ABSTRACT
The main argument of this chapter is that micro-insurance is a form of prospecting; a practice in search of novel kinds of value. This is of particular importance for the large global populations who are without any access to basic formalized risk management or insurance schemes. This chapter proceeds in three steps. A first section notes, insurance is a practice which historically has occupied a unique cultural economy a practice that entailed a new culture emphasizing the future not as something governed by chance or fortune but as a field of risks that could be instrumentalized in calculative form. A second section moves to the intimate scale of everyday practices by emphasizing the preoccupation of micro-insurers with a certain kind of cultural or behavioural or psychological change. A third section turns to micro-insurance as a recent set of experiments in converting those who live on the very edges of the financial system into insurable and fungible assets.
