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Picturing How Life Insurance Matters

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  • Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen

Abstract

What kind of object is private life insurance? To discuss this question, this article examines how life insurance is pictured, that is, explained and concretized with words and visual images, in the promotion of private life insurance in Finland between 1945 and 2000. In principle, life insurance can only be used for assessing and securing the economic value of life. The empirical material shows, however, that life insurance, as an object, can only exist if economic value and other values constantly overflow into each other, and calculation and affect are made to intertwine. In order to objectify their potential customers' lives as economic potential, as commodities, insurance companies have indeed had to objectify life - yet not only in terms of monetary value, but simultaneously and as importantly, also as something that is irreducible to monetary value. Hence the promotion of life insurance enacts a double stabilization of objects. On the one hand, advertisements and leaflets show how life insurance matters, what it is capable of, and thus stabilize the understanding of insurance itself as a tool. On the other hand, the promotional materials both stabilize and mobilize 'life' as an assemblage of heterogeneous practices and modes of valuation that is irreducible to economic potential.

Suggested Citation

  • Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, 2014. "Picturing How Life Insurance Matters," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 7(3), pages 308-333, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jculte:v:7:y:2014:i:3:p:308-333
    DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2013.869503
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Donald Mackenzie & Fabian Muniesa & Lucia Siu, 2007. "Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics," Post-Print halshs-00149145, HAL.
    2. Lucien Karpik, 2010. "Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 9215.
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    4. Donald MacKenzie & Fabian Muniesa & Lucia Siu, 2007. "Introduction to Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics," Introductory Chapters, in: Donald MacKenzie & Fabian Muniesa & Lucia Siu (ed.),Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, Princeton University Press.
    5. McFall, Liz, 2014. "Devising Consumption: cultural economies of insurance, credit and spending," OSF Preprints at2nv, Center for Open Science.
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    Cited by:

    1. Kar, Sohini, 2023. "Domestic values: gendered labor and the uncanniness of critique in marketing life insurance for women," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 120591, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

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