Paper short abstract:

The paper focus on the Brazilian insurance industry to analyse how the monetized uncertainty and, in turn, the protection selled by the insurance companies, both become valuable commodities, central to governing the future and calculating risks.

Paper long abstract:

The anthropology of finance has already taught us that instability and crisis characterize the culture of the global financial market elites. Over the past two decades, social scientists concerned with the advances of neoliberalism have drawn attention to processes of "economization of uncertainty" central to the reproduction of global financial capitalism. There are two sides to these processes. On the one hand, there are a whole series of technical and political apparatuses aimed at reducing uncertainty and selling security (insurance policies and risk management technologies, etc.). On the other hand, and at the same time, social studies of the financial sector have pointed to a reverse side of statistical risk and probability technologies that are concerned not only with reducing uncertainties, but also with creating earnings opportunities in the uncertain future. With a certain level of control, it is desirable to assume risks for future gains. From the perspective of sectors of the Brazilian financial elites, it is the tension between managing risks and taking risks that is on the agenda. From data produced in ethnographic research on the Brazilian insurance market, a market that is precisely on the frontier of these perspectives, I see how the monetized uncertainty and, in turn, the security of the protection markets, both become valuable commodities. In this context, both the calculation of risk and the protection markets that sell security gain even more prominence and expand into new zones of accumulation.