Reassembling and Cutting the Social with Health Insurance

Abstract

By rescuing an obscure and almost forgotten parliamentary controversy in Chile, this article shows how private property and solidarity cohabit in health insurance. To do so, it follows both pragmatist sociology, where controversies are seen as situations in which social formations are questioned and reconfigured, and recent economic sociology, studying how marketisation might help in assembling and not only destroying social bonds. Simultaneously, this work departs from these influences in three directions. It deals with two ways of assembling the social, solidarity and property, which have remained overlooked in the proximate literature. Rather than a detailed ethnographic description, it works analogically, eliciting new interpretations of the empirical material by pairing the social scientific concepts mobilised in the studied controversy with the conceptual tools developed in recent social sciences. And, by analysing a parliamentary controversy regarding insurance, it complements recent work that is starting to study how finance commodities are enacted not only in traditional market encounters but also in a varied array of collateral sites, including courts, social policy and regulation controversies.

KEYWORDS:

• insurance
• solidarity
• property
• biopolitics
• marketisation
• Chile

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research has been funded by the Beca Presidente de la República from the Government of Chile, the Central Research Fund awarded by the University of London, and Universidad Diego Portales. Early versions of this work were presented at the conferences Rethinking Economic Anthropology, LSE – SOAS and III Jornadas de Estudios Sociales de la Economía, IDAES, Buenos Aires. The author is grateful for comments and suggestions provided by Keith Hart, Scott Lash, Celia Lury, Liz McFall, David Stark and the thorough criticism given by the editors of this special issue and two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. For a small sample of a vast literature, see Fischer (2009), Fourcade-Gourihnchas and Babb (2002) and Gárate (2012).

2. The parliament acts available for consultation in Chile are not a literal transcript of the sessions, but they are documents narrated in the third person.

3. For instance, the act reads:

Health constitutes an area that should avoid the application of the same principles applied to the rest of the economy, and he [a senator] regretted that the current model is not reconciled with a solidary health system inspired by epidemiological criteria. (Senado 2004, p. 75)

4. It is worth reminding that in this context the word ‘technologies’ has a specific meaning. Consider, for instance, Rose's definition:

I use the term ‘technologies’ here to refer to the assemblage of social and human relations, hybrids of knowledge, instruments, persons, systems of judgments, building and spaces, structured by a practical rationality governed by a more or less conscious goal, and underpinned by certain assumptions about human beings. (Rose 2007, p. 8)