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Our Risk Society

Our Risk Society:  Social Anthropological Reflections

Frederick C. Gamst 

Paper:  FCG-W-03-1, hour-presentation, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Wyoming, 12.5.03    

1. Opening Reflections:

In this presentation, we reflect on the world risk society in which, willy-nilly, we are all immersed or, better perhaps, ensnared.  In the reflections, we look at the ways in which risk is assessed, and, in so doing, we use the anthropologists' ur-concept of culture and holistic/systemic method.

As Niklas Luhmann explains in his intriguing “Die Moral des Riskios und das Risiko der Moral,” most risk in preindustrial societies is not controllable and not caused by organizational decisions (1993, 1995).  Preindustrial risk includes drought, flooding, tectonic disturbances, change in migratory patterns of animals, and microbiological infestations.  Often supernatural causes are invoked to explain the hazards.  Accordingly, little political consideration obtained in the reaction to a realized hazard.  In modern societies, most risks are engendered by organizational and regulatory decisions and considerations of utility, the ability to satisfy needs or wants.  New risks come from introduction of new labor-saving and materials-saving technologies.  Because of the organizational roots of the decisions, including those in regulatory agencies, the issues of social accountability arise.  Modern risk, then, necessarily has an underlying political dimension.  This dimension means that risk and its assessment is to some extent negotiated.  

In our modern society, assessments of risk and consequent judgments for action regarding what is deemed risk are a wielding of power affecting our everyday lives (and perhaps risk-acceptable deaths).  In modern society, regulatory agencies are charged with protecting us from risks.  Steven Rayner reacts with a sociocultural view:  "[B]ureaucratic agencies involved in regulating hazardous technologies have not risen up against cultural theory, despite the fact that it exposes much of their risk assessment technique as legitimatory ritual  . . . rather than the neutral science they  pretend it to be"  (Rayner 1992:112; see also Wynne 1982).

Among the Wayto hippopotamus hunters of Lake Tana, Ethiopia (Gamst 1965, 1979a, 1984b), risk can be coped with by means of a shaman practitioner (capable of being ”possessed by spirits" who seemingly speak from his/her mouth).  The shamanistic spirits tell the Wayto how to avoid hazard, e.g., make allegedly necessary sacrifices to a local water spirit.  Among the pagan-Hebraic Qemant peasants of Ethiopia (Gamst 1965, 1969, 1994a, 1995b), their priests combat risk to the year’s crops and new livestock by conducting a fertility rite of spring, according to the alleged desires of their bronze-age, sky-father, Adera Mezgena (God Mezgena).  Here the paramount priest must use a ceremonial phallic plow for penetration during the ritual insemination (with a mixture of sacred beverage and blessed seeds) of the labia major (sacral plowed furrows) of mother earth.  The modern skeptic says, “But, none of these shamanistic or priestly actions are effective in a material sense.”  No, but the actions are perceived to be effective by those requesting the arcane knowledge and methods of the local expert practitioners.  It gives the true believers, those having a particular kind of faith, the confidence to go on with their activities.  A culturally congruent, and, therefore, individually reassuring, rationale for the activities has been constructed.  In all, among the Wayto and Qemant, the uncertainties of life have been dealt with in a culturally meaningful way.  Accordingly, a community feels secure because the hazards, that it perceives, have been coped with in a customarily and logically reassuring manner.  

Turning to modern societies, as Ulrich Beck informs (1992: 4):  ”In world risk society the politics and subpolitics of risk definition become extremely important.  Risks have become a major force of political mobilization. . . .  This high-lights the new power game of risk and its meta-norms:  who is to define the riskiness of a product, a technology, and on what grounds in an age of manufactured uncertainties?”  Furthermore, Beck explains (1992:5):  “[I]n risk society seemingly unimportant areas of political intervention and action are becoming extremely important and seemingly ‘minor’ changes do induce basic long-term transformations in the power game of risk politics.”  According to Beck, risk society is an emerging structural condition of advanced industrial societies in which hazards produced "undermine and/or cancel the established safety systems of the provident state's existing risk calculation."  Moreover, "Industrial society . . . has involuntarily mutated into risk society through its own systematically produced hazards. . ."  (Beck 1996:31).   Thus, in advanced industrial societies, we are entering into a "brave new world" of risk of a scale unprecedented in human experience.

The more we investigate, the more we learn that, not only in its application but also in its conception, risk is politicized and thus considered as governable.  “Bureaucrats--no matter how knowledgeable they may be--are making political decisions when they determine which risks are tolerable and which are not” (Heimann 1997:166).  Even such matters as cancer and nuclear materials are politicized regarding risks (Epstein 1979; Herbers 1979).  In risk society, the politics of defining risks and formulating associated methodologies have become great forces for political mobilization, similar to those involving inequality regarding sex, class, and so-called race. 

Risk can be considered a view of representing events so that they at least seem governable, according to particular viewpoints, using selected techniques, and, above all, for targeted goals. In modern societies, then, risk is a product of various forms of calculated, methodical procedures for governing individuals and groups.  Perhaps the significance of risk is not inherent in an actual hazard but in what meanings people attach to the hazard.  A comprehension of the concept of risk must include understanding the different procedures, and their limitations, of calculating it and understanding the political structures in which these procedures are encompassed (Nelkin 1975, Nelkin 1977; Hammond and Adelman 1976; Dean 1999).

Mary Douglas is one leading critic of risk theory (1966, 1985, 1990, 1992; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982a, 1982b).  Douglas attempts to explain why people identify some hazards as risks and some as not.  In the anthropological way, she notes selective identifying and classifying of hazards is relative to social groups and organizations. The groups and organizations create norms against (their definitions of) deviance and infraction and thus attempt to create a social order.  Accusations of failure to conform to the norms sometimes leads to individual-victim blaming.  This is a political moving of risk from a contextual social to a myopic individual focus.  The blamed individuals, however, might be members of particular groups:  minorities, blue-collar workers, the barely literate, children, and so forth.  S. Carter notes that “a range of social practices exist, connected with risk assessment, which historically have often targeted specific groups. . .” (1995:142).

A culturally relative conceptualizing and applying of concepts of risk exists.  Nevertheless, ranges of real and present, often horrific, hazards exist in the material world.  Hazards from radioactive waste and carcinogenic chemicals abound.  Yet science, technology, and rational planning make life safer:  life expectancy increases, infant mortality decreases, most accident rates decline, and economic security in old age continues to rise.  Particular hazards exist as material entities, a priori, before any mental perception of them—a huricane, cobra, or trophy-collecting armed enemy on one’s path; a large toxic chemical spill in one’s neighborhood; and so forth.  In other words, if a relativistic risk analyst walks in a forest and a tree suddenly falls and instantly kills him, and no other person is present to observe this event, he definitely encountered a personally fatal hazard. 

Let us reflect further on Ulrich Beck’s ideas about the “risk society,” in which our future has become uncertain (1992, 1995, 1999). Such society suspends the all-encompassing principle of social insurance in its economic, medical, and religious aspects.   A risk society assesses future events with short-term, mathematical calculations of hazards.  “In this sense, one could say that the calculus of risk exemplifies a type of ethics morality, the mathematical ethics of the technological age” (Beck 1992:99).  More specifically, in the industrial democracies of the West, we are now emerging from a socially securing, welfare society, a provident/providing state, into a risk society.  In insurers' terms, our established provident society as whole was a risk group, providing various kinds of social insurance. 

In the new risk society, hazards and their consequences exceed the bases of our customary conceptions and providing of security.  That is, the customary assumptions for societal well-being and a concomitant social order are dissolving.  Ordinary people are unable to make decisions regarding possible consequences of risk in a knowledgeable and responsible manner (Beck 1999:72-77; Ewald 1986).  How do we cope in the emergent risk society for which we do not have the knowledge to cope?    Can we turn to the social sciences for guidance?  Beck is pessimistic:  " . . . social-scientific categories and methods no longer work when confronted by the complexity and ambiguity of the state of affairs to be described and understood . . .   it is necessary to redefine the rules and principles for decision-making, for areas of application and for critique."  (Beck 1999:78-79).  Finally, Beck summarizes, risk society "can be characterized by the loss of a clear distinction between nature and culture" (1999:145).  One example would be from Chernobyl, where the radioactive pollution of nuclear technology overwhelms nature and whatever cultural safeguards exist.  Not only do humans now technologically adapt the world to their needs but, in this adapting, they also damage habitat and threaten it in numerous potentially catastrophic ways.

2. The Nature of "Risk":

Before we continue, How might we define risk and its associated idea of hazard?  Risk and uncertainty, of course, are part of everyday life for humans in all societies, across time.  For millions of years, societies of humans and other hominids ancestral or related to us faced hazards.  These beings accumulated information about their total environment, the geographic and the sociocultural, so that they could plan for and attempt to overcome hazards.  Such collective behavior became part of our process of evolving culturally, an ever more effective adaptation, including risk mitigation, to the total environment. 

In life, we do not avoid known hazards but select among risks of such hazards (cf. Wilson 1979).  Risk assessment and risk management are two separate but related domains of scientific basic and applied research and of government regulation and managerial application.  The assessment and management of risk concern events having multiple uncertain outcomes.  Just how do we conceptualize risk?  That is, How do we form our ideas about risk and what influences us in this forming, both overtly and covertly?  Is risk an irreducible scientific concept or does it have traceable records of varying, subjective, and political use, a form of cultural history?  Risk is not merely something assumed by an individual but also something imposed on a society.  Furthermore, risk assessments and policies from them shape futures, for us--and for descendant generation after generation.

How might we define risk and its associated idea of hazard?  Risk could be defined as the degree of probability of a loss of a thing valued by at least some humans and the amount of this loss within a particular duration of time.  (Probability is some kind of a measure, often a numeric expression, of an amount of belief:  I am more likely to be struck by lightning than a meteorite.)  For now, we can posit that risk is some kind of measure of exposure to some loss.  We will modify this standard definition as we progress, inductively, in our reflections.  Loss has a subset of danger or jeopardy to person, property, and habitat and, in turn, has a subset of death to persons and destruction of property and habitat.  Risk, then, is fostered by uncertainty regarding the loss consequences of a hazardous event.  Risk could be thought of as a measure of exposure probability to hazard.  Hazard could be a being, energy, mass, toxicity, or duration of time that, if not controlled, could result in a loss.  Thus hazard is some thing that is a potential source of loss, including but not limited to danger. 

To think broadly, for each human society, risk could be conceptualized as a network of social relations and related beliefs guided by cultural prescriptions and proscriptions (“thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots”) characterizing some thing as hazardous.  This “thing” could be a process of nature (e.g., storm, drought, flood, or vegetation blight), an organic and/or physical object (e.g., leopard, armed enemy, or artifact), or a supernaturalistic construction (e.g., spirit; magical threat; witchcraft; or impersonal, amoral manistic force).  Different human societies have various social networks depicting in particular ways certain things as risky.  Americans tend to see all snakes as hazardous, whereas Australian aborigines see them as scarce, prized food.  A society, not an individual socialized in it, both creates and maintains, with change over time, its networks for characterizing of risk. 

Because risk is a sociocultural creation, it is subject to sociocultural limitations regarding its application to things in the world.  Accordingly, as a social conception of risk changes over time, so do its referents.  In the physical sciences and engineering, risk is grounded in quantification of probabilities and outcomes.  In the social and behavioral sciences, risk goes beyond these two procedures and includes its qualitative aspects and especially its relativistic meanings.

Given our introductory, framing reflections on risk, we should not think it is a clear-cut, agreed-upon concept.  Often writers about risk and those using risk assessments proceed as if their risk is understood by the reader and recipient or as if no other views about risk exist.  Let us further reflect on the nature of risk, as a business.

3.  The Risk Business:  How and What Do We Know?

To begin, the ways to study and conceptualize risk are under continuing discussion and reformulation, and even in dispute by many professionals in the risk business.  Yes, risk assessment and management, just like any other business in the marketplace, has a community of practitioners (sellers) and of persons interested in the subject for a wide variety of reasons (customers).  How did this risk business come to be, and how might we view this business for discussion of risk, in its assessment, management, and other applications?  Such inquiry is part of the sociology of knowledge:  the relation between human knowledge and its sociocultural base, including how experts decide and what, for sometimes overtly biased reasons, is relevant knowledge (Russell 1948). 

Perhaps the central questions of inquiry are, What is occurring in the risk conceptualizations and methods and what is happening in the actions and interactions of the risk practitioners and the consumers of their work products?   Most important, does risk assessment sometimes provide a “cover” for organizations implementing and regulatory agencies approving and overseeing new technologies?

Our knowledge about risk and our action against it are frequently uncoordinated.  That is, we do not achieve the most possible to prevent the largest kinds of damage (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982a).  What are some of the misinformed and uncoordinated reactions to risks?  For two examples, we do little about the carnage on the highways and we allow endless debate about whether smoking is really harmful and addictive.  What war would the body politic tolerate with 40,000 plus deaths (as on highways), year after year?  Most mitigation of risk is first and foremost a political act, deciding allocations among winners and losers.          

Generally, as technology develops, its associated new hazards occur, with commensurate risks, even as it reduces or even eliminates older risks.  Given the revolutionary advances during recent decades in materials, electronics, and computation, it is physically possible to call for greater levels of performance and productivity in systems.  Performance can be in physically adverse settings such as poor visibility and at speeds and intervals not previously common.  Regulators sometimes allow an organization’s conversion of a new gain in safeguards against hazard into an increase in productivity.  Thus the overall amount of hazard remains in equilibrium. 

4.  Risk as an Evolving Sets of Often-Competing Ideas:

The Western idea of risk, as with other ideas, changes over time.  Our present conceptions of risk are not verities but are modes which necessarily will continue to change, even if irrevocable decisions are based on the present concepts. 

In the late Middle Ages and thereafter, the Latin word riscum was applied to the chance of hazard to ventures, in maritime shipping, insurance, and other business.  This idea of risk excluded the thought of human fault and responsibility.  Risk came from an inexplicable natural or fatalistic-God-intended event, such as a storm.  (Natural or Devine process depended upon one’s learned viewpoint from one’s cultural background.)  The word risk had entered popular parlance in English by 1696, e.g., “to cut my Elder Brother’s Throat without the Risque of being hang’d for him” (OED 1971 2:714).  Thus Adam Smith, in his The Wealth of Nations, was readily understood when he said:  “The ordinary rate of profit always rises more or less with the risk” (1776 1:136).  Beginning in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century, risk began to be discussed in terms of a more naturalistic knowledge of the world, through humans’ rational thought, scientific inquiry, and experimentation.  Later, statistical sampling and reckoning and probability-based life expectancy and theory developed to bring quantifications.  Thus Westerners began developing a perceived order to a seemingly chaotic world, a perception allowing faith in actions which otherwise could be mired in indecision (Hacking 1975, 1990; Bernstein 1996).

L. James Valverde holds that probability theory provides a framework for analysis of risk, more important than particular numbers generated in its application (1991).  Paul Thompson would go further than just de-emphasizing a focusing on numbers.  He does not think that probability should even be used as a framework for organizing our analyzing risk (1992).

In all, as S. Reddy notes, we "Moderns had eliminated genuine indeterminacy or 'uncertainty,' by inventing 'risk.'  [We] have learnt to transform a radically indeterminate cosmos into a manageable one, through the myth of calcuability" (Reddy 1996).  That is, we Westerners began to replace an age-old, supernaturalistic worldview with an emerging material one, which included grounding, in part, in unprovable assumptions, a secular “faith.”  We return to ”faith” in a concluding reflection.  Robert Castel is even more doubtful concerning scientific risk theory (1991):

"a grandiose technocratic rationalizing dream of absolute control of the accidental, understood as the irruption of the unpredictable. . . a vast hygienist utopia plays on the alternate registers of fear and security, inducing a delirium of rationality, an absolute reign of calculative reason and a no less absolute prerogative of its agents, planners and technocrats, administrators of happiness for a life to which nothing happens."

Scientific risk theory often has a naiveté of “hard” technical, data oblivious to the authenticity of the real world attempted to be modeled, such as a world of work, e.g., the rail world.  Railroaders often complain about analysis in which the complexity of their work is simplified, overlooked, and ignored to fit an elegant model of the analysts’ view of the natives’ world.   

5. Uncertainties in Risk Assessments:

“Management” of modern risk provides reaction to the uncertainties of producing and implementing new technologies and developing new markets.  Such management is done through government and private approval of new technology and inputs to and regulation of markets.  Risk management is effected through, among other measures, insurance contracts and government limitation of or subsidy of liability.  This management is also done through deployment of governmental interveners such as police officers, fire fighters, members of the armed services, social workers, public health workers, teachers, and so forth.  

Government agencies not only regulate but also promote new technologies.  C. F. Larry Heimann explains (1997:2-3):

On the one hand, agencies are told by political superiors not to inhibit important technological advances and may even be charged with promoting such development.  On the other hand, agencies must provide enough monitors and guidance to insure that no major accident will occur under their watch. . . .

  [P]residential appointees and legislators who are charged with overseeing the operation of these agencies also face difficulties.  Knowing the concern for catastrophic failure, bureaucrats are sure to publicly state that safety and reliability are the agency’s top priorities when asked by inquiring political superiors.  Yet that alone cannot be satisfactory since it is clear that simply stating an objective is no guarantee that the agency will take the necessary action to realize the objective.

A number of kinds of inherent uncertainty exist in risk analysis, some of which are unquantifiable.   These uncertainties are logically separate and cumulative.  Moreover, we have no known way of quantifying their cumulative affect.  We must remember that even when we can quantify some item of uncertainty, it remains an uncertainty.  As Vern Walker summarizes on uncertainty in risk analysis:  “Our conclusions might be in error, even though supported by reasoning that suggests a high probability of their being true” (1998:38).

Given uncertainty, Steve Rayner cautions the advocates and users of risk assessment (1990:162):

Probabilistic risk assessment seems to hold out the tantalizing, but misleading, promise of an unambiguous technical basis for what are inevitably contentious decisions involving ticklish social, political, and ethical judgments. . . .  [T]he empirical identification of cognitive biases was grist to the mill of anthropologists who argued that different cognitive biases are characteristic of different social groupings and that different institutional arrangements shape their selection.

In a risk assessment, the focus is on a result of a sequence of small events that usually do not create an accident.  Rarely, however, they do result in an accident.  The interrelations of the events can be analyzed for a bounding of the probability of the accident.  If we can learn most of the ways in which an accident event can occur, then, we can assess the chances of occurrence of the in between small events, and, finally, we can attempt an estimate of the probability of the accident.  But do we always know "most of the ways"?  Given that a risk analysis was correctly calculated with all of its gathered information, unknown events could make the final work product an uncertainty to some unknowable degree. The estimate of the probability, thus, is frequently uncertain, that is questionable and perhaps problematic.  Different estimators of the same risk can conclude different probabilities for it. 

Although risk assessment attempts to classify the possible consequences of identified alternative events, it seldom assists in identifying different objectives.  It often does not make transparent the values and norms entering the assessment. 

A risk assessment for some part of a complex industry, because of the myriad known impinging events, is professionally labor intensive, time intensive, and monetarily quite costly.  The organization or regulatory agency requiring a risk analysis cannot expect quick, inexpensive results. 

6.  Risk Management:  Scientific and Objectivistic? 

A risk assessment can be self-serving.  Two common strategies in assessing risk are blaming the victim and blaming the other.  Thus, in the first instance, an automobile or tire manufacturer could protect its mechanically failed product and blame the accident-injured driver and, in the second instance, environmental groups could blame petroleum or timber companies for aspects of environmental change which the activists view as degradation.  Trevor Kletz explains that, at a street intersection having a high number of accidents, it is cheaper to blame the drivers than to redesign and reconstruct the road (1991:30). Mary Douglas reasons that blaming the victim facilitates social control of persons, and blaming the other engenders group loyalty and solidarity vis-à-vis other groups.  Both strategies serve to prevent a community from becoming split with dissention over their formulations and perceptions of risk (Douglas 1985).

A common practice in risk analysis is blaming an individual for an accident and not looking for causes further up the hierarchy of social organization.  Traditional societies, such as the Wayto foragers and the Qemant peasants have risks primarily from the geographical part of the encompassing total environment.  In modern societies, risks come mainly from the sociocultural part of the total environment.  Sociocultural includes the artifactual (regarding all human-made material items) and the social organizational (regarding all actions by human organizations) parts of this environment.  Modern risks largely come from physically failed structures, from business mismanagement, and regulatory omission.  Accordingly, modern risks usually cannot be relegated to one individual’s action.  Because total risk is ordinarily extra-individual, its understanding must be in part in the political realm.  Scott Sagan concludes:  “the politics of blame:  When a petrochemical plant explodes, a jumbo jet crashes, or an oil tanker runs aground, accident investigators round up the usual suspects:  the  control room operator, the pilot, or the captain who committed an error.  It is extremely misleading, however, to place such a significant emphasis on ‘operator error’ as the cause of most accidents” (1993:278). 

How can we know the true frequency of realized hazards entering into risk analysis?  Judicial punishment and organizational sanctions are often in store for those who report all accidents, and for those who report an accident fully.  As Andrew Hale explains regarding accident investigation (1997:7): 

Built into the judicial approach is a threat for those to whom the finger may finally point.  They will have to pay, either as punishment, or to compensate others, and their reputation and future business or employment prospects will be damaged.  There is a natural tendency for anyone faced with such a prospect to be unforthcoming, to limit themselves to statements which do not damage their position, to put the best gloss on their description of events and to act defensively under questioning. 

“Unforthcoming” is a mild way of putting it.  This unforthcoming is more than just defending or covering an individual’s own actions, however.  Many organizations force employees to unite to protect the company’s interests.  This means, reveal nothing to nonorganizational members, except for questions of law officers in the course of a particular formal investigation.  The quality of the data for a risk assessment, thus suffers.

7. Risk and Culture:

      Each of the world’s several thousand specific (whole, autonomous) cultures has its peculiar metaphysics, that is, overt and covert ideas about what parts of reality, including risk, exist and how to organize and evaluate this “extant” information.  Each culture and subculture has its own decision-making solutions to dealing with problems including hazards.  Such decision making is an aspect of culture adaptive to the total environment.  If any society or subsociety survives through time, it is, in part, because it developed decision-making procedures for risks of satisfaction to most of its members most of the time.  What constitutes acceptable risk must always be a culturally relative (i.e., comparative) matter imbedded in a particular specific culture or subculture.

Not just the assessment and management of risk but also the ranking of risks from greatest to least involves culture-laden judgments and negotiations having winner-and-loser consequences.  Rankings of risk and risk-reductions strategies depend on questions from ethics and not only from science, to determine just which risks are considered, how a risk is measured, which different events interacting with a risk are considered, and how uncertainty is treated.  For example, a regulatory agency might, first decide, not to have a new technology risk assessed and, later, with some public concern about the technology, have assessed only several operations (of many) that are potentially less hazardous.  Additionally, in a risk assessment, an agency might ask for a format of a comparison of several operations in the former and the new, replacing technology, thereby, precluding assessment of any hazards unique to the new technology.  Or owing to outside pressures, an agency might omit in a risk assessment hazards potentially leading to certain kinds of losses.  Even though, in most instances, an agency has the regulatory authority to compel an entire industry's or a particular firm's compliance or cooperation on a particular matter, it must ordinarily proceed through negotiation to achieve effective results.  Accordingly, at least to some extent, the negotiations will result in:  whose welfare is shielded and whose risky activities are allowed (cf. Fischhoff 1995a).

Invariably, our efforts in understanding human behavior regarding risk begin with an event, an act, or a statement of probability.  Steve Rayner advocates a quite different orientation to such understanding.  In a culturalogical manner, he posits we must learn how organizational cultures and institutions have humans actively choose particular issues as consideration for a construction of risk (1990). 

Risk, then, is more than just the degree of probability of a loss and the amount of this loss, as noted earlier.  The concept also involves political negotiation about the probabilities of and public consent about risks.  Often the consent obtained is not informed and coercion obtains.

A cultural theory of risk assessment, including perceptions of risk, then, must consider the wielding of political and economic power in relation to the kinds of risks deemed acceptable.  What parts of society and its culture engender the various, sometimes privileged, outlooks about hazards?  That is, Why are certain kinds of hazards chosen for just how much concern?  Each specific culture, and each of its subcultures and their factions, has a peculiar selection of perceived risks.  Shared values and norms foster both group apprehensions and assumptions not to have apprehensions about other things.

Not all sectors of a highly complex state society have the same expectations for social action.  Risk experiences are not the same for all sectors of a large society.  Good fortune for individuals in such society is not uniform.  Poorer persons have more accidents, are sicker, and die earlier than the more affluent, including as infants (Gray 1982; Gortmaker 1979, Gortmaker and Wise 1997; Smeeding and Torrey 1988).  We can never say that all persons who live with a hazard and thereby incur some degree of risk do so truly voluntarily.  The choice might be assumed risk or else lack of employment, risk or unaffordable housing, risk or burdensome costs of private medical insurance, and so forth.  Risk encounters by different societal sectors are consequent to inequality in the distribution of and access to power.  Outcomes for risk assessments often have problems with legitimacy because they impose risks on sectors of society and groups not understanding or desiring to bear the risks.  Accordingly, questions about acceptable risk cannot be answered merely by investigating and analyzing interactions of technology with humans and the geographical environment.

Despite claims for scientific objectivity, risk may be viewed pragmatically as a variably culturally relative set of ideas and methods for an ordering of reality in the world.  This ordering allows a sense of security that earthly hazards have been or can be coped with. As an ordering of reality, risk is part of a people’s worldview.  More specifically, risk is a set of interrelated learned views-- developed in self-interest by groups in a society but among which individual’s can choose opportunistically.  The choices, however, are bounded by convention and not free wheeling from free will. 

Reality and the knowledge of it are to a large extent a relativistic sociocultural construction concerning a material setting.  Constructed knowledge includes the “reality” of hazard and its risk within each of the myriad cultures and their subcultures.  To understand the reality of hazard and risk, then, we must comprehend how particular societies and their societal sectors construct it.

8. Summation: 

In a context of all human risk, we have reviewed the peculiar Western development and applications of risk, an analytic construct concerning a cultural mechanism for allaying concern about future conditions.  And we have discussed at length the conceptual and, consequently, the policy uncertainties of use of the ever-developing concept of risk.  Such discussion touches upon the legitimacy of this use and the question of who loses and who gains from such use.  Today, contests about the legitimacy of kinds of risk expertise, assessment, and consequent findings concern attempts to influence societal directions, sometimes across future generations.  In the Anglo-Saxon states, at least, these contests sometimes devolve into bitterly fought campaigns in a broad cultural war polarizing society. 

Risk has both physical and cultural characteristics.  Many risks are from material phenomena.  The losses from such phenomena are palpable to real humans, no matter what the perception of the risk and the construction of its concept may be. 

After reflecting on scientific assessment of risk, we find its conceptualizations and methods for analysis contain inherent sundry uncertainties.  Many uncertainties are unquantifiable, some are reducible, but none are removable.  Risk assessment is not a kind of verity, unfouled by the total environment, the real world.  Perceptions, judgments, and reactions regarding risks are mediated through learned sociocultural constructions guiding thought and action.  Thus risk depicts, assesses, and accesses some part of reality by culturally constructing it.  At times, the perceptions and reactions are laden with the values of certain groups which are in some way privileged or which want to exert social control or obtain a gain regarding some matter.  In other words, risk cannot be fully comprehended apart from values and norms and political processes including those of exercise of power.  All of human sentiments and knowledge about risks exist in a sociocultural setting, of which politics is one aspect for modern societies. 

If risk assessment is to have merit for public policymaking in a democracy, then, not only the physical and procedural aspects of a technology must be dealt with but also its normative, social, and political contexts must be recognized and handled in analysis.  Discussion of risk cannot be limited solely to the physical and procedural realms.  This is because, in the final analysis, all such discussions are philosophical, grounded in epistemology, always a sociocultural reflection.  All discussions of risk have been culturally mediated on a number of levels, thereby compounding uncertainty.  Thus the conclusions of risk discussions are quite malleable culturally and capable of having a number of differing conclusions, crafted by particularly enculturated professionals.

We have now completed our reflective explorations among the uncertainties of constructions of risk.  But, for one more reflection, we present a succinct, perhaps pithy, risk viewpoint from anthropology.

For those of you who are somewhat skeptical about risk assessment and its management, as the Ethiopian Qemant do for handling risk, stand, face toward "Yerusalem," hold upward your cupped hands as if you will receive something from above, and repeat the following formula exactly three times:  “Getoch Mezgena, ye-adera new.” (“Lord Mezgena my-God He-is.”)  You are not a Qemant and, anyway, you do not understand the ideas underlying this procedure, you say?  Does the following, instead, give you confidence and a perception of security, of being safe enough?  “The regulatory agency has provided great reduction of hazard and uncertainty through scientific risk assessments.”  Feel better, now?  Is it all a matter of relativistically enculturated belief?  Are both formulas matters of ritualized faith?  Is the primary function of assessment of risk an engendering of social reassurance allowing individual self-confidence?  Can we disregard all of risk analysis of hazards, however?

[The referenced cited above are not typed in here, but can be supplied, in the 23 pp. of references cited from a course of lectures on risk (FCG-Risk Lectures-00-8G).  A long e-copy of these lectures is available on request from fcgamst@aol.com .]

Last update: 5/25/2005; 5:09:50 PM.