are potentially life-threatening.
Ironically, despite bad experiences with insurance companies and burial services, some people do take out life insurance policies. Revisiting the Weberian iron cage, impersonal bureaucracy is redefined not just as cruel and dehumanizing, but also as potentially emancipating and caring. Life insurance lingers as attractive because of its power to escape unwanted sociality, constituting a private contract between the insurance company and the individual client.
While the term ‘irony’ is skilfully used to comprehend ‘the contradictory ethnographic evidence on how people talk about, experience, and shape insurance’ (p. 25), the author’s argument could be strengthened by clarifying the meaning of the terms ‘solidarity’ and ‘kinship’, both featured in the book’s title. While stating that ‘[i]nsurance can be understood as a form of solidarity in that people pool money in order to overcome adversity’ (p. 3), it remains unclear what exactly solidarity entails and how it differs from care, a term also frequently employed in the book. Furthermore, since the book examines a range of social networks that include but also go beyond ‘kinship’, I wondered whether the term ‘social relations’ would depict the content more suitably. Despite this criticism, Ironies of Solidarity would make a great addition to discussions in new kinship studies, which point out the coercive, darker side of kinship and care. The rich Southern African scholarship specifically emphasizes how kinship – in Africa as elsewhere – requires constant reworking and is intertwined with economic interactions and uncertainty, entailing disputes over state, non-governmental and kin-distributed resources.
Overall, this book provides a refreshing set of analytical tools and an exceptionally strong empirical account of the financialization of social relations and uncertainty, one that convincingly questions the causality between financialization, neoliberalism and inequality in South Africa. It serves as an important resource for scholars across political and economic anthropology and kinship studies, and for anyone interested in the social and economic lived realities of post-apartheid South Africa.
