Financialization and Its Discontents: Israelis Negotiating Pensions

Abstract

Anthropologists have long been studying how people deal with risks and uncertainties and resist those that prove too punishing. They provide the bearings for a distinctly anthropological intervention into a key feature of financialization: the insinuation of finance, and of financial risk management, into household economics. I undertake such a project here through an ethnography of pension practices in Israel. I argue that people's perceived irrationality in their dealings with their insurers is in fact meaningful discontent. People expect to be protected insofar as they act responsibly as savers and citizens. Against this expectation, they are made to bear the risks of financial markets whose growth is won at their expense. I argue further that their discontent is depoliticized when they act from their positions as consumers rather than citizens. Negotiations within this framework deflect attention from the relationship of finance to exploitation.