CU Boulder Department of Anthropology Colloquium

The quest for “ground truths”: Paraguayan disaster insurance and histories of political surveillance

Dr. Caroline Schuster

Associate Professor, School of Archaeology and Anthropology

Australian National University

Date: Friday, November 14

Time: 4-5:30pm

Location: Hale 230

This talk probes “ground truth” in parametric weather insurance schemes in rural Paraguay. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with sesame growers in San Pedro, I challenge conventional understandings of calculative devices as tools that abstract financial processes from their environments. Instead, I track how two competing insurance programs in San Pedro are deeply embedded in Paraguay’s political history of surveillance and agrarian transformation under the militarised Stroessner regime (1954-89). While algorithmic systems are commonly understood as “black-boxed” technical abstractions, I explore how establishing ground truths for weather models involves complex negotiations of growth, yield, and purity parameters that structure value creation between farmers, insurers, and climate data. By documenting how ground truth constantly ‘shimmers,’ being re-tuned to unruly materialities and political histories, I propose a framework for understanding climate finance and insurance not as remote calculation but as relational forms of perception and value-making entangled with the sociopolitical worlds they claim to merely observe.