Bad deaths, good funerals: The values of life insurance in New Orleans

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between the value of money and the value of human life as it plays out in the financing of funeral ceremonies. It examines how these values are articulated through life insurance policies concerning violent deaths of working-class black Americans in New Orleans. The article draws on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork (2017–18) in New Orleans, which included participant observation at a black-owned funeral home and interviews with funeral directors, policyholders, and beneficiaries. By examining the role of life insurance policies in arranging good funerals after bad deaths, the ethnographic analysis demonstrates how life insurance policies are consumed and can produce value at a moment of loss. It explores the paradox that an insurance policy can at once become a resource for the affirmation of human value and a financial risk in itself.