Risk and Trust Negotiation: A Critical Intercultural Communication Study on Life Insurance Adoption Among Civil Servants at Universitas Tanjungpura Pontianak

This study critically examines how life insurance is negotiated in the everyday lives of Indonesian civil servants (Aparatur Sipil Negara/ASN) at the intersection of state rationality, market forces, and local cultural worldviews. Within a postcolonial context, life insurance is understood not merely as a financial instrument but as a discursive mechanism through which neoliberal ideas of individual responsibility, risk management, and future security are normalized. Tensions emerge when actuarial rationality encounters culturally embedded understandings of fate (takdir), sustenance (rezeki), and collective solidarity. Using a critical qualitative approach, this study draws on in-depth interviews with 20 ASN from urban, semi-urban, and rural settings at Universitas Tanjungpura Pontianak. Fairclough’s (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis is employed to explore how power, ideology, and meaning are constructed and negotiated within insurance-related narratives. The findings reveal four major themes: (1) risk is interpreted through local cosmologies that challenge universalized neoliberal assumptions; (2) ASN participants embody epistemic hybridity, simultaneously acting as agents of modernization and cultural subjects; (3) life insurance reflects the commodification of life, death, and uncertainty within postcolonial capitalist structures; and (4) everyday financial practices function as forms of symbolic resistance to global financial hegemony. The study also finds that culturally rooted alternatives, including cooperatives, arisan, and Dayak Credit Unions, remain trusted mechanisms of social protection. The study concludes that life insurance adoption is shaped not only by economic rationality but also by cultural values, social experiences, institutional trust, and communicative negotiations, underscoring the importance of culturally sensitive approaches in financial inclusion and public financial education policies.