Erik Bähre is Associate Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University, Netherlands. He is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Project Moralising Misfortune: A Comparative Anthropology of Commercial Insurance and author of Money and Violence: Financial Self-Help Groups in a South African Township.
'This is a critically important book that opens the door to what the author refers to as a conceptual space for exploring how suffering is at home within social relations and how this is central to people's interest in the abstract form of solidarity offered by large scale bureaucratic companies. The book warns us against nostalgic notions of social relationships as inherently good and caring, and the market and money as polluting this imagined paradise. Life is much more complex. This book should be required reading for every student of society, especially anthropologists in the 21st century.'Mamphela Ramphele