Politics of Pools
Wealth and Insurance under the Doctrine of Actuarial Fairness
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2230545 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Caroline E Schuster (0000-0003-4229-2921, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 66 |
| Issue | S27 |
| Pages | S71-S82 |
| Publication date | 2025-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Current Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/734572 |
| OpenAlex | W4411482679 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 36 |
Anthropology has long considered the social institutions that pool and redistribute wealth through various forms of reciprocity. In Paraguay, state-sponsored life insurance for poor communities on the receiving end of conditional cash-transfer entitlements reveals the battles over managing pools (both risks and resources) and the contested morality of fairness attached to them. This article argues that studying the politics of pools allows us to see the historically grounded relationship between kinship, financial capitalism, and the asset form. Microinsurance in Paraguay reveals how an idea of “fairness” is used to define the risk pool, but it has been successfully stripped from wealth pools. What might this imply for a distinctively anthropological approach to a politics of pooling, one that can articulate alternative social models of fairness?
Geography · Political science · Politics · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Political Economy and Marxism
Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange
How Our Days Became Numbered
The Challenge of Common-Pool Resources
Assetization
Comment On “The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone”
The Ideological Effects of Actuarial Practices
The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone
Strong Reservations about “New Insights into the Demographics of the Paraguayan War”
Fire Watchers
The Science of Difference
International financial subordination
The Hierarchies of Global Finance
Enacting Actuarial Fairness in Insurance
Total life insurance
Refining the Numbers
Outlaw Capital
The “Lincolnshire Farmers” In Paraguay
Ironies of Solidarity
Risky Data' for Inclusive Microinsurance Infrastructures
Primitive Accumulation, Mafia Capitalism, and the Campesino Population in Paraguay
Saving capitalism from empire
The Collateralization of Social Policy under Financialized Capitalism
Guerrilla Auditors
Foreign Capital, Economic Elites and the State in Paraguay during the Liberal Republic (1870-1936)
Producing Culture and Capital
A political anthropology of finance
Agribusiness, peasants, left-wing governments, and the state in Latin America
Between Gender and Kinship
Bridges to cash
Compounding financial frontiers
It is easy for women to ask
Hearthholds of mobile money in western Kenya
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |