Paper short abstract:

Maintaining life insurance is a financial practice oriented towards future death that can conflict with the need to sustain life in the present. This paper explores how home service insurance agents in New Orleans perform temporal work to ensure coverage in economically precarious neighborhoods.

Paper long abstract:

Buying and maintaining life insurance policies is a financial practice oriented towards future death that can conflict with the need to sustain life in the present. This is especially the case with home service life insurance, the door-to-door sale and monthly collection of premiums towards small policies that is popular among working-class black Americans. In this paper, I analyze the everyday work that insurance agents do in the operations of the home service market of the life insurance industry in New Orleans, USA, where I conducted ten months of ethnographic fieldwork (2017-2018). I focus on the ways that insurance agents attempt to time their collections in the low-income neighborhoods they service. They use strategies that include the anticipation of exact moments in which individual policyholders obtain money and practices of time-tricking (Moroşanu and Ringel 2016) that bring future money into the present (e.g., using post-dated checks). I argue that insurance agents thus perform temporal labor to make sure their customers mobilize scarce money in the present to pay their insurance, which protects them from the financial costs incurred at death whenever it may strike. The paper contributes to the growing scholarship in the social studies of finance that explores how financial technologies shape conceptions of temporality. Moving away from a focus on financial elites that characterizes this body of literature (Kar 2018), I analyze the intimate and mundane temporal labor of insurance agents necessary for the functioning of life insurance under conditions of economic precarity.