Insurance: using anthropology of finance to study disaster relief

This project aims to broaden and re-theorize economic definitions of insurance through an innovative combination of ethnographic methodologies and feminist studies of finance. Using responses to weather disasters and the financial products created to cover them, the project will explore cultural understandings of protection and damage through a Latin American case that foregrounds experimental and emerging adaptation. In doing so, the research will open significant new directions in the anthropological study of poverty and contemporary capitalism, as well as provide working frameworks to understand how financial services can engage meaningfully with communities impacted by our ever more uncertain weather.