Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives: Logics of Precariousness in Everyday Contexts (Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty) 3030839613, 9783030839611

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CRITICAL STUDIES IN RISK AND UNCERTAINTY

Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives Logics of Precariousness in Everyday Contexts Edited by Beata Świtek Allen Abramson · Hannah Swee

Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty

Series Editors Patrick Brown, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Anna Olofsson, Mid Sweden University, Östersund, Sweden Jens O. Zinn, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Palgrave’s Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty series publishes monographs, edited volumes and Palgrave Pivots that capture and analyse how societies, organisations, groups and individuals experience and confront uncertain futures. This series will provide a multidisciplinary home to consolidate this dynamic and growing academic field, bringing together and representing the state of the art on various topics within the broader domain of critical studies of risk and uncertainty. Moreover, the series is sensitive to the broader political, structural and socio-cultural conditions in which particular approaches to complexity and uncertainty become legitimated ahead of others. It provides cutting edge theoretical and empirical, as well as established and emerging methodological contributions, and welcomes projects on risk, trust, hope, intuition, emotions and faith. Explorations into the institutionalisation of approaches to uncertainty within regulatory and other governmental regimes are also of interest.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15840

´ Beata Switek · Allen Abramson · Hannah Swee Editors

Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives Logics of Precariousness in Everyday Contexts

Editors ´ Beata Switek University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark

Allen Abramson University College London London, UK

Hannah Swee Independent Researcher Copenhagen, Denmark

ISSN 2523-7268 ISSN 2523-7276 (electronic) Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty ISBN 978-3-030-83961-1 ISBN 978-3-030-83962-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83962-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: HAWKEYE/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Praise for Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives

“This timely collection seeks to transcend the usual binaries between expert and lay, rational and irrational that permeate much research on risk. It reveals not only the complexities inherent in the subject but also the situated knowledge that comes from qualitative approaches. A wide range of stimulating case studies and cross-disciplinary commentary deftly demonstrates people’s agency in negotiating the management of fear and the retention of hope in high-risk, yet ordinary contexts.” —Pat Caplan, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK

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Contents

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Introduction: Ordinary Life, Extraordinary Risk: Precariousness in Everyday Contexts ´ Beata Switek and Allen Abramson

Part I 2

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Self-Constitution: Defiance, Endurance and Choice

‘Knowing How to Walk’: Risk, Violence and Practices of Endurance in Urban Brazil Marie Kolling Risk Negotiations in the Mines of Potosí: Implications for Rethinking Current Health and Safety Approaches Mei L. Trueba Regenerative Medicine, Unproven Therapies and the Framing of Clinical Risk Alessandro Blasimme

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Commentary: Clear and Present Danger—Dodging and Dealing with Risk and Uncertainty in Everyday Life Atreyee Sen

Part II 6

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Shifting Dangers: Macro and Micro Politics of Risk

‘Keeping the Conversation Going’: Understanding Risk in a Context of Escalating Conflict in Syria Julie L. Shackelford

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The Edgeworker’s Habitus: Climbing and Ordinary Risks Matthew Bunn

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Commentary: Action, Edgework, and the Situated Logics of Risk Stephen Lyng

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Part III 9

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Environmental Threat and Cultural Possibility: Risk and the Contemporary City

‘Asılmak Tehlikeli Ve Yasaktır ’: Unintelligible Mobility and Uncertain Manhood in Istanbul’s Old City Janine Su

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Ordinary Life in the Shadow of Vesuvius: Surviving the Announced Catastrophe Giovanni Gugg

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Keeping Disasters Under Control: Anticipation, Cyclones and Responses to Uncertainty Hannah Swee

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Commentary: Interpretive Risk Ethnography as a Means of Understanding Risk Problems: Encounters with the Ordinary-Extraordinary and What Comes After? Karen Henwood

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Allen Abramson has taught courses on theory, cosmology and risk and, until recently, was co-convenor of the research group CROC (Cosmology, Religion, Ontology and Culture). He has published several articles on risk society and ‘extreme’ sport. His recent publications include Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds co-edited with Martin Holbraad published by Manchester University Press in 2014. He is currently conducting research on climbing walls for a book that explores changing significations of the edge and the vertical in the context of mountain practices. Alessandro Blasimme is a senior scientist in bioethics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich. His work revolves around ethical and policy issues in contemporary medicine and biotechnology. He has been a Fulbright-Schuman fellow to Harvard University’s ‘Science, Technology and Society’ Program. Matthew Bunn was awarded his Ph.D. in sociology and anthropology in 2015 at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He works as a Research Fellow at the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education. His

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research focuses on theorizing enduring inequalities in higher education participation. Giovanni Gugg is an adjunct professor of Urban Anthropology at the University of Naples ‘Federico II’ (Italy). He is currently a research fellow at the University Paris-Nanterre (France) for the project ‘Ruling on Nature. Animals and Environment before the Law’. His studies concern the relationship between human communities and their environment. Karen Henwood is a Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK, and a long-standing Associate of Cardiff University’s Understanding Risk Group. She studies issues of risk, environmental controversy and identity and uses interpretive, qualitative and longitudinal research methods to conduct community case studies. Past research projects include: ‘Energy Biographies: Exploring the dynamics of energy use for demand reduction’, ‘Homing in: Sensing, sense-making and sustainable place-making’ and ‘Coastweb: Valuing the contribution coastal habitats make to human health and well-being, with a focus on the alleviation of natural hazards’. Currently, she is working on the transition to a flexible, integrated energy system with a focus on infrastructure (upgrade and disruption) and values change and asking questions about how such changes are ‘felt’. Marie Kolling is an anthropologist and senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. She has conducted extensive fieldwork on urban marginality in relation to housing, debt, livelihoods and violence in Northeast Brazil. She is co-editor of Who’s cashing In? Contemporary Perspectives on New Monies and Global Cashlessness (Berghahn Books, 2020) among other publications. Stephen Lyng is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Carthage College. His major areas of interest are the sociology of risk, sociology of the body and sociological theory. He is the author of three books, Holistic Health and Biomedical Medicine: A Countersystem Analysis (SUNY, 1990), Sociology and the Real World (with David Franks, Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) and Edgework: The Sociology of Voluntary Risk Taking (Routledge, 2005).

Notes on Contributors

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Julie L. Shackelford From 2017 to 2020, Julie was employed as a Folk High School Teacher at The International People’s College in Elsinore, Denmark, where she taught courses on the Middle East, human movement and migration, cultural heritage and material culture. Her Ph.D. research at University College London (2015), upon which her chapter is based, examined the social role of heritage both prior to and during the first year of the popular uprising that began in Syria in 2011. She is currently an independent researcher working on her first major publication, (Re)assembling Palmyra: Anthropological Reflections on Ruins, Regimes and Resiliency in Syria. Atreyee Sen is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is a political anthropologist of urban South Asia. She is author of Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum (2007) and co-editor (with Dr. David Pratten) of Global Vigilantes (2008). Janine Su is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. Her doctoral research is based on fieldwork in Istanbul, the bulk of which was completed between 2010 and 2012, but which was initiated in 2008 through a research scholarship from the British Institute at Ankara. Hannah Swee is currently working as a climate and capacity-building specialist for the United Nations. She has worked extensively in the Asia Pacific region and holds a Ph.D. from University College London, where her research focused on community responses to disaster and climate risk. ´ Beata Switek is Assistant Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is a social anthropologist with an interest in contemporary ethical transformations across different social domains. Her primary regional focus is on Japan. She is the author of the monograph Reluctant Intimacies. Japanese Eldercare in Indonesian Hands (Berghahn Books 2016) and a coeditor of Monks, Money, and Morality. The Balancing Act of Contemporary Buddhism (Bloomsbury 2021).

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Mei L. Trueba is a Lecturer in International Development and Global Health at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) and the University of Sussex. Her research is predominantly concerned with the political economies of health and ill-health, in particular health and safety in global supply chains. Since 2008, her research has focused on the complex relationship between international development, employment and health as well as on using grounded research to inform policy and practice. She is currently working on a project focused on preventing modern slavery in Malaysian medical gloves factories.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

The meeting point by the canal for the evening walks, October 2010 (Photo by author) Potosí’s cemetery. ‘Silence! Here rest the men that have drained their lungs in the mine’ (Photo by author) Miners pushing wagons (Photo by author) Mine entrance (Photo by author) Graffiti by the children of Dera’a: ‘It’s your turn, Doctor’ (ijak ad-dur, ya Doktur )—an implicit reference to Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad (who also happens to be a trained ophthalmologist). Original source unknown. Retrieved from the Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution (http://www.creativememory.org/?lang=en) Screenshot of video depicting the release of ‘freedom balloons’ into the early morning skies. Damascus, October 2011. Published on YouTube by Kafar Sousah Revolt on 12 October 2011 (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4hC6Il1EajY)

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Fig. 6.3

Graffiti in Syria before the conflict. Religious graffiti on the wall of a private residence in Palmyra, autumn 2010. The nearest text (right) reads: ‘May God accept your pilgrimage and forgive your sins’. An icon of the Kaaba and Sacred Mosque of Mecca (al-Masjid al-H . aram) are depicted far left (Photo by author) Graffiti in Syria before the conflict. Tagging in the Old City of Damascus, autumn 2010 (Photo by author) Graffiti in Palmyra, November 2011. Clockwise from left to right: defaced Syriatel billboard located in President’s Square, Palmyra; broken and defaced 1 × 2 m nationalist-oriented ad campaign situated at the entrance to the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palmyra; graffiti on the exterior side of the newly reconstructed defensive wall of the archaeological site (All photos by author) Anti-regime graffiti spray-painted onto a fallen Roman column in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palmyra, November 2011 (Photo by author) Screenshot of video depicting early demonstration in Hariqa (Damascus), 17 February 2011. Published on YouTube by shirkhorshidiran on 18 February 2011 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTl7Gjhne68) Early protesters do not hide their faces and face cameras directly. Protest in Douma (outskirts of Damascus), 8 April 2011. Originally posted to Flickr as ‘Syria Demonstration 30’ by Shamsnn (https://www.flickr. com/photos/61606819@N07/5606924846). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Later protesters cover their faces and/or turn away from cameras. Here, is an image of an anti-regime protest in Yabroud (near Damascus) on 2 March 2012 that circulated on numerous sites online, including: http://www.saiia.org.za/opinion-analysis/why-sa-mustfight-against-war-in-syria and http://www.aljazeera.com/ indepth/features/2012/03/201237101424192726.html/. Original source unknown; copyright given variously to Reuters, UPI and FreedomHouse2/Flickr/Creative Commons

Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5

Fig. 6.6

Fig. 6.7

Fig. 6.8

Fig. 6.9

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Fig. 9.1

Satellite image of Istanbul. Sultanahmet is located at the tip of the Old City peninsula, whose boundaries correspond to those of Byzantine-era Constantinople. The city’s unique geography concentrated around three converging peninsulas helps make the phenomenon of ‘centres’ that do not interact with each other plausible. Image adapted by author from Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0276337. 28.9719445.24163m/data=!3m1!1e3 (Imagery ©2015 DigitalGlobe, Data SIO, NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, GEBCO, TerraMetrics. Map data ©2015 Basarsoft, Google [Retrieved 29 August 2015])

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1 Introduction: Ordinary Life, Extraordinary Risk: Precariousness in Everyday Contexts ´ Beata Switek and Allen Abramson

As a volume in a series on risk and unertainty, this collection is perhaps an odd one in that it brings together contributions based on research whose original focus, for the most part, was not solely or especially on risk. However, brought together during a two-day workshop Ordinary Extraordinary. Anthropology of Risk, Limits and Exposure held in autumn 2014 at the Department of Anthropology at University College London, the authors refocused their analytical lens to highlight what was nonetheless germane to their different focuses: namely, the experiences of people who actively engage (with) significant degrees of risk in the ordinary ´ B. Switek (B) University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] A. Abramson University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 ´ B. Switek et al. (eds.), Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83962-8_1

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course of their day-to-day lives. What has resulted is a collection of cases where, across widely varied contexts, ranging from disaster-prone regions and zones of military conflict, to economically and politically disenfranchised communities and to lifestyle edge-workers, important value is continually at stake.1 In focusing on these diverse sites, we ask what it means for the concrete patterning of social lives if risk is a constant factor in people’s conduct and experience. What kind of logic allows people to lead ordinary lives in apparently extraordinarily threatening conditions, or to ordinarily engage in apparently extraordinary risky activities? The larger goal of this collection builds on the singular accounts that are the heart of the volume. What we aim to achieve here is an elucidation of what might be usefully meant ’ as a conceptual tool for viewing high-risk states and situations that, in various ways in the contemporary world, have become routinised without losing the sense of their being exceptionally threatening. Throughout the volume, this ‘ordinary extraordinary’ addresses the widespread—and perhaps universal—agency of individuals faced with danger, and responses which seem only minimally mediated by collective significations of danger and risk, and by official modes of regulation. Our goal consists in ‘connecting social forces with individual sense-making’ (Zinn and Olofsson 2019, 15); we aim to marry critique and description: critique in defence of the ingenuity, defiance and creativity of ordinary people and description to expand upon the limited collated literature on how people engage ordinarily with extraordinary or significant risk. To achieve this goal, we found it valuable to take a two-step approach. In the first instance, we reiterate, with some modifications, the need for placing the local logics of ‘ordinary’ (that is untrained and uncertified) actors on an equal footing with dominant managerial forms to avoid privileging technocratic, ‘expert-defined’ perspectives on the nature of and responses to risk. We argue that recognising the multiplicity of logics (Bunn, this volume) or ‘terms’ (Su, this volume) by which people live and 1

The workshop was funded by UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences Funds for Departmental Initiatives and by the Department of Anthropology, UCL. While not all participants are included in this volume, we are gateful to everyone involved for their contribution to the discussion. The full programme of the workshop is available here: https://www.ucl.ac. uk/anthropology/news/2014/oct/ordinary-extraordinary-anthropology-risk-limits-and-exposure.

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self-constitute their practices is fundamental to analyses of ‘non-ordinary’ risk-taking (Lyng, this volume) and to analysing the responses of ordinary actors to the practical intervention of ‘the experts’. Whilst we are not the first to argue for a broad contextualisation of risk and risk perception (see, for example, Caplan 2000; Boholm 2015; Slovic 2000; also Zinn 2020, 15–34 in particular), our aim is to particularly highlight the capacity of human agents to act knowledgeably and logically even under the direst circumstances where confronting risk is not only culturally framed (Douglas and Wildavsky 1983) or narratively transposed (Mairal 2008) but is a form of human dasein, of being in the world. In this state, risk is not an extraordinary event, but a condition that meaningfully permeates the very fabric of life. This is where we take the second step of conceptualising an ‘ordinary extraordinary’ in which we not only give equal weight to ‘expert’ and ‘non-expert’ knowledges and logics but also ground risk analytically in the regular course of ordinary lives. With its attention to the inflections of risk in everyday mundane activities, decisions, strategising and hoping, an ethnographic approach is thus an indispensable platform for the task of analysing the messy meshwork of political, economic and social conditions and the diverse syntheses of risk consciousness directing actors from different backgrounds and contexts. These analyses have to be fashioned without presupposing the presence or absence of a predefined, particular rational mode that, more than anything else, replicates and transfers the risk calculus of modern specialists beyond their own contexts of emergence and practical applicability. This is not to say that ethnographic analysis should assiduously avoid the conceptual possibilities offered by general theories of risk and uncertainty for fear of succumbing to an over-reaching homogenisation of social variation and complexity for such theory is capable of illuminating ethnographic realities that are only dimly discernible. Rather, sensitive to the relative autonomy of local space, and the power and productivity of local interest, ethnographic studies have shown that they have the power to reveal how actors in their own everyday contexts variously perceive and estimate the risks about them, creatively orient towards these risks and, indeed, in many cases see risk—or not see risk—where others do. In her introduction to Risk Revisited (2000), Pat Caplan similarly suggested the need to move beyond the tightly

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formulated theories of risk propounded by Beck, Giddens and Douglas in order to grasp the significance of such context-bound specificity. Caplan hoped that a specifically ethnographic and cross-cultural focus would illustrate the complexity and unpredictability of the field of risk and risk-taking. And, undoubtedly, the book achieved this objective. Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives continues this exercise 20 years later, inviting its contributors to turn their focuses particularly to the convergence of extraordinary risk and everyday social life (where this convergence occurs).

Ordinary Actors and Practical Logic in Risk Studies The questions of why people engage in risky pursuits, how they calculate the odds and what risk is in the first place have been explored by a range of scholars of varied disciplinary provenance. Aspiring to consolidate the field, a recent Routledge Handbook of Risk Studies (2016) shows that, despite increasingly pronounced attempts to move away from the rational–irrational dichotomy (e.g., Tulloch 2016; Zinn 2008, 2016, 2020) that often underlies the distinction between expert and lay knowledge regarding risk, a prevalent scientistic bias and ‘managerial and techno-scientific zeitgeist’ (Lane et al. 2012, 223) persist in normalising quantitative probability calculation to the exclusion of qualitative logics. The spectres of scientific and statistical thinking still make it possible to unequivocally claim that ‘our lives are now shaped by probability calculation [which is] the underlying essence of risk’ (Burgess 2016, 3), encouraging propositions such as ‘it is perhaps unsurprising that nonquantitative forms of risk assessment can lead to suboptimal or even erroneous conclusions’ (Ball-King and Ball 2016, 151). In this volume, we try to lay to rest the reductionism of these types of judgement. It is possible to trace the origins of the hegemony of mathematical risk assessment to the emergence of ‘population’ as a primary unit of governance. In his astute historical analysis, Claude-Oliver Doron (2016) shows how, with the development of the ‘mathematical science

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of “probability”’ (2016, 21), the conception of risk underwent transformations between the Middle Ages and the late eighteenth century until it eventually ‘almost totally escaped the reach of the individual’ (2016, 20). Such population-level thinking is the sine qua non of contemporary governance wherein mathematical risk has served as one of the tools through which states exercise control and shape jurisdictions on the basis of variable means and medians, fluctuating correlations and regressions and other metrics rather than on the basis of what have previously been viewed as fixed and homogeneous characteristics. Whilst a detailed analysis of the role of statistical discourse in modern governance (Hacking 1990; Ewald 1991) is beyond the scope of this introduction, the point nonetheless is that, whilst the policy-directed administration of large numbers and areas was progressively driven by statistical analysis and limits of confidence, the subjectification of individuals was premised upon the inculcation of perfectly predictable self-control or, where self-discipline failed, upon irrational deviations that were institutionally pathologised. As a result, in contrast to the perceived behaviour of systems, considerations of probability and risk became minor considerations in discourses on the dynamics of ordinary individual behaviour. It is in the context of such heavily divided governance that the analytical reliance on ‘expert’ knowledge to determine risk has elevated certified expertise to the status of ultimate arbiter of what is rational risk-taking behaviour and what is not. The discursive power of the information disseminated by the myriad institutions dealing with insurance, health and safety and risk-assessment has been lent credence by the increasingly prevalent sense that significant risks are latent, invisible to the innumerate eye, and that specialist actuarial knowledge is needed to bring them to light. Especially in the practical field of risk management (see below), the assumption often is that, whilst ‘experts’ rationally probe and carefully risk-assess, ‘lay’ individuals unable to access or fully understand the parameters of the situation, jump to simplistic conclusions, being more prone to act upon the certainties of received habit and prejudice than upon the cautious reasoning of considered rational analysis. From this standpoint, there is no value and little conceptual space left for imagining, and then ethnographically describing, the variety of logics of action distributed across ‘lay’ communities when actors habitually

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take risks or find themselves habitually at risk. (The apostrophes placed around ‘lay’ signal the error of glibly declaring the inexpert quality of uncertified competence, the irrationality of ‘ordinary’ people’s action as well as to mark the unsustainable conceptualisation of ‘experts’ as actors guided solely by their expertise. More on this below). Consequently, this rationalisation of the supposedly objective knowledge monopolised by experts (even as the expertise multiplies in endless cycles of contestation and re-evaluation, Beck) has left little room for showing how ‘lay’ individuals and ‘lay’ communities competently respond to threatening contingencies in everyday life in equally logical ways though in different idioms and with different priorities. Among the accounts collected in this volume, Mei Trueba’s, in particular, attests to the professional dominance of certified risk assessment over grassroots experience and expertise and the implicit sense that local responses to non-ordinary risk are wanting in rationality for lack of a rigorously reflexive audit. Trueba argues that the multitude of responses to risk is impossible to capture by way of numerical analysis or by binary (expert-lay) frameworks. Alarmingly, she shows how the continuing dominance of the rational expert paradigm in the Occupational Health and Safety sector in Bolivia legitimises the blaming of high accident rates on the ‘irrational and non-logical’ actions of miners and other workers rather than on specific configurations of situated factors including the expert discourse of risk assessment (see also Kearnes et al. 2012; Giritli Nygren 2019). The need to question the assumption that ‘the gap between the expert and the lay public ought to be closed in only one direction – towards the opinion of experts’ was voiced by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky already in their 1982 book on Risk and Culture (p. 193). Ten years later, in 1992, Douglas bemoaned yet again a world in which we, people, ‘warm-blooded, passionate, inherently social beings’ are presented as ‘so inefficient in handling information that we are unintentional risk-takers; basically we are fools’ (Douglas 1992, 13). Douglas’s expositions of how perceptions of risk are socially and culturally malleable have signalled the possibility of thinking about danger and risk from the standpoints of differently positioned actors and from an anthropological standpoint that accords both the statistical measurement and the many non-mathematical framings of risk equal logical status.

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Her approach though has found only limited application even in anthropological and ethnographic studies (e.g., Caplan 2000; Henwood, this volume; see also Boholm 1996 for a critique of the cultural theory of risk). For a while now too, assumptions made of the other side, regarding the unquestionable objectivity and rationality of science and scientific expertise have also been subject to scrutiny (Haraway 1988; Latour 1987, 2011; Nader 1996b; Stengers and Muecke 2017). For example, in the introduction to a 1996 collection Naked Science (Nader 1996b), Laura Nader argued that the global expansion of science as ‘not only a means of categorising the world, but of categorising science itself in relation to other systems of knowledge that are excluded’ (p. 3), has been ‘based on power rather than greater rationality’ (Nader 1996a, 23). The unavoidable politicisation of science ‘not only because politicians, corporations, and governments try to use what scientists know, but also because virtually all science has social and political implications’, meant for Nader that its ‘[p]urity … is the pursuit and the myth’ (Nader 1996a, 9–10; see also Kearnes et al. 2012 for a discussion about the ‘political coconstitution’ of risk research in particular). In a similar vein, and also in 1996, Brian Wynne (1996) published an incisive manifesto against creating an absolute divide between expert and lay public knowledge of risk and for reconceptualising the epistemic value of both. Tracing the processes through which non-expert, non-institutional forms of experience and knowledge are deleted from social recognition (p. 49) and concealed behind the public scientific rhetoric of disembedded objectivity and determinism (p. 74), Wynne argues strongly for the substantive intellectual content of local knowledge. Both Nader and Wynne decry the domination of the idea of ‘an elegant, pure science [that] defines as external the context in which science is practiced, [making] a wider dialogue … irrelevant’ (Nader 1996a, 10) and which ultimately ‘disseminates and imposes a particular and problematic versions of the human and the social’ (Wynne 1996, 75). Wynne summarises some of the consequences thus: [t]he predominant perspectives on the risk society and transformations of modernity … implicitly treat the non-expert world as epistemically

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vacuous. It may be reflexive, but such reflexivity is implied to have little or no intellectual content in the sense of having cognitive access to nature or society. It has no apparent instrumental value as measured against a scientific worldview, so is assumed to have no real content or authority beyond the parochial, subjective and emotional world of its carriers. (Wynne 1996, 61–62)

Despite such elaborate expositions from over 30 years ago (but see also Horlick-Jones 2005), Jens O. Zinn found it nevertheless necessary to point out in a 2017 overview article that ‘experts are still puzzled about common people not following good advice presuming people’s lack of understanding’ (Zinn 2017; also Trueba this volume), whilst Andrew Weyman and Julie Barnett still found it worthwhile to focus on uncovering the processes behind ‘the disposition of policymakers that the public are irrational’ (2016, 137). What these accounts indicate is that despite an already rich array of voices arguing otherwise, the discourses of scientific, institutional expert rationality and the ‘calculative orthodoxy of modernity’ (Zinn 2020, 28; italics in original) with their political power to subjugate or ‘delete’ other forms of reasoning continue to hold strong (see also Zinn and Olofsson 2019, 15). An aim of this volume is thus to further problematise the salient dichotomies (experts vs lay, rational vs irrational) by focussing on life strategies and immediate tactics in contexts where significant risk is a constitutive element of the normal and the everyday. Building on the spirit of the studies mentioned above, we suggest that there is a need to abandon the dichotomous vocabulary (science/non-science; rational/irrational; expert/lay) in favour of an approach that brings into view actors who are subject to encompassing and compound reasoning, plural and non-evaluative logics. These are logics that accommodate information gained via scientific methods and through expert institutions, via knowledge gained through experience, reflexive assessments, cultural understanding, supported by hopes and desires as well as emotions and visceral reflections. In elucidating how a range of subjects act on these bases, the need to assign evaluative judgements—either by those who produce or those who receive these judgements—recedes.

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This proposition is not without its predecessors. Among the authors who most consistently have been arguing for the introduction of the immediate social context into scholarly accounts of individual risktaking, are Deborah Lupton (e.g., Lupton 1999, 2012, 2013a, b; Lupton and Tulloch 2002) and John Tulloch (e.g., Tulloch and Lupton 2003; Tulloch 2016; also Lash 1994; Wynne 1996). In their individual as well as joint works, Lupton and Tulloch have shown that risk is a phenomenon that cannot be considered in a vacuum devoid of social, cultural, historical and political processes. Their methodological focus on individual narratives, rather than on grand level processes outlined in the risk society thesis, the governmentality approach (Foucault 1991) or Douglas’s cultural theory of risk (which whilst granting epistemological validity to ‘non-expert’ knowledge restrictively maps limited types of worldview onto a correspondingly limited kinds of group) has helped bring light to more situated apprehensions of risk. (For detailed overviews of different approaches to the study of risk see, for example, Lupton 2013a; Boholm 2015; Zinn and Olofsson 2019.) Lupton and Tulloch conclude in favour of different ‘logics of risk’ (Tulloch and Lupton 2003, 8), or what they also refer to as ‘situated rationalities’ (ibid., p. 9) that are synthesised, though (we might argue), in ways to be illuminated by modest theorising of possibilities. This is a welcome perspective that takes an additional step towards overcoming the dominant dichotomous evaluative thinking and representations of what constitutes risk and how people should relate to it. Zinn (2008, 2016) also takes a step towards coalescing the growing body of research that shows just why people might not act as ‘rationally’ as theory predicts. Zinn proposes that we think about the different factors affecting responses to risk in terms of strategies that can be either rational (instrumental), non-rational (hope, faith and ideology) or in-between (trust, intuition and emotion). Responding to criticisms of his typology as hierarchical and perpetuating the rational-irrational dichotomy, in his 2016 article Zinn proposes considering all the above strategies as reasonable seeing that different situations may call for responses based on a whole repertoire of resources and knowledge of different kinds. Whilst Zinn’s is a welcome endeavour, it still may fall short of freeing the non-scientific, non-expert knowledge from the

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spectre of irrationality. Whilst considered ‘reasonable’ on a par with ‘rational’ strategies rooted in positive knowledge, in Zinn’s account, the in-between and non-rational strategies are confined to a supportive role ‘when rationality does not provide sufficient reasons and sufficient confidence in the ability to control risks and uncertainties’ (p. 361). Inbetween and non-rational strategies also sometimes ‘come out of the blue’ (p. 359) and remain influenced ‘by all kinds of other factors’ (p. 362) and therefore appear arbitrary. Whilst the intention of the texts is clear and we very much sympathise with it, we believe that the redefinitions could be taken one step further. Whilst Zinn argues for maintaining the notion of instrumental rationality because it has a wide application in economics and in the rational action paradigm (p. 358), we see these same usages as a good reason why we should rather abandon the primacy of instrumentally rationalist terminology when trying to understand risk-taking ‘in the round’. If we are to truly allow the situated knowledges (Haraway 1988) speak, as we hope we do in this volume, then we need to create means of representation that will remove them from the subaltern position (cf. Spivak 1988). Given that language does not only represent but also shapes the world we live in, it is important that we recognise and when necessary amend the ‘metaphors we live by’ (Lakoff and Johnson 2003). Since the narrow rationalist orthodoxy has long dominated modernising societies (Zinn 2016, 362; 2020, 28) allowing the image of positive science to remain influential as the underlying normative metaphor invoked by the term ‘rational’, we need to search for means of representation that allow room for equal recognition of heterogenous logics. It is not enough to qualify rationality (as in situated rationalities etc.), or to juxtapose hope or intuition with instrumental rationality, as these manoeuvres perpetuate the now long-debunked image of non-situated science and by extension index the locally situated knowledges as less than rational, as a not fully realised ideal that is purportedly achievable. Therefore, we propose questioning, just as Lupton did in her thinking about the relationship between emotions and risk ‘why is it important to define the rationality or otherwise’ (Lupton 2013b, 641) of people’s actions and argue for abandoning the term ‘rationality’ with the heavy baggage it carries in favour of ‘logic’ (usually as logics) that can

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help us move closer to the non-judgemental ‘science of the heterogenous’, to transpose Bataille’s (2018) ideas onto risk studies. Here, we do it by privileging an ethnographic approach as the key to probing the plural modalities of risk consciousness that typically frame observable behaviours. Then, ideally, the artificial divide between expert and lay, and between rational and irrational, becomes obliterated giving way instead to representations of people who are both knowledgeable and habituated actors, who reflexively manage an array of factors in line with both their perception of circumstance and their manageable dispositions. Where practice works to varying extents, it is usually because people are aware of the limits of practice and their own technical limitations regardless of whether they rely on emotions or an intuitive ‘sixth sense’ as a guide to their actions.

The Distribution of Expertise and the Spread of Extraordinary Forms If, conceptually speaking, the idea of the ordinary directs us to the cyclical stability, habitual obviousness and unsurprising eventfulness of everyday life, the idea of the extraordinary draws our attention to events and states that fill the ordinary with enchantment and sublimity or with unsettling uncertainty. In which case, the conceptual challenge for this volume is to theorise how ‘ordinary extraordinary’ states and practices combine these conditions in situations of significant danger and threat. Contributors to the following pages have added empirically to this theoretical task by considering, on the one hand, the significant risk-taking of ordinary people (as opposed to certified ‘experts’) and, on the other, the contemporary spread and normalisation of extraordinary forms of risk-taking. Both of these registers are explored in this volume.

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The Extraordinary Risk-Taking of Ordinary People Self-Cultivated Expertise It is all too easy to accept a certain kind of common knowledge that deems people inexpert because they are formally untrained and uncertified. However, it is also not that difficult to show that, whilst negotiating precarious circumstances, ‘ordinary’ people inherit a local stock of perceived risk, cultivate their own bespoke expertise in situ, think in complex ways, as well as develop their own blind-spots and biases (as all experts do). For instance, the decision to build and dwell on the slopes of volcanic Vesuvius may appear wildly irrational. However, belying the ‘apparent carelessness’ (Gugg, this volume) involved in staying put people in the village of San Sebastiano al Vesuvio wonder whether actually, since calamity is everywhere, there is any real sense in moving from the slopes of the volcano. And given, too, that the mountain hasn’t irrupted significantly for a long time, what’s to say that the science isn’t faulty? This type of thinking balances a knowledgeable ‘polyphony’ of standpoints that locally calibrates risk as a fluid resultant of competing views. As Gugg shows, too, within this polyphony, the most threatening of these voices are ‘scotomized’, which is to say, backgrounded, muted and reduced to an ignorable murmur. And, this explains ‘the paradox of being conscious of a risk and yet not knowing it (Cohen 2008, 57) … of seeing and not seeing the danger at the same time’ (Gugg). In another environmentally focused study in this volume, Hannah Swee documents a variety of lay responses to the recurrent prospect of cyclones that supplement, but often contradict, official meteorological forecasts. People set up their own weather gauges, visit alternative online forecasting sites, look out for their own trusted signs of incoming cyclones. What is the logic of this behaviour? One obvious anthropological answer universalises local autonomy, finding authentic agency in the grounded dwelling of ordinary people (as against the groundless nomadism and unattached generalities of official experts). However, whilst this kind of theoretical understanding of local action supplies important critiques of prevailing scientific orthodoxy (Wynne’s work

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cited above being one strong instance of this), it is important to argue that local autonomy can just as often exercise agency by affirming the wisdom of official expertise, distant or not. Thus, dwellers on the slopes of Vesuvius or inhabitants of the Australian cyclone belt do craft recognisably local responses to the destructive threats they face but usually in the context of situated, fluid and ‘pragmatic’ (Swee) relations to official risk assessment and emergency management rather than with principled scorn (which, as instances of Covid denial and anti-vaxxer recalcitrance show, is also a possibility). The problem with the over-stated ordinariness of ‘ordinary’ people is that it is all too frequently theoretical code for, on the one hand, inherent states of lack of necessary expertise or, on the other, intrinsically superior adaptation to risky circumstances.

Shifting Circumstances and Embodied Judgement The risk-taking logics of ordinary actors may also appear naïve and inexpert to outside observers because they are under-articulated. Not speaking the same language as the verbose articulations of external ‘expertise’ these logics, vulnerable to mistranslation, become muted and relegated to a subordinate position. Indeed, as will be seen at various points in the collection, managing risk in a rigorously calculated manner may be far from people’s minds. This does not mean though that, faced with significant threat on a regular basis, ‘ordinary’ people abandon risk assessment and adjustment. Rather, oftentimes, on the back of this regularity, ‘ordinary’ judgement occurs in situ, through the embodied knowingness of habituated memory rather than through reflexive abstraction. Thus, there is no written manual for Syrian protesters who resist a repressive and punitive regime (Shackelford, this volume) nor expertise in formulaic risk assessment for Central American women who walk the streets to rail against the violence of local drug dealers (Kolling, this volume). However, these untrained actors learn risk where they are, intuitively triangulating their own subjective resilience and the scale of objective threat on the back of cumulative precedent. Ethnographically articulating elements of this under-stated resilience and habitual calibration, the Bataillean ‘excluded part’, has become a key aim of this volume.

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As Treuba points out, too, when a Potosí miner plants the dynamite himself rather than let others risk their lives, he seems to defiantly trust in the native wisdom of his practiced body to risk-assess, relying on nothing outside of a ‘grittily’ (to paraphrase Sen, this volume) immediate relation to his dangerous world. Similarly, Bunn (this volume) observes of mountaineers that, though climbing the margins safely relies upon a continuously reflexive risk assessment of the wider frames of terrain and weather, the need remains for a habituated openness to the dangerous unpredictability of the route and for a ‘strongly improvisational disposition’ distilled from numerous encounters and techniques (archived subliminally, we might say, as ‘muscle memory’). In these encounters, risk assessment is by critically pre-visualising: visually imagining in situ the safety or not of each possible body-position in the instant before it is adopted. This is the body’s intelligently ‘gritty’ relation to its chosen terrain, knowledge situated in and through the flesh. Sometimes, the climber may feel that a head is not in the right place that the vibes aren’t right. And, whilst these subjective senses defy empirical measurement, they are the inner signs that need heeding if embodied functions are to safely operate. In such instances, the embodied management of extraordinary risk turns expertly inwards to confront the affective limits of its cognitive efficacy. Residents of the slums in the Brazilian city of Recife (Kolling) also have to respond on the spot whenever violence erupts, staying ‘alert to the shifting spaces of danger’ which they intimately know. Indeed, to stay alive at any given moment, they need to instinctually gauge ‘whether to run, hide or pray’ (Kolling), their ‘risk assessment’ being necessarily attuned to the singularly violent spaces they inhabit. In Syria, as the dangerous struggle progressed, the rapidly shifting demands of each emerging conjuncture forced anti-government protesters to intuitively redefine the risks of engaging the regime to avoid being beaten up or disappeared after protests, and to ‘keep the conversation going’ (Shackelford). Where the threat or the opportunity horizon changes quickly, the response of ordinary actors to the transforming risk has to be sudden, to flow primarily from experience, memory and intuition—the key components of embodied expertise—as well as from local knowledge.

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Similarly improvisational in the face of significant risk are the actions undertaken by the young Turkish men in Su’s account in this volume who move to precarious sites in Istanbul in search of lives fashioned beyond the comparatively predictable pathways of the traditional lifecycle (Su). Enthused by the poetic stories of predecessors who have risked failure and humiliation before them, these nomadic chancers live as much for the hasty solutions they keep finding to problems posed by shifting risks on the edge, as for the near-impossible dreams that animate their imagined futures. Neither can silver miners in the Bolivian town of Potosí allow themselves the luxury of a rigorous formal risk assessment when their real choice is not between safe and unsafe work in the mine, but between high-risk work in the mines and the gamut of risks that come with unemployment in an impoverished setting. The salient unit of assessment would have to be life in its totality, more or less. Either way, amidst the outdated infrastructure left by the state, there is no choice but to utilise such ‘wit and creativity’ (Trueba citing Möeller 2007, 87) as they can muster to steel themselves for the inevitable dangers that would be ruled out by health and safety formalism. The brakes on excessive risk-taking have to be applied in the moment. Tempted by the binaries at the heart of classical social theory, there comes a tendency to pit conscious risk assessment and calculus against the visceral monitoring of latent danger, and to want to map this distinction onto the expert/ordinary divide. However, whilst these distinctions describe radically different ways of monitoring and responding to risk (Kahneman 2012), they typify cognitive orientations that can combine in different ways and in the same practice. This has to be just as true for contemporary modern contexts where, below the level of inevitable formal risk assessment, the wily dispositions of a trained habitus—of training turned habitus—is always cut out to be the best regulator.

Agency, Defiance and the Management of Fear Sen (this volume) is also surely right to highlight cases where, because of great asymmetries of power, it is often more important for marginalised actors to urgently display defiance through their risk-taking than to

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meticulously risk-assess—indeed to take extraordinary risks in order to exhibit agency and defiance in the face of daily threats. When, as Kolling shows, too, women in Brazilian favelas walk together into civic areas territorialised by violent men and symbolically mark off their dwellings with additional walls, they court risk to defiantly confront the normality of this violence. They can do this because they possess an intimate knowledge of the area they walk and a knowing feel for the men they challenge. As Kolling’s title suggests: they know how to walk. The mental management of fear is also constitutive of any routine exposure to significant risk: otherwise risky practice and precarious dwelling become untenable. Reasons to fear can be ‘scotomized’ and so not be consciously entertained (Guggi). Levels of fear can be endured where, as Shackelford shows, ‘barriers of fear’ have been breached and overcome. The interference of fear can be treated. Thus, Bunn describes how mountaineers develop an ‘emotional callousing’ that allows them not to ‘overcome fear’ (a misconception) but to mentally position it. This fear is constrained and contained, bracketed but always present at a site where it can be expected to not interfere with either technique or the need for fortitude (Bunn). In striking contrast, Bolivian miners say that they leave their fears ‘at the entrance of the mine’ (Trueba). These cases indicate the indubitable value of a cultural psychology of risk, one that shows how the mental positioning of fear is both an indispensable technique of the body at risk and a culturally variable form.

Risk, Hope and the Longer-Term Lastly, we observe that the embodied habitus which is well-suited to speedily negotiate immediate threat and changing danger is always capable of extending its focus and, in effect, of becoming bifocal. The subsumption of the immediate and the forthcoming in the same ´ embodied action is set out by Nico, an interlocutor of Switek during a research trip to the river Dart in the UK. Focused on the ethical ´ and educational dimensions of white water kayaking, Switek joined a group of British adolescents on their training run down a more difficult section. Nico was one of their instructors. They stopped in an eddy above

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a boulder garden (a rapid with many rocks that require manoeuvring between) to listen to Nico’s advice. He said: You look far ahead, you choose the line, roughly where you want to go, then you look down and adjust your line as you paddle (…) and then look ahead once you’ve passed that section, [and] do it again (…) if you look ahead all the time, you hit the rocks [right in front of you] …

But, the future that nuances visceral risk-taking in the immediate present can, of course, be much further away and more telling than a paddler’s ‘future water’. In the Bolivian mine that Trueba describes, when Don Anastasio skilfully detonates dynamite with wicks that offer little time for escape, each fraught detonation is simultaneously in front of him but also on a trajectory that leads to securing a safer life for his sons. How he risks the present is how he wants the future. It is also clear that, where risks are taken in the here-and-now with the expectation of later outcomes, hope fortifies these investments as much as beliefs in their efficacy, sheer defiance and dealings with fear. Patients who have exhausted officially approved treatments reach a point when they must risk the consequences of uncertified regenerative medicine, and must hope beyond the expectations of the unofficial science for beneficial outcomes (Blasimme, this volume). Explaining why he does not accept the forecast of severe cyclones becoming a normal occurrence in Cairns, Swee’s informant responded: ‘If you never live in hope, then you can never live here’ (Swee). Which is to say that, amidst all the danger and anxiety, if it is the habitual positioning of fear that constitutes the actor as a focussed technical performer rather than a victim of panic, tussling with doubt and silencing its murmuring, it is the work of hope that reproduces the will to act.

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The Spread of Extraordinary Forms There are occasions and contexts where extraordinary risk also passes onto ordinary ground and where, as a consequence, meaningful risktaking is either imposed upon, or is made available to, regular lives. We can illuminate the significance of this spread, and its radical specificity, by initially considering its opposite: contexts in which the negotiation of extraordinary danger is close to hand but specialised and set apart.

Extraordinary Risk and the Separation of Expertise Whilst many hazards immediately beset the lives of ancient and traditional communities (Gerrard and Petley 2013), danger of a radically different cosmic order sprang from traversing the oceans, caves, forests, mountains and the sky. Lying outside the ordinary human sphere but not quite in the realm of the Gods, these primordial zones were legendary for both the terrible threats they posed and the extraordinary value they concealed. Famous heroes undertook fabulous quests to retrieve these values, magically insuring expeditions against the physical and supernatural risks. Thus, nearly a 100 years ago, Malinowski (1922) reported how, exposing themselves to supernatural attack from flying-witches, Trobriand Island men took to sea in rudder-less outrigger canoes to circulate shell-made treasures and absorb their fame. American shamans journeyed—and still journey—to other worlds in search of magical medicines. King Arthur’s knights sat impatiently at the round-table in Camelot, awaiting the mysterious call to perilously journey on quests that would ultimately secure the Holy Grail. In these instances, power securely enthroned and rooted in its territory remained incomplete without the heroic incorporation of values from the margins, obtained on the riskiest ventures. It is clear that Su’s young Turkish male collaborators are neither as blatantly heroic nor as magically armed as these medieval and tribal specialists and nor are the contemporary risks they take as fraught. However, detaching themselves from regular social circuits and swapping the relative security of their natal villages and towns for precarious

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positions in the city, these young Turkish men do venture widely and outwards, away from their villages, questing platonic and sexual relations with foreign tourists. The dream and expectation are not, of course, of consorting with truly transcendental divinity on the outer margins of human dwelling but of successfully courting flesh-and-blood means of escaping impoverished and confined horizons. It is interesting to see how the wishfully precarious adventuring of these young men seems to resonate with a longstanding dream and quasi-magical possibility which pulses at the heart of village life. In one sense, Su’s interlocutors come across as ordinary village men electing exceptional precariousness on the margins of the international tourist economy. In another sense, they traverse these margins as contemporary exponents of a longstanding indigenous pattern of masculine adventure, steeped in cultivated transgression and poetic reward (Herzfeld 1998). Systematically self-rationalising, modern progressive societies came to preclude and exclude significant threats to social reproduction. In these systems, quintessential danger became culturally positioned outside Society (in dangerous Nature, foreign power and the imputed malevolence of foreigners) or within Society as chaotically anti-social force ‘out of place’ (Douglas 2002), targeted for incarceration, transportation or liquidation. This was spectral danger that stalked Society as catastrophic eventuality rather than cosmic state or inherent process, as omnipresent risk but only episodic intrusion into the otherwise systemic reproduction of social lives. Adverse realisations and disasters became categorical ‘accidents’ and ‘incidents’ rather than unfolding necessary developments, pathologies that lay outside normal cycles. Managing incidents, accidents and other manifestations of high-risk became the professional responsibility of risk and disaster specialists who were positioned to operate at the interface of normal life and the distinctive spaces of chaos that threatened it. Specialists also operated in spaces where dangerously high-risk was enclaved, confined and contained. As a result, subject to the different daily rhythms of life in their various stations (police and fire), barracks (army), mines, trawlers and other extraordinary confinements like casinos, trading-floors and the circus, high-risk specialists were physically set apart from ordinary civilians. They underwent prolonged training, oriented along fundamentally

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different risk-horizons, and shared radically different habitus. Typically, too, masonic exclusions, shop floor rites of passage, sexist and racist restrictions (Lewis 2006; Zaloom 2006) further intensified the barriers to ordinary involvement in these realms of extraordinary risk to the extent that, as a rule, high risk-takers in these societies were (and still are, to a lesser degree) selected for male, heteronormative and indigenous qualities. Therefore, whilst Bunn is right in thinking that the ordinariness of many exceptional modes of modern risk-taking practice derives from an extension of already-generalised skills and drills (rather than the acquisition of transcendental magic or the exclusive transmission of guild-based patrimony), there is a sense though in which such ordinariness of modern technique and orientation come to be combined with sector-specific rationality in the extraordinary confines of these professional realms.

The Migration of High-Risk Activity into Ordinary Spaces and Times Under what circumstances might habitual engagements with extraordinary risk slip out of specialist hands and morph into more general preoccupations? When it does become prevalent, how does ordinary exposure to extraordinary risk tend to re-organise and develop? One observation is that high-end risk-taking tends to de-specialise once significant threat is culturally relocated from being outside realms of existence to being interior, and from being inside, anomalous, eventful and pathological to being processual and intrinsic. This cosmological passage seems to quietly premise much of the important contemporary sociological discourse on risk and uncertainty which theoretically links amplifications of risk and insecurity to core techno-economic and socio-cultural process. Thus, both the uncontrollability and unknowability of sideeffects in ‘the second modernity’ (Beck 1992, 1999) and the growing ontological uncertainty of citizens in ‘post-traditional and late’ modernity (Giddens 2013a, b) theoretically normalise risk as an emergent and spectral condition of contemporary being. The inherent presence and production of extraordinary risk in ordinary realms manifests in different ways.

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Thus, sometimes the cultural internalisation of risk is indistinct: for instance, where significant threat is externally generated but, increasingly, in conditions where its inward trajectories are indigenised. Thus, whilst its theological and other influences might be seen to be located abroad, terror increasingly appears as the violent practice of domestic converts and, even more, as the destructive force of a distributed material culture turned perversely against its regular users. In effect, the terror trope imperceptibly slides away from an imagery of demonised others towards a portraiture of ordinary objects that become suspect: of rucksack fabrics exploding horrifically inside themselves (Asad 2007), of buildings collapsing in on their occupants, of cars morphing as bombs (‘Am I sitting in an aeroplane or a bomb?’) and of trucks as bulldozers. Indeed, like the magical wardrobe into Narnia or Alice’s looking-glass into Wonderland (though these were portals to enchanted inner realms), ordinary objects begin to dimensionally double-up. Buses, metro-trains, aeroplanes, rucksacks, computers and bottles of water function as they should but simultaneously present in parallax as vectors of extraordinary threat. The once-external threat has now become ingrained in the very ordinary object-world of late-modernity. A similar process seemed to be taking place in the early stages of the Syrian civil war when, as Shackelford shows, calculated resistance emerged in city neighbourhoods and protesters drafted everyday objects into the developing struggle. Subversive recordings were carefully placed in litterbins, kid’s scrawled graffiti onto walls, Facebook was used as anonymously as possible to message and post. These tactics combined the visible impact of protest on the ground with minimum risk to resisters. However, in this turbulent context, whilst risk was high in the heart of local neighbourhoods, the ultimate source of the risk was an illegitimate and essentially invasive presence. Thus, in the early months of the civil war, Shackelford shows how the regime infiltrated gatherings at mosques and hacked into social media from the outside. Hidden and unbidden, and increasingly foreign to its own people, the regime became an outsider power even as it intensified repression and amplified threat at the heart of local communities. The ethnographic difference is salient. For, at the heart of risk society specifically, people engage with risk because ‘it is there’ (as the famous mountaineer, George Mallory said of

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his motives for trying to climb Everest in the 1920s): because it beckons or because it inescapably co-habits. By contrast, in places like contemporary Syria, ordinary people defiantly take risks close to home to combat the risk posed by an enemy who precisely should not be there. There is perhaps a world of difference between the ordinary ‘there-ness’ of extraordinary risk that has become structural, and the unwelcome otherness of extraordinary risk that has invaded ordinary life but is structurally anomalous. Another real shift in the geography of risk spans the field of contemporary medicine where, as Emily Martin (1995) points out, even where infection is down to the pathogenic action of ‘foreign bodies’, latemodern disease appears increasingly and primarily as the product of weak immunity, auto-immune responses (as in AIDS) or self-destructive excess (as in cancer). In these lethal fields, the primary focus of risk perception passes from the external source of attack to the mal-behaviour of internal mechanisms. Swee shows how, similarly for the ecosphere, contemporary Far North Queenslanders draw a distinction between cyclones tied to a familiar cycle—which seem to arise inside of their world of anticipated threat and habitual responses—and hurricanes tied to newly evolving ‘climate change’ which, not arriving ‘on time’, seem foreign and excessively unpredictable. This example shows that the tendency to think risk as internal to late-modern process is not culturally absolute. Indeed, a populist politics of national sovereignty now seems devoted to building walls precisely to re-establish the foreign-ness of risk and, as its primary aim, to purge the Nation of inner risks, instabilities and threats. This refusal to politically contemplate the normality of high risk in ordinary life is perhaps defining of this new national populism and of what it wants ‘sovereignty’ to mean. A further factor in the altered imagined geography of risk is that generic global threats—like pandemic, terror and climate change—tend to morph in their nature when they spread from distant sources to merge with local environments. A good example is that of the 2018 nerve agent attack in the UK city of Salisbury, which, whilst emanating from an external politico-military source and drawing national attention on this political basis, nonetheless became a serious environmental problem in

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Salisbury. (Of course, it also remained a specifically international political problem for the UK government!) Technically, whilst the epicentre of the risk was located in cordoned-off areas, the risk of the liquid novichok being present anywhere in the town was big enough to generally change townspeople’s ordinary behaviour. The environment became the problem. In these circumstances, ordinary people may creatively supplement— and not just popularly oppose—the practice of official specialists (as, for example, with ‘citizen science’ and ‘neighbourhood watch’). And, sometimes, such devolution of practice to ordinary actors is masked and hidden. Thus, when patients with incurable conditions struggle to obtain high-risk experimental treatments, they increasingly attract popular support but find themselves at loggerheads with official testing regimes and ethics committees. However, Blasimme shows that, because the segregated state of exception claimed by those who are clinically untreatable replicates the institutional segregation and state of exception of official medicine itself, the struggles of these desperate patients often resonate with prevailing moral orders, inside as well as outside the medical establishment. The extraordinary recourse to higher risk treatments gives these desperate patients access to an ‘altogether extraordinary epistemology that allows them to see hope precisely where medicine foregoes it’ (Blasimme), whilst also gaining traction in established medical channels. So that, even where the science underpinning special pleading is called into question, there is still a chance that the medical establishment itself can be turned.

Edgework and the Ordinary Extraordinary Several of the contributors to this volume describe individuals, communities and organised groups who, exposed to significant threats, live ‘on the edge’, close to the limits of living. Far from being panicked and paralysed, these actors divert nascent anxiety into considered organisation and technical defence, grounded within ongoing structures of living. It is the simultaneity of the ordinary and the extraordinary, of life as usual and looming catastrophe, that frequently bolsters imagery of ‘the edge’. For,

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on the edge, the feeling is of occupying ground that is stable but only just, of being knowingly close to the limits without tipping. This observation prompts the question as to whether the normalisation of dwelling in the face of possible disaster is usefully conceived as edgework? Stephen Lyng (this volume and elsewhere Lyng 1990, 2004) has specified edgework as voluntary non-ordinary risk-taking, consistently focusing attention upon actors who construct and negotiate specific manifestations of the edge. Critically, the perspective singles out edgework as practice positioned between over-regulation and reckless abandon, crystallised as a careful resistance to surplus regimentation through the performance of carefully calibrated, technical scenarios that gain singular meaning in relation to their edge. The analytical value of the edgework approach stems from its insistence that, whilst quasi-ecstatic experiences such as ‘rush’, ‘buzz’ (Midol 1993) or ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi 2000; Turner 1982) may well be the stated attractions of some extreme practice in the packaged ‘experience economy’, the elements of any edgework are scrupulously assembled to maintain perilous position in boldly calculated play that is work: technical, physiological and psychological work. Though only Bunn (on mountaineering) probably depicts what Lyng and others have classically typified as edgework, nearly all contributors to this volume focus upon the considered actions of subjects who engage at the limits of secure existence and ordinary dwelling, whose very lives therefore are indubitably on the edge. For these subjects, significant threat pervades all fronts simultaneously, edgework is involuntary, and this ‘total relation’ seems to place all of existence on the line. Consequently, whereas the striking aspect of Lyngian edgework is the quest undertaken from mundane realms to locate, construct and incorporate extraordinary risk, involuntary dwelling on the edge appears extraordinary for precisely the opposite reason: namely, that, in circumstances that seem to defy any normality at all, risk assessment, tactics, techniques and defiant gestures often become habituated and regularised. From the standpoint of this comparative study, voluntary edgework then appears as a special case defined as much by its late-modern conditions of emergence—in societies where the proximity of non-ordinary

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risk is no longer thought anomalous—as by its protagonists’ commitment to find a defining edge in-between the heights of reckless abandon and excessive constraint. This suggests that relevant context always ‘overdetermines’ the particular logics of extraordinary risk-taking, adding overall socio-cultural meaning to any particular corpus of edgework. In fact, the singular status of edgework as an expanding feature of risk society is thrown into clearer relief if adventure is tracked through modern times. The exploration of the extreme margins of Earth (moon, sky, mountains, magnetic poles, caves, ocean and deep-sea trenches) was undertaken as a convergence of epic pursuit in adverse Nature and the triumphalism of sovereign modern powers who sponsored and were glorified in expeditions. Though general population read avidly about these exploits or, later on, enthusiastically watched broadcasts of moonlandings (as Lyng observes of Bunn’s paper), practitioners mostly came from privileged strata. These deeds took place vicariously in a space beyond the public’s direct experience. Nowadays though, the elite ‘conquest’ of savage nature has become radically democratised, mountaineering offering a graphic example. Looping back from the margins, most climbing now occurs in ordinary communities, artificially in urban climbing centres rather than on real mountains. In the process, the practice has mutated from epic pursuit in the name of human sovereignty over Nature into routine recreation for anyone (Bell and Lyell 2002), pitting mastery of technique against graded scales of difficulty and instability, but sovereignty over nothing. This metamorphosis even rebounds back to the Big Ranges where peak ascents are routinely packaged and commodified (Palmer 2010; Krakauer 2011). The result is that, no longer a ‘conquest’, an imperial spectacle and a constant source of heroic narrative, late-modern climbing and other extreme sports have come to manufacture and to widely internalise microcosms of the marginal edge in communities. As a result, on the precarious instabilities of walls, boards, artificial waves and the streets (with marathon and parkour), edge-workers flex ordinary bodies and sensibilities to sensible limits, topographically extending forms of ordinary living to extraordinary limits. It is telling, too, as if by way of verification, that this striking democratisation of non-ordinary risk-taking has begun to strangely

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attract protagonists from other social sectors (e.g., charity, ‘personal development’ and health) whose memberships find in the scenarios of edgework morals and metaphors for their own practice. In effect, edgework has (also) become exemplary and ‘applied’ and, in various ways, its meaning and possibilities have become transferable to the riskiness of involuntary states. With this convergence, the risk-taking of ordinary people and the spread of extraordinary forms to ordinary spaces merges meaningfully into one. ∗ ∗ ∗ The ordinary extraordinary addressed in this volume suggests a bifocal examination—of the significant risk-taking of ordinary people, on the one hand, and the spread of non-ordinary risk-taking to ordinary spheres, on the other. A question that might be worth asking then is: how do these different gazes inter-relate? In one sense, these gazes are fashioned and authorised by loaded concepts and so are not naturally twinned. They emerge from different theoretical traditions and alight on quite different phenomena for good reason. However, simply from the standpoint of empirical breadth as well as theoretical interest, it is no bad thing that these perspectives— the one problematising official frameworks of risk management, the other seeking to supplement existing theories of risk society and edgework—co-exist in a single volume. Together, these perspectives broaden awareness of the capacity of ordinary actors to deal with extraordinary risk in logical ways and highlight, too, the range of forms in which high levels of risk come to be socially normalised. From a different comparative standpoint though, the contributions to the volume suggest the modelling of a variable formation in which the extraordinary risk-taking of ordinary people and the ‘becoming-ordinary’ of extraordinary risks signal different social materialisations of risk, each a topological formation in which risk presents in substantively different modes. In the one case, risk appears as an external threat and spectral presence that has to be negotiated by human subjects who converge upon its structural manifestations as generic risk-takers. Confronted with such spectral risk, the extraordinary risk-taking of human actors can be

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adequately composed of ordinary logics, imported across social domains and tactically brought to bear upon the singular risk. The risk logics of these human risk-takers are extensions of existing techniques and dispositions. In the other case, risk manifests at less of a distance, is less ghoulish, more material, more an intrinsic part of the human world that generates and fashions it. The risk-taking of actors is then risk-taking within structures that are omnipresent and so is defined more by particular affordance of the ‘risk object’ than, so to speak, by the tool-kit brought from back-stage. Collectively, contributors to this volume provide typologies of both manifestations, exploring implicitly both the ordinary ‘there-ness’ of extraordinary risk that has become omnipresent and structural, and the unwelcome otherness and anomaly of extraordinary risk which ordinary actors have to engage as danger gravitates towards them. This would seem to open up another fertile field of study within the crucial domain of risk. Needless to say, the introductory task is not one of generalising inductively from all of the contributions, impoverishing the diversity of their analyses (indeed we use their ethnographic detail as well as their substantive insights as an analytic springboard to formulate our ideas). Rather, the hope is that the conceptual elaboration attempted in this introduction can illuminate the particular cases in ways that recursively nuance and deepen what can theoretically be said of the ‘ordinary extraordinary’.

Organisation of the Book Though ethnographically grounded, Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives embraces anthropology, sociology, psychology and medicine, carving out an interdisciplinary approach to the topic. One consequence of this amalgamation is a diversity of ethnographic practice as well as a spread of literatures. For example, Bunn, Kolling, Su, Trueba and Swee relied heavily on participant-observation (with various degrees of visceral engagement), Gugg relied a lot on ‘walking interviews’, Shackelford on observation, interviews and Facebook, whilst Blasimme on online accounts produced by patients.

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Moreover, to enrich the interdisciplinary conversation between the contributors, the book is divided into three thematic parts, containing chapters accompanied by commentaries written by scholars coming from different disciplinary backgrounds to that of the chapters’ authors. We asked the commentators to reflect on the contributions through the prism of their own research. In response to this call, Lyng expands on the notions of edgework and action, Sen opens up a discussion of risk and defiance, and Henwood comments on the ‘intelligibility’ of pragmatic response to non-ordinary risk. We think that this additional layer of reflection carries added value, encouraging the emergence, in the words of Anna Tsing (2015) of ‘the ‘something extra’ in those [ethnographic] descriptions – beyond theoretical argument – inspire[ing] new thought and new argument’. Mindful of the non-linear nature of the earlier sections focused on how the individual contributions illuminate what we mean by ‘ordinary extraordinary’, here we offer a more streamlined overview of the book’s contents. Part One, Self-Constitution: Defiance, endurance and choice, revolves around the ways people exercise various forms of agency under otherwise constraining circumstances, be it due to omnipresent violence or regulation. In all the contexts presented in this part, the people involved face death or serious damage to their health on a daily basis. Under such circumstances, risks are continuously calculated, redefined or embraced, thus opening ways to control life trajectories and relationships in the uncertain situations. Marie Kolling’s chapter discusses how women in an impoverished area of the Brazilian city of Recife endure their day-to-day under conditions of pervasive violence caused by state-led redevelopment of the area. Kolling analyses how residents navigate shifting spaces of danger using sensory and quotidian practices of knowing as a way of pragmatically enduring pervasive insecurity. Mei Trueba’s chapter focusses on miners in the Bolivian town of Potosí who navigate a number of physical and socio-economic risks over which they often have little or no control. Trueba explores the miners’ different perceptions of risk to understand how taking health risks at work becomes a strategy to manage a wider array of simultaneous risks. Alessandro Blasimme analyses narratives surrounding clinical risk in regenerative medicine in the context of controversies over the

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provision of yet unproven stem cell therapies in the US and in Italy. He shows how extraordinary epistemology of clinical risk while departing from the ordinary framing of risk in medicine and medical experimentation, also bears continuities with the conceptual and symbolic world from which it seeks to separate. In her commentary Atreyee Sen brings these three contributions together with the aid of her own research among Tibetan prisoners in Dharamsala. She shows that spaces of politically, economically and otherwise ‘invisibilised’ risk are nevertheless brimming with defiance as people fight to reclaim control over their ‘bodies, memories and destinies’. Part Two, Shifting Dangers: Macro and Micro Politics of Risk, considers the ways in which risk becomes a tool of experimentation in the extension of everyday life and actions. Both in situations of political protest and in climbing, new possibilities open up (but can also be foreclosed) either in terms of reformulation of human-nonhuman relationships, forms of human collectivity or perimeters of the everyday. In this sense, taking and defining risk becomes a political project of proclaiming anew what is possible and permissible. Julie Sheckleford explores the shifting calculus of everyday risk within the new normal of the crisis in Syria that has ravaged the country since 2011. Sheckleford examines the ways in which not only conceptions of risk have shifted as the protest escalated into an outright war but also how the otherwise ordinary objects and spaces have taken on new threatening qualities. Matthew Bunn explores the qualities of habitus on the edge and its relationship to the ordinary, neoliberal world. He shows how the risks of climbing are made sensible through the slow inculcation of a perceptual schema adjusted to making sense of vertical environments. In his commentary on these two contributions Stephen Lyng draws attention especially to ‘the barrier of fear’ that has to be overcome if these kinds of actions are to take place effectively, stressing that fear itself is not conquered as a result, but emotionally processed and technically positioned. He also highlights the inevitably variable relation to ‘action’ (Goffman) exhibited by nonordinary risk-takers of different background and social situation, some seeking control, others embracing chaos. Part Three, Environmental Threat and Cultural Possibility: Risk and the Contemporary City, focusses on lives that develop in environments

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framed by either defining natural phenomena or strictly upheld, conspicuous social norms. Chapters in this part explore the interplay between interpretations of risk and the construction of present and future modes of life. Janine Su explores the experiences of young men in the touristic Sultanahmet district of Istanbul whose masculine selfhood is defined by their capacity for freedom of movement. Arguing for differentiation between ‘mobility’ and ‘migration’, Su shows how the young men’s projects of self-actualisation as mobile citizens become ‘unintelligible’ and therefore risky. Giovanni Gugg analyses the collective response to volcanic risk locally developed by the residents of San Sebastiano al Vesuvio at the foothill of the Vesuvius volcano in Italy. He argues for seeing the apparent lack of fear of a future eruption in terms of ‘scotomization’, a defence mechanism that allows for ‘not seeing’ the source of anxiety. Hannah Swee’s chapter investigates how cyclones are experienced as regular, seasonal events in Far North Queensland, a region in the north-east of Australia. By presenting the creative methods that people use to respond to uncertainty and maintain a sense of control, Swee provides insights into how uncertainty is understood in the shortterm as weather events and in the long-term as climate change. In her concluding chapter-cum-commentary, Karen Henwood emphasises the opportunism and pragmatism of response that shapes the ‘emergent ways of living with risk’ portrayed in these three contributions. She also notes the centrality of ‘questions of intelligibility’ to the analyses, and the role to be played by ‘ interpretive ethnography’ in deepening this field.

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Part I Self-Constitution: Defiance, Endurance and Choice

2 ‘Knowing How to Walk’: Risk, Violence and Practices of Endurance in Urban Brazil Marie Kolling

Introduction ‘Here you have to know how to walk’, I was often told by local residents during my field research in an impoverished area of Recife. The term chronic violence (Pearce 2007; Adams 2011a, b) was coined to describe the troubling security situation in Latin America and to capture the new normality in which violence ‘is embedded and reproduced in multiple spaces’ (Adams 2011a, 2). This resonates with the situation in Recife where violence permeates people’s lives in such a way that it has become a life condition and in this sense chronic. In the northern zone of Recife, spatial reconfigurations in the wake of large-scale urban development interventions forged new spaces of violence associated with the ongoing drug trade in the area and contributed to what residents referred M. Kolling (B) Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 ´ B. Switek et al. (eds.), Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83962-8_2

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to as a ‘wave of violence’ that heightened the level of insecurity. However, violence and insecurity prevail regardless of fluctuations in intensity. A city of 1.5 million inhabitants (IBGE 2016) and capital of the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, Recife has consistently had one of Brazil’s highest murder rates since the turn of the century. It was ranked number one among Brazil’s capital cities in 2000, with a homicide rate of 97.5 per 100,000 inhabitants. In 2010, when my field research began, that rate remained high, with 57.9 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants (Waiselfisz 2012). In Recife, the ability to gather information, read danger, assess risks and respond accordingly is known as saber andar, ‘to know how to walk’. Through ethnography exploring the sensory and quotidian practices of ‘knowing how to walk’, I will show how residents navigated these new and shifting spaces of danger. I will discuss the inherent ambiguities of sensing and assessing risk (Boholm 2003; Nygreen et al. 2020) in a ‘hyper-signified’ urban terrain (Vigh 2011). This ethnography advances existing theories on risk by bridging understandings of risk-taking as a state of exception with risk-taking as a mundane practice that can be learned and routinised and even normalised (Zinn 2020). By engaging with studies on transformations of the ordinary (e.g., Borell 2008; Kelly 2008), I examine how violence in ‘peace’ time Brazil has infused everyday life to elucidate the appropriateness of the term ‘violent-ordinary’. In the urban periphery of Recife, the ordinary does not exist in opposition to violence. Violence may be experienced as extraordinary and yet, given its recurrence and omnipresence, it is part of a violent-ordinary with which residents must reckon. In analysing the socio-spatial dynamics of violence in Recife, this chapter also provides insights into urban dynamics that differ from those described in the more commonly studied cities in southeast Brazil, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in particular (McCann 2006; Wolff 2015). With Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985 following 21 years of military dictatorship, the country’s metropolitan areas experienced a dramatic increase in violence and organised crime. By the mid-1990s, murder rates were higher than ever before (Caldeira and Holston 1999; Perlman 2010). Between 1980 and 2010, the Brazilian Ministry of Health registered more than one million homicides (Murray et al. 2013). More recently,

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the rates of reported homicides have been stabilising, but there are regional disparities. In the Northeast, the homicide rates have continued to increase, surpassing the figures for the much wealthier Southeast over a decade ago; this statistic is often overlooked due to the more extensive scholarly production on south-eastern Brazil, which distorts the general conception of the geography of urban violence (Nóbrega Júnior 2010, 2015; UNODC 2013). By providing an account of life in the Northeast of Brazil, one additional goal of this chapter is to at least partially rectify this scholarly misrepresentation.

Learning How to Walk The impoverished area of Recife where this study was undertaken was selected in the early 1990s for comprehensive urban development under the state-led programme Prometrópole, but it was not until the mid-2000s that the interventions began. The Prometrópole programme aimed to benefit a total of 154,000 inhabitants across 13 neighbourhoods (de Souza and Campos 2010). I undertook field research in an area that intersects four of these neighbourhoods. In the 1970s and 1980s, this part of Recife was built by poor migrants from Pernambuco’s countryside and other north-eastern states who were moving to the city in increasing numbers (Fontes and Eichner 2004). Makeshift homes were erected, using different materials ranging from adobe bricks, wood and scrap materials to cinderblock, and many built palafitas—makeshift stilt houses on the water of the rivers that became increasingly contaminated and frequently flooded. Redevelopment aimed to improve living conditions for slum residents by providing urban infrastructure and social housing that would integrate the area and its ‘marginalised population’ into the ‘formal city’ (FIDEM 2000, 11; de Souza and Campos 2010). The demolition of slums began in 2007 and the resettlement of slum dwellers to the new state-built social housing in the area started in 2008 (Nuijten et al. 2012). When I moved there in September 2010, it was still undergoing infrastructural transformations, and families were still awaiting resettlement. When I returned in 2013, the programme was still

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ongoing but much of the work was completed and most of the families had received their new homes. As a newcomer to the neighbourhood, I had to tread cautiously. I did not know the spatial and temporal dynamics of violence, and I stood out as a white, privileged foreigner in a resource-deprived and predominantly Afro-Brazilian community. In Brazil’s metropolitan cities, walking and socialising in the street has long been abandoned by the elite, who move around the city by car, rendering the act of walking a sign of class (Caldeira 1999). Therefore, to position myself in the area, I made an effort to walk with different residents: community leaders, community health workers, workers employed in the slum upgrading projects and ordinary residents such as housewives exercising along a canal. Walking is, according to Michel de Certeau, a spatial practice through which people appropriate the city and its ‘topographical system’ (1984, 97). Through these walks, I became acquainted with the area and residents became acquainted with me. I was usually accompanied by people who were considered ‘good folks’ (gente boa), or those who were morally ascribed to ‘the right side’ of a dual moral divide between good and bad. I walked less often with those on the other side of this divide, who were literally referred to as ‘wrong people’ (pessoas erradas): they were those involved with dealing or using drugs, referred to as ‘wrong things’ (coisas erradas). I also learned how to walk and was often corrected by the residents with whom I was walking for not being vigilant enough, for carrying my bag incorrectly or, sometimes, for bringing a bag at all, which, they believed, increased the likelihood of being robbed. The act and skill of walking became a key methodological entry point to understanding the social and spatial terrain of violence that residents navigate on a daily basis.

New Spaces of Violence During my first walks, I was struck by the area’s rural atmosphere. The resemblances to rural life evoked a tranquil atmosphere, but I was soon to learn that one should not be fooled by the seeming calm. One of my first home visits was in one of the new housing complexes called

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Saramandia. Here I visited Raimunda, a young mother living with her husband and their two-year-old daughter. She was hanging laundry in her front yard, and as I approached her she greeted me and said, ‘ Good you didn’t come yesterday’, as I had had to reschedule my visit. There had been a shootout on Raimunda’s street—right in front of her house—at ten o’clock the previous morning when I had originally planned to visit her. Wondering how I would have handled the situation had I come as planned, I asked how she responded. Raimunda described how she had hidden in the bathroom with her daughter and a neighbour’s child she was babysitting at the time. The walls of the house were thin, so the bathroom was the safest place when there were shootings because it was the only room that did not face the street. When I was leaving, Raimunda walked with me to the end of her street, and as we were saying goodbye, she showed me a bullet hole in the wall from the shooting the day before. She commented—as many other residents I was to befriend would—that I had come during ‘a wave of violence’.1 The intensification of violence was attributed to the reconfiguration of space and its (re-)appropriations by ‘wrong people’. As the urban development interventions proceeded, it produced new housing complexes, new roads and public spaces for leisure activities such as football fields and playgrounds, but also new slums in the area (see Kolling 2017). These sites constituted new (potential) drug territories to be conquered and former territories to be re-negotiated, producing new spaces of violence. Moreover, the infrastructural changes made the area more accessible, which some residents welcomed because it made it easier for police to patrol the area and for family and friends to come visit. But the easier access of vehicles, and thereby outsiders, was also a source of concern because it seemed to increase the drug trafficking, which in turn was seen as bringing even more violence to the community. In Saramandaia, the new football field was not only used by children and youth for sports and other social communal events but it was also appropriated for dealing and consuming drugs, with shootouts occasionally taking place there. During my fieldwork, a 15-year-old was killed by the football field and his 12-year-old brother was injured in a dispute related to the local drug trade. In another of the new social housing complexes, Portelinha, a public square was constructed with a

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playground and benches. When the families had first moved in, illicit bars had been set up on the square. According to Melissa, a woman in her late 20s living with her husband in a house facing the square, there had been loud brega music (a popular music genre in Recife) blasting from these illicit bars where people would get drunk and get into fights. Melissa and her family had witnessed violence and the rapid degradation of the square, which left them deeply disillusioned with their new home, especially when a man was killed right on their doorstep. Home location impacted exposure to violence; occupying a home facing the square made Melissa more vulnerable. Likewise, another resident, Eliana, lived with her husband in a house located on a street corner that had become a drug sales point. Eliana, too, would hide in the bathroom whenever there were shootouts. Like her neighbours, she intended to build a wall to close off the backyard to prevent the dealers from hiding there during shootouts and police raids. What added to their vulnerability to sporadic violence was the fragile construction of the new housing and the particulars of its floorplan. Dona Nilda, who lived in Portelinha with two of her daughters, grandchildren and a great-grandchild, complained that the front door of the house was in the living room. It made the house less safe because, as Dona Nilda complained, when there was violence in the street it easily entered the house. Dona Nilda gave an example of her next-door neighbour, Edson, who, one evening while on drugs, had started acting out in a fit of anger. His brother, who also lived in the house, had tried to stop him, but they got into a fight that continued into the street. When Edson went back into the house to get a knife, the brother and his pregnant wife ran to Dona Nilda’s house to hide. They could hear Edson rage outside and anxiously awaited his moves. Luckily, he did not realise they were hiding in Dona Nilda’s house. ‘If he had found out we were in my house, he would have trashed my house and tried to hurt us all’, Dona Nilda told me. Such violence could and did erupt unexpectedly. A final ethnographic vignette of residents’ efforts to protect themselves amidst such startling incidents of violence is found in Sônia’s attempts to find temporary refuge when she was caught up in shootouts on her way home from church. Sônia is a devout evangelical Christian who was resettled with her husband and five children to the new housing

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in Saramandaia. On one occasion, Sônia and some of her fellow churchgoers were coming out of the church at night when a shootout began. They sought refuge in the church until it had calmed down. Then, when they were close to home, it started again. This time, they took shelter in a neighbour’s house. When they thought things had calmed down, they went back into the street, but then, as Sônia explained: ‘Suddenly the guys came, they were armed, and we entered the house of another neighbour [she laughs]. Then we prayed to the Lord to give us salvation so that nothing would happen to us’. Sônia’s laughter as she tells the story was typical of the casual attitude towards violence in its aftermath, a phenomenon also documented by other scholars of everyday life in Brazilian favelas. In her ethnography on the use of laughter and humour in storytelling among residents in a favela in Rio de Janeiro, Donna Goldstein (2003) suggests that the absurdity of the laughter is congruous to the absurdity of the conditions under which people live. It reveals a recognition of the absurd situation at times when there is ‘nothing left to do but to laugh’ (2003, 39). Residents were exposed to danger and violent events in their daily lives both at home and in the street, at daytime and night-time, alone and with friends, family or fellow churchgoers. It was crucial to know how to walk—or whether to run, hide and pray. Unlike other scholarly work on the experiences of violence in resource-deprived communities in Latin America, I find it more useful to focus on endurance rather than on people’s attempts to establish a sense of security and order (e.g., Caldeira 2000; Cavalcanti 2007; Jakobsen 2011; Penglase 2014; Risør 2010). I distinguish between enduring insecurity and seeking security. I argue that in this part of Recife, life was experienced as fundamentally insecure. Thus, these practices—to run, hide and pray—should be understood as practices of endurance.

Brutal Killings and Brazil’s Crack Epidemic It was not merely the pervasive urban transformations with new housing projects, public spaces and paved roads that generated new spaces of violence and, by extension, new modes of endurance (such as hiding in

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bathrooms of the new houses). Changing dynamics in the drug trade also attributed to the new dynamics of violence. In 2010, it was mainly marijuana that was sold and consumed in the area, sometimes openly in public spaces. Cocaine, and pedra, or crack cocaine, were also present, but less commonly consumed in plain view. Crack arrived in Brazil in the late 1980s and became rampant in Recife around 2003, a development connected to changes in global drug consumption and trafficking routes (Noto et al. 2003; de Oliveira and Nappo 2008). Recife has been a central transit point for cocaine from the Andean Region to a growing European market (UNODC 2011, 119, 122; Diario de Pernambuco 2010, C1). Crack use has continued to explode in Brazil, propelling politicians and scholars to declare an epidemic in both Brazilian and international media (Antunes 2010; Dias et al. 2011; Diogo 2011; Garmany 2013). When I returned to Recife in 2013, there had been another change in the pattern of drug consumption. Glue had also become popular, and young men and boys were sniffing it openly by the football field in Saramandaia. Crack (as well as glue) are associated spatially with deprived inner-city centres in Brazil, many of which have an area where crack users gather, referred to as ‘crackland’ (Cracolândia) (see Frúgoli and Spaggiari 2011; Rui 2013). In Recife it had also become prevalent in the urban periphery. Marcus, an owner of a hair salon, had lived in the area most of his life. He observed the changes in violence and related them to the emergence of crack and the paradoxical correlation between the urban renewal and the intensification of violence: There wasn’t always all this drug trafficking here. It’s after the crack arrived. First, there was only Lydia’s marijuana boca [drug sales point] at the farthest end of the favela, but today it’s everywhere. They sell at home and on the street. It was much calmer before, less killings and less imprisonments. Today, the majority of the boys that I grew up with are in prison or have been killed. I already saw a lot of people die here, I think I saw more than fifteen! People I literally saw being killed and everybody running and all that. [...] They sell on my street, in front of my house and my salon, in the street that has been paved and is looking all pretty.

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The dealers were involving Marcus not only by selling crack in front of his hair salon but by hiding their drugs in his salon when police appeared. Marcus knew the dealers, who were from the community, but he did not dare confront them: ‘If you confront them [the drug dealers] they might kill you, even if you have known them all your life and have that friendship. You have to be cautious and dance to their music. If you don’t, you might get yourself killed because nowadays they really kill’. Marcus’ perception that violence had gotten worse, and that the drug dealers were more prone to kill, was widely shared. There was a popular saying that ‘the traficante (drug dealer or drug lord) does not forgive, he kills’. Indeed, studies focussing on crime in Recife have shown that the proliferation of crack in the city brought about an unprecedented increase in criminal and lethal violence (Wolff 2015). It is also documented that homicide is the most common cause of death among crack users in Brazil (Dias et al. 2011; Ribeiro et al. 2006). Killings were performed in very brutal ways. Young men and women were not only shot; there were incidences where victims were stoned to death. One interlocutor, Wesley, had witnessed a man being beaten to death with a baseball bat in broad daylight. Dona Nilda’s daughter-inlaw was murdered in her home while asleep and while her two children were sleeping in the house as well. The children now lived with Dona Nilda. One of the first interviews I conducted was with a woman whose son had taken nine bullets, five of them to his head. He had miraculously survived and was now recovering in hiding. She explained the shooting as a random act of violence by the next-door drug traffickers, but according to the local gossip, the son was involved in the drug trade. In Recife, both dealers and users were an immediate source of violence and homicide, as were the police, who in Brazil are responsible for up to 14% of the homicides committed each year (Human Rights Watch 2009; Ramos and Lemgruber 2004). A local taxi driver, Anderson, whose services I frequently used, witnessed the killings of a young couple one night on his doorstep. The perpetrators were police, who removed the bodies of the ‘suspected’ drug dealer and his girlfriend, but not the blood. It was smeared all over Anderson’s front door, leaving him and his wife to clean it up before their young daughters had to leave for school early in the morning.

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In her book, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (2011), Elizabeth Povinelli discusses the intertwinement of endurance and exhaustion in what she refers to as zones of social abandonment and excess. Povinelli writes that: ‘[t]he state only rarely exercises its right to kill. Instead it directs life, letting those who wish to swim against the tide do so until they cross a line or exhaust themselves’ (2011, 118). In this part of Brazil, as in so many urban peripheries of the country, the state did kill. But as Povinelli describes, it was also letting people die. As for the living, there was little help to be found in trying to change the status quo. Nancy Scheper-Hughes similarly discusses the issue of ‘dispensable lives versus lives worth saving’ (2015, 4) and the normalisation of violence in Northeast Brazil. It fosters an attitude of resignation and a ‘social consensus towards devaluing certain forms of human life’ (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004, 22). Such an attitude was also prevalent in this area of Recife, manifested most clearly when lives were lost due to involvement in drug-related crime. Drug users and dealers were considered to have entered ‘a one-way street’ and expected to ‘either end up in jail or the graveyard’. They were rarely grieved beyond their immediate families and mainly by their female relatives, who did not mourn in public and received little—if any— sympathy in the community. In view of these conditions under which life is lived and the violent-ordinary endured, I now turn to examine the residents’ quotidian and sensory practices of knowing how to walk and the ambiguities of sensing and assessing risk. I start by presenting an ethnographic case of middle-aged women who teamed up for weekly power walks along a canal.

Communal Power Walks and the Ambiguity of Danger The women met at 7:30 p.m. The choice of walking time was carefully thought through. It was too hot during the day, and although one could exercise around five in the morning when the temperature was still cool enough, the women reasoned that it was too risky because at this time of day burglars were around, especially those stealing car tires. I was

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also informed that the police usually made their arrests at daybreak so it was better not to be around at that time. There was also a consensus in the area that 9 p.m. was already late to be out, and by 10 p.m. the streets were usually deserted, used only by ‘those who were up to no good’. This exemplifies how part of the ‘knowing’ is the ability to assess risks, which requires a comprehensive understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of violence. The road by the canal where we walked was previously a site of approximately 500 homes that had been demolished as part of the urban development interventions (Koster and Nuijten 2012). In the new shared public space, the women had taken up this new activity of communal evening exercise. At this time of the evening, children also played by the canal, biking or flying kites. Food stands sold grilled corn, hot dogs or beiju.2 On one corner, a group of elderly men gathered every evening to play dominos. Further down, a group of women would bring out plastic chairs and chat. Across from them on the other side of the canal, a Pentecostal church held communion several days a week with loud gospel music and preaching. In several specific places along the canal, on its northern and quieter stretch, young men would meet to smoke marihuana and listen quietly to reggae tunes. In a more isolated spot on our walking route, a group of boys, around 12–15 years old, hung out with friends and girlfriends, dealing drugs. During this part of the walk, the women would lower their voices and become discreetly observant or stop talking altogether. The pace of the walks was not too fast, since much of the time was spent gossiping, including about the latest violent events that seemed to be of just as much—if not more—interest than burning calories. This was, for instance, how I found out that a man had been shot dead that same morning on a lot on the other side of the wall of my courtyard. I had been home when the killing had taken place, but I had not heard a thing. The women knew all the details, as people usually did: the exact time it had taken place, the exact location, the motive, the victim and who ordered the killing (see Fig. 2.1). Local residents had to be updated on the latest gossip on violence and disputes in order to be alert to the shifting spaces of danger and adapt their movements accordingly—and this is what the women would do.

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Fig. 2.1 The meeting point by the canal for the evening walks, October 2010 (Photo by author)

The standard route was to walk all the way down one side of the canal and then return along the other side, but with their insider knowledge of the latest violent events, the women changed the route nearly every time. On one evening, a killing had taken place on an empty construction site on the northern end of the canal, so we did not walk to that end. We also avoided that end on another occasion, because of the threat of a counterattack. Sometimes the route was determined according to who was walking since different women had different opinions about which end of the canal they thought was less safe. This indicated that assessing risk was an ambiguous matter subject to negotiation and interpretation, which I return to shortly. One way to read danger was through the ability to interpret the soundscape. It was, for example, important to be able to distinguish fireworks from gunshots and, if it was the latter, to assess how close they were to one’s location. Fireworks were frequently used for celebrating victories in football and during religious ceremonies of both Catholic and Afro-Brazilian traditions. Another way to read danger was through the

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interpretation of an atmosphere evoked by the presence or absence of certain people or objects. One evening, after we had been walking for about 20 minutes, we reached one of the spots where young men would usually sit quietly and smoke marihuana. Luciana, one of the three core members of the walking group, pointed out that it was suspicious that they had parked their motorbikes on the pavement across from where they were sitting. The expense of the motorbikes, and the fact that their owners did not come on foot, indicated that they were not from the neighbourhood. There was something about them and their waiting in the street, Luciana said, that signalled something was up. ‘Dá medo’ she said about the young men: their presence invoked fear. Suddenly, the lovely evening atmosphere of leisure and communal socialising was gone, and we became attentive and tense. First, Luciana cut the route short. Soon we gave up the walk altogether and hurried home. Whether something happened that evening, I never found out, but knowing how a tranquil atmosphere could change in a split second, we did not take any chances. The notion of hyper-vigilance proposed by Henrik Vigh (2011) is useful here to unpack the expression ‘to know how to walk’. Vigh use the term to describe how former militiamen navigate high political instability caused by changing regimes and ethnic and family allegiances in Guinea-Bissau’s capital city. These circumstances create a social hypervigilance that saturates social relations and ‘leads to the world becoming hyper-signified, so that every political gesture or utterance is interpreted as a possible sign of oncoming conflict’ (Vigh 2011, 98). This resembles the sensory and quotidian practices of the people I befriended in Recife as they navigated the unstable terrain where they lived, interpreting signs of oncoming violence. In the scenario by the canal presented above, it was the presence of certain people and motorbikes that was ‘read’ as a potential threat. Other times it was the absence of people that meant danger. Different women interpreted signs differently, which makes evident the inherent ambiguity of assessing risk and perhaps even more so in a ‘hyper-signified’ (Vigh 2011) urban environment. Residents’ ongoing interpretations of danger and hyper-vigilance find resonance in Åsa Boholm’s (2003) description of risk as relational. Boholm argues that we should consider risk not as a

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phenomenon in itself and as such it is not an intrinsic property of things. It is perceived, interpreted and produced in contexts that link ‘an object of risk (a source of potential harm), an object at risk (a potential target of harm) and an evaluation (implicit or explicit) of human consequences’ (2003, 175). In this way, Boholm argues that we can think of risk as a relational order. This concept useful in understanding how ‘knowing how to walk’ in Recife encompasses embodied and subjective tactical responses to risk. One had to ‘know how to talk’, which required particular skills and knowledge in order to sense danger (c.f. Zinn 2020, 118). Still, the question of when and where to walk, or when to return home, was an ambiguous matter. It was subject to people’s social position in the ‘relational order’ (Boholm 2003), and their subjective interpretation of signs of possible oncoming violence and appropriate responses. Nygreen et al. (2020) sum up this dynamic ambiguity of risk and its relation to individual experience in their work on intersectional risk theory. They propose that risk always exists in different viewpoints from which we evaluate whether there is or could be a threat. Views differ on how to assess and consider a possible threat, and even more when it comes to particular judgements on the relevance, meaning, and implications of available risk information as well as which actions to consider. This is because our understanding of risk is dependent on the time and the context in question, based on norms, ideologies, and individual experience. (2020, 159)

From this analysis of the inherent ambiguities of sensing and assessing risk in an urban setting of omnipresent and often unpredictable violence, I now turn to a discussion on how these sensory and quotidian practices inform the notion of the ordinary. When walking around the canal for weekly exercise, the women attempted to assert the ordinary even as the circumstances conspired to undermine it. In response, they often had to adjust the routes, shorten them or cancel them altogether.

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Towards a Conception of the Violent-Ordinary In this chapter, it has been my intention to portray the violent-ordinary from the perspective of residents who are not contributing to the production of violence and who are not intended targets of violence. I have primarily presented experiences of women, but I use their stories to illustrate a general condition affecting both men and women who live amidst the violence and endure the unsettling insecurity and uncertainty it generates. My objective has not been to provide a gendered analysis, although the vulnerability of violence is, indeed, distributed in gendered ways. One example of this is that people involved with drugs and the drug trade in particular are more likely to become targets (and perpetrators) of violence. More men than women are involved, and the main victims of homicide in Brazil are young black men (de Araújo et al. 2010; Waiselfisz 2012, 2015). I have presented ethnographic accounts of women socialising through exercise and women caught up in shootouts returning from church or at home taking care of children, all scenarios which are gendered. More women than men attend the evangelical church services, and more women than men are not part of the workforce in Brazil; women likewise spend more time than men at home undertaking domestic chores (Banco Central do Brasil 2018). However, I use these examples to show that the sensory and quotidian practices of ‘knowing how to walk’ is a way of pragmatically enduring the insecurity of the day-to-day. I also presented ethnographic accounts in which the experience of violence did not depend on gender. I described families of men and women that lived or worked next to a drug salespoint, exposing all members to increased violence. I recounted the stories of two different families living in different parts of the community that witnessed a killing on their doorsteps. Collectively, the accounts I have presented in this chapter make the case for a conceptualisation of the ‘violent-ordinary’ endured by both men and women, even though some manifestations reveal gendered implications. I have suggested that we need to distinguish between enduring insecurity and seeking security. While these could be interpreted merely as two sides of the same coin, in this particular area of Recife, life is experienced as fundamentally insecure. This sense of precarity and uncertainty also

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permeates social reality in relation to other aspects of life such as employment, income, love, health and politics. Insecurity, and the omnipresent risk of violence, has taken its toll on daily life in such a manner that it has transformed everyday life into a ‘violent-ordinary’, which has, in turn, generated a particular sociality. This sociality is enacted in ‘knowing how to walk’ and other practices of endurance described in this chapter, such as hiding in the bathroom during a shootout or quietly cleaning up the blood of victims killed by the police, as Anderson and his wife did before their daughters were leaving for school in the morning. It is also enacted in the storytelling infused with dark humour as people narrate their experiences, and in the binary moral discourse of good and bad people and acts. It is clear in the way lives of people involved in ‘bad things’ were devalued—deemed undeserving of grief and care (see Kolling 2020). ‘Knowing how to walk’ by deciding when and where to walk, or when to return home, are adaptations to risk in an environment of heightened insecurity and unpredictability. These practices are learned, routinised and even become normalised in what Klas Borell (2008) has characterised as ‘crisis normalisation’. In his study of the ‘wave of terror’ (mainly car bombs) in Beirut in 2005, he shows how the wave of terror affected people’s perceptions of risk and made people change their daily routines and try to ‘recreate some kind of “normality”’ (Borell 2008, 67). Over time, such changes became routinised and normalised. Other scholars have likewise shed light on adaptions to risk during armed and military conflict in which continuous exposure to violence reshapes people’s geographies of the city (Fawaz et al. 2012) and its riskscapes (Lundgren 2017). Dorota Woroniecka-Krzyzanowska (2014) focusses on Palestine to explore people’s efforts to normalise the experience of crisis and exposures to new risks. She describes how suspending everyday life becomes a form of resistance during the first intifada while maintaining everyday activities functions as resistance during the second intifada. There are similarities across these contexts and in relation to Recife. In all of these contexts, people adapt to the risk of violence and take risks under conditions in which they have little control. But there are also important differences. In Recife, multiple forms of violence have encroached on the city for decades, and while people can identify the perpetrators of

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violence, its many causes are much more obscure. These changes have occurred in times of peace and democracy and without a clear ‘before’ and ‘after’ to measure ‘normality’ against and attempt to ‘restore’. The notion of a violent-ordinary thus helps to distinguish between how people may experience violence in daily life in times of armed conflict, and how they experience a context where violence predominates in times of peace. In the concluding section, I attend to this task in relation to Tobias Kelly’s work on the notion of the ordinary during the second Palestinian intifada (2008).

Conclusions In Kelly’s ‘ethnography of armed conflict’ (2008, 353), he explores the meanings of the ordinary in the midst of the second intifada in Palestine by showing how people aspire to the ordinary—a mundane, everyday life in which people can work, marry and make a life for themselves free from the problems brought by armed conflict. Kelly finds that in the recently growing number of armed conflict ethnographies there has been a tendency to overemphasise violence while ignoring the mundane nature of most political conflicts. Kelly argues that ‘in order to understand how people live through violence, an examination of the ordinary is just as important as the apparently extraordinary or exceptional’ (ibid., 253). He continues: ‘[T]he intifada is probably little different from many armed conflicts, from the Congo to Columbia. More time is spent watching TV, waiting for buses or preparing food than it is shooting guns, hiding in basements or burning houses’ (ibid.). I share Kelly’s approach of studying everyday life and focussing on the mundane to understand how people live through violence. In Recife, too, people spend plenty of time waiting for the bus and watching TV. However, it is exactly in these moments that the ordinary does not exist in opposition to violence, as Kelly suggests; indeed, the risk of violence is imminent in such everyday situations. The violence from the street or a stray bullet could enter the house while one is watching TV just as one could easily be in the street, waiting for the bus, when violence erupts.

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There was such an unpredictability to the violence that even though residents were knowledgeable of when and where one should avoid walking, safety was not guaranteed anywhere. Not even at home. Residents are constantly exposed to risk and are thus constantly calculating and taking risks—when exercising around a canal, going to church and even when staying at home, blurring the distinction between ‘taking risks’ and ‘responding to exposure to risk’ (Zinn 2020) and the distinction between ‘violent’ and ‘ordinary’. Instead, I have proposed that people inhabit a ‘violent-ordinary’. At the time of confrontation with violence, it is extraordinary but given its recurrence and omnipresence, it has become a part of a violent-ordinary with which people reckon and endure—and gossip and laugh as they narrate events in which their lives have been at stake. By unfolding the dynamic co-existence of the ordinary and violence, I have attempted to bridge understandings of risk-taking as a state of exception with risk-taking as a part of daily practices that with time and through repetition can become routinised and normalised (Zinn 2020). In the Palestinian context of Kelly’s study there is a particular temporality, a ‘before the uprising’ and a longing for its ‘after’ to begin when envisioning the future. The studies discussed in the section above similarly consider adaptations to risk that aim to cope with continuous exposure to violence during an armed and military conflict. By contrast, violence in Recife is not caused by political conflict or declarations of war. Its more ambiguous nature makes it more difficult to envision an ‘after’. In Recife, residents experienced a wave of violence due to new drugs appearing on the market and new infrastructure that aimed to improve living conditions but produced new spaces of violence. But the proliferation and intensification of violence has taken place for decades, making violence and insecurity a feature of life in Recife regardless of fluctuations in intensity. The perpetrators of violence are not ‘the enemy’; they are typically members of the community or the same police charged with protection who actually pose a threat to civilians. Major risks emerge from within the community, which has been reshaped by infrastructural changes in the built environment and shifting dynamics within the drug trade, both instigated by external regimes.

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Finally, there is also a huge difference in the sheer frequency of violence: homicide rates in Brazil are much higher than in Palestine and many other places of armed conflicts around the world (UNODC 2013, 127, 129). Such statistics and observations challenge our notions of ordinary and violence, peacetime and war, and the category of armed conflict. Violence in ‘peacetime Brazil’, as this chapter has shown, takes its toll on daily life, transforming social relations and modifying modes of existence such as to make the endurance of violence part and parcel of ordinary, everyday living. Acknowledgements I wish to thank the editors of this volume and especially ´ Beata Switek for careful revisions of the manuscript that strengthened the argument. The 2010 fieldwork was conducted under the research project: ‘Power, Force Fields and the Social Construction of Space: An Anthropological Study of Slums in Recife, Brazil.’ It was led by Prof. Nuijten from 2006 to 2011 and funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. During the 2013 fieldwork, I was a Ph.D. student at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. I am grateful to the late Monique Nuijten for the opportunity to do fieldwork in Recife, and I am grateful to all the families in Recife who let me into their homes and lives and so generously participated in my research and looked out for me during my stays in the community.

Notes 1. All quotes are my translations from Portuguese. 2. Beiju is a popular food in North and Northeast Brazil. It is similar to a pancake but made from tapioca, a particularly starchy type of manioc flour, and served hot with sweet or savoury fillings (Fajans 2012).

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Nóbrega Júnior, José Maria Pereira da. 2010. A dinâmica dos homicídios no Nordeste e em Pernambuco. DILEMAS: Revista de Estudos de Conflito E Controle Social 3 (10): 51–74. ———. 2015. Diagnóstico da Violência no Brasil e os Desafios para a Segurança Pública. Revista Espaço Academico: 103–115. Noto, Ana Regina, José Carlos F. Galduróz, Solange A. Nappo, Arilton M. Fonseca, Claudia M.A. Carlini, Yone G. Moura, E.A. Carlini. 2003. Levantamento nacional sobre o uso de drogas entre crianças e adolescentes em situaçäo de rua nas 27 Capitais Brasileiras. São Paulo: Centro Brasileiro de Informações sobre Drogas Psicotrópicas. Nuijten, Monique, Martijn Koster, and Pieter de Vries. 2012. Regimes of Spatial Ordering in Brazil: Neoliberalism, Leftist Populism and Modernist Aesthetics in Slum Upgrading in Recife. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 33 (2): 157–170. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9493.2012.004 56.x. Nygren, Katarina Giritli, Anna Olofsson, and Susanna Öhman. 2020. A Framework of Intersectional Risk Theory in the Age of Ambivalence. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Pearce, Jenny. 2007. Violence, Power and Participation: Building Citizenship in Contexts of Chronic Violence. IDS Working Paper, 274. Penglase, R. Ben. 2014. Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela. Rutgers University Press. Perlman, Janice. 2010. Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro. New York: Oxford University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ramos, Silvia, and Julita Lemgruber. 2004. Criminalidade E Respostas Brasileiras À Violência. Observatório Da Cidadania 8: 45–52. Ribeiro, Marcelo, John Dunn, Ricardo Sesso, Andréa Costa. Dias, and Ronaldo Laranjeira. 2006. Causes of Death among Crack Cocaine Users Causa Mortis Em Usuários de Crack. Revista Brasileira Psiquiatria 28 (3): 196– 202. Risør, Helene. 2010. Twenty Hanging Dolls and a Lynching: Defacing Dangerousness and Enacting Citizenship in El Alto, Bolivia. Public Culture 22 (3): 465–485. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2010-005. Rui, Taniele. 2013. Depois Da ‘Operação Sufoco’: Sobre Espetáculo Policial, Cobertura Midiática E Direitos Na ‘cracolândia’ Paulistana. Dossiê Fronteiras Urbanas 3 (2): 287–310.

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Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2015. Death Squads and Vigilante Politics in Democratic Northeast Brazil. In Violence at the Urban Margins, ed. Javier Auyero, Philippe Bourgois, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190221447.003.0012. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Philippe Bourgois. 2004. Introduction. In Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois. Malden, MA: Blackwell. UNODC. 2011. World Drug Report. Vienna. https://www.unodc.org/docume nts/data-and-analysis/WDR2011/World_Drug_Report_2011_ebook.pdf. ———. 2013. Global Study on Homicide 2013. Vienna. Vigh, Henrik. 2011. Vigilance. On Conflict, Social Invisibility, and Negative Potentiality. Social Analysis 55 (3): 93–114. https://doi.org/10.3167/ sa.2011.550306. Waiselfisz, Julio Jacobo. 2012. Mapa Da Violêcia 2012. São Paulo: Instituto Sangari. http://observatorio.c3sl.ufpr.br/xmlui/handle/123456789/227. ———. 2015. Mapa Da Violência 2015: Mortes Matadas Por Armas de Fogo. Brasilia: Unesco. Wolff, Michael Jerome. 2015. Building Criminal Authority: A Comparative Analysis of Drug Gangs in Rio de Janeiro and Recife. Latin American Politics and Society 57 (2): 21–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-2456.2015.002 66.x. Woroniecka-Krzyzanowska, Dorota. 2014. The Meanings of Ordinary in Times of Crisis: The Case of a Palestinian Refugee Camp in the West Bank. Polish Sociological Review 3 (187): 395–410. Zinn, Jens. 2020. Understanding Risk-Taking. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

3 Risk Negotiations in the Mines of Potosí: Implications for Rethinking Current Health and Safety Approaches Mei L. Trueba

‘I draw little pictures to show them [cooperative miners] what a health risk is so that they learn how to keep safe in the mines’, told me Federico,1 a health and safety expert,2 during one of my visits to the mines. ‘I draw a picture of a man with a helmet on his head and a cartridge of dynamite with a very short fuse in his hand’, he continued, ‘he is bleeding on the floor, and on the top of the picture I write “BOOM!” to indicate the risk of death associated with the miners’ tendency to use fuses that are too short’. ‘The problem is that miners are not used to learning from teachers’, he added, ‘they learn from life experience and from what experienced miners teach to newbies… miners M. L. Trueba (B) Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS), University of Sussex, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 ´ B. Switek et al. (eds.), Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83962-8_3

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don’t want us experts to come and explain to them what an occupational health risk is or how best to prevent it… It is as if they didn’t care about their own safety and wellbeing … Those [miners] only care about extracting the mineral if you ask me… and so they keep on dying in the mine’. Federico’s view is not an isolated one in Potosí, where it is common to hear that miners continuously suffer the devastating consequences of exposure to the health hazards associated with mining because they do not make use of ‘the logic of science’, or because their mineral extraction and health risk management is a ‘non-rational’ one. Indeed, the fact is that the dominant Occupational Health and Safety approach (onwards OHS) has embraced a rational actor paradigm for health and safety risk management according to which it is assumed that an understanding of what constitutes an occupational health and safety risk together with an awareness of its consequences for workers will logically result in the establishment of appropriate risk management strategies within workplaces (see, for instance, Swartz 2001; ILO 2006; Rantanen 2005; Devi 2009; Alli 2008; Burton 2010; Mayer et al. 2015). This assumption in turn informs behaviour-moulding health and safety interventions based on health risk awareness and risk detection training like the one described above. My research in Potosí shows however a much more complex health and safety logic and rationale: one in which work-related health risks are not individually assessed and prioritised according to their likelihood and immediate consequences, but are instead weighed together with all other risks and uncertainties that simultaneously affect miners and their relatives and with the degree of control they all have over all of these. As this chapter demonstrates, miners’ responses to OHS risks are inseparable from these wider concerns. A large body of anthropological and sociological risk research has shown that people often take risks consciously, knowing that they are exposing themselves to possible harm (e.g. Abramson and Fletcher 2007; Lyng 2004; Zinn 2015, 2017; Holmes 2013). As Jamie Cross (2010) and Douglas and Wildavski (1982) point out, people’s risk responses not only have to do with knowledge about the consequences of risk but also with how people weight different risks and prioritise among them

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according to their own life-worlds, concerns and objectives. Furthermore, Cornwall (2007) shows that the relation between risk knowledge and the practical responses to risk management is less straightforward than the OHS model presented above seems to advocate as, for example, making clear-cut, strategic choices is also dependent on having the power to realise them. Accordingly, people’s responses to risk are to be considered through the interaction between the potential physical harms attached to a risk and the social, political and economic factors that shape perceptions of that event (Pidgeon et al. 2003; Trueba 2014). Several authors have in fact argued for the introduction of the immediate social context into scholarly accounts of individual risk-taking (e.g. Lupton 2013a; Tulloch & Lupton 2003; Wynne 1996; Boholm 2015; Caplan 2000; Sauer 2003; Zinn 2020, etc.). As Prentice and Trueba (2018) point out, the immediate and wider socio-economic contexts often act as structural constraints on how people are able to respond to particular risks. Despite such stipulations, both within the OHS domain and within the growing social science literature on risk, the broader socioeconomic circumstances of particular risk perceptions and behaviours remain underexplored. This chapter draws on ethnographic field research in the mines of Potosí to generate a contextualised understanding of individual aspects of perceiving and acting towards OHS risks. With fine-grained attention to how miners negotiate and navigate everyday risks at the workplace I demonstrate that miners take the risks they do, not because they do not understand them, but because they do, and illustrate how their risk choices are profoundly shaped by historical exposure to global market forces and by the associated uncertainties in their daily lives. By ‘connecting social forces with individual sense making’ (Zinn and Olofsson 2019, 15), the chapter demonstrates that the Potosí miners act both knowledgeably and logically. It also illustrates that rather than opposite or incompatible, both understandings of risk, the lay and the expert, are complementary, each providing, as Sauer calls it, ‘an isolated piece of information’ (2003, 13), or a part of an integrated whole. After all, contrary to how institutional risk assessments isolate workers and workplaces in order to cost-efficiently manage OHS risks and the workflow, neither workers nor the sites of their labour are disembedded from the broader social forces and individual lifeworlds (Polanyi

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2001 [1944]). As I will show, the Potosí miners do not just ‘consent to hazard’ (Hall 1996) to maintain identity and protect their job (see also Hall 1999). Instead, they knowingly take risks to their health in order to get through or get by precisely because they need to self-manage multiple risks and uncertainties, of which OHS risks are only one part. Demonstrating the value of workers’ OHS risk perception and the need to integrate abstracted, technical notions of risk with the multiple and changing, embedded, everyday risk notions on the ground, I ultimately show the need for contextualised and participatory approaches to OHS risk management. As a mining enclave, Potosí’s labour market, socio-economic development and welfare provision have all been historically subject to the vagaries of international mineral prices and trade competition. Consequently, widespread and severe poverty and inequality, multiple scarcities and uncertainties have always been a fact of life for most potosinos (Potosí’s inhabitants), with the multiplicative effects of an export-oriented economy deeply affecting all aspects of miners’ lives and livelihoods. In this context of overlapping risks and uncertainties that the miners are not always able to control, as this chapter shows, taking risks to one’s health whilst at work is in fact a risk management strategy that allows the miners to get by. Miners are well aware of the potential losses of taking OHS risks, but also of the potential gains of their decisions. I draw in this chapter on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork (2010–2012) during which I lived and worked with the miners and their families in order to understand how they conceptualised and sought to manage occupational health risks.3 Through an ethnographic account of the various factors, conflicts and circumstances that shape voluntary health and safety risk-taking among the cooperative miners working in Potosí, I explore the complex relationships and negotiations that order the miners’ engagement with health risks as a strategy to get on and get by. In so doing, in this chapter I illustrate the futility of artificially separating the assessment of OHS risks from all the other issues that also affect and concern the miners, and which further shape the miners’ (in)ability to conform to dominant safety standards in spite of their understanding of these risks. Exposing the shortcomings of contemporary, training-focussed, OHS interventions and the resulting

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conflictive encounters between miners and OHS experts, the chapter demonstrates the need for dominant OHS approaches to actively engage with the global, historical, multifaceted and ever-shifting socio-political and economic contexts in which OHS risks are assembled, encountered, perceived and ultimately responded to.

Mining in Potosí: Living and Dying for the Mine Located in the Bolivian highlands at 13,420 feet above sea level Potosí is a mining city in a mining country. The Spanish discovered the city’s wealth of underground silver only a month after their arrival in the 1540s, and mining has been the motor of the local and national economies ever since. For nearly three centuries the Spanish secured cheap silver production by forcing local indigenous villagers and African slaves to work in the mines (Francis 2006). Exported via the ports of Argentina, Chile and Brazil, Potosí’s silver played a crucial role in Europe’s development during the colonial period. However, as it was not invested in the development of the region where it was extracted, this wealth failed to benefit the majority of the local population. Eventually, potosinos started to bitterly conceptualise themselves as ‘beggars sitting on a throne of gold’ (Morales 2010) and Potosí’s mine as ‘the mountain that eats men alive’. Since Bolivia’s independence from Spain in 1825, Potosí’s mining industry evolved through alternating periods of private large-scale operations when mineral prices were high, and state-run operations in times of economic downturn. It was not until 1985 that cooperative miners became the major labour force in Potosí, following the bankruptcy of the state-run mining industry after a dramatic drop in international mineral prices. All of the miners previously employed by the state were made redundant with no compensation. At the same time, miners lost access to social benefits because of the newly adopted austerity measures and the associated withdrawal of social spending and welfare cuts (Artaraz 2012; Nash 1992). Most of the miners who had been laid off selforganised into cooperatives in order to eke a living in an impoverished city that did not offer alternative means of subsistence. They continued

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mineral extraction, this time with no government support or oversight, by complementing the archaic infrastructure that the government was unable to sell with their own physical strength, ‘wit and creativity’ (Möeller 2007, 87). Although significantly depleted today, Potosí’s mine, known since the colonial period as the Cerro Rico (rich hill), continues to be exploited by mining cooperatives. Both in Potosí and Bolivia the cooperative mining sector has seen a dramatic increase in numbers since 1985, and especially since Evo Morales and his party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), won the Bolivian presidential elections in 2006. Unable to finance a sustainable national mining industry and reluctant to privatise the industry again,4 the MAS government has increasingly promoted cooperative mining—both as a strategy for tackling the high levels of poverty and unemployment in the country and for securing national revenues regardless of the international mineral prices (Prentice and Trueba 2018). In Potosí, the exact number of miners is unknown, but according to the records held by the Regional Federation of Mining Cooperatives (FEDECOMIN), in 2011 there were 47 mining cooperatives actively extracting mineral in the city. Some of these cooperatives are family run whilst others have evolved into more complex (and hierarchical) organisations. My own estimates based on visits to the cooperatives and conversations with miners and leaders of the regional mining federation suggest that around 18,000 miners worked in Potosí in 2012, of which roughly ten per cent were females.

Everyday Risks, Labour Arrangements and the Politics of OHS Unlike most small-scale mining operations around the world, Potosí’s mining cooperatives are formal organisations that operate legally. Miners rent the mines from the state in exchange for a yearly rental fee and a monthly percentage of the production. To be able to establish the lease agreement in accordance with the Bolivian Cooperative Law, a cooperative must have at least ten partners (over the age of 14) and be registered with FEDECOMIN. Cooperatives then divide their rented areas so that

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each partner has his or her own individual space to exploit. In each workspace, partners independently (individually or in groups) organise production and introduce safety measures on the basis of interpersonal agreements and the assets they are able to pull together at any given time. Unable to obtain loans from banks due to the uncertainty of their production and earnings (see below), these miners extract the mineral mostly by hand using hammers, chisels and dynamite, or with the occasional help of drills that they can obtain from unregulated mineral buyers in exchange for a percentage of their earnings and the obligation to sell the ores to them. The miners’ earnings depend entirely on the quantity and quality of the ores they extract and on the mineral prices, but fluctuating mineral prices and the difficulty of access to ores that are mostly of low quality5 can mean monthly earnings as low as 450 Bolivianos (£45), or even nil if the miners do not manage to find ores in their allocated workspaces. Once partners have paid a percentage of their production to their cooperatives (from which cooperatives will pay the state) and to their buyers in return for the borrowed extractive equipment, they divide earnings unevenly according to the productive assets each individual has brought to the group. Miners will then individually decide whether they want (and can afford) to pay their national health and social insurance contributions that would give them access to state health care and pension upon retirement.6 Miners are a rather heterogeneous group. It is often assumed that low tech, labour intensive mining absorbs mainly rural (Aizawa 2016; ILO 1999) and unskilled labour (Hentschel et al. 2002), but this is not the case in Potosí. Here, undergraduate students engage in mining work to pay their way through university while graduates are pushed to work in the mines because the local labour market is unable to absorb a skilled workforce. They work hand in hand with, among others, peasants who seek to supplement scarce agricultural earnings through seasonal mining, youngsters pulled to the mine by a hope of finding good ores and the desire for social ascent, children orphaned by the mine, women widowed by the mine and aged men and women whose pensions are insufficient to cover the living costs. There are also important institutional hierarchies within cooperatives. With little government support and oversight

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many partners employ labourers7 in order to increase production— mostly when economic conditions are favourable, for instance, during periods of high mineral prices. These labourers are informally employed by cooperative partners on a day-to-day or short-term basis, receive a pre-determined wage of about 50Bs/day (£5) (usually dependant on the group’s ability to find marketable ores), and generally have no decisionmaking power within cooperatives or within workgroups (Francescone 2015). It is commonly accepted by researchers and Bolivians more generally that partners exploit labourers’ need for work to their own benefit and that these power hierarchies reinforce the precarious conditions in which labourers work (Michard 2008; Francescone and Díaz 2013). My research however indicates that the distinction between partners and labourers does not shape health and safety inequalities in Potosí nor does it influence the decision-making processes through which the various miners seek to respond to the health and safety risks associated with mining. Some better-off partners do occasionally avoid the health risks associated with mining by informally employing labourers or poorer partners to extract the mineral for them (see Trueba 2014). However, among the miners who actually work in the mine, organisational hierarchies and distinctions do not determine uneven patterns of risk distribution or different patterns of health and safety decisionmaking and management. In the mine, there are no differences between partners and their labourers regarding personal protection equipment (which each miner is responsible for buying). Partners work hand in hand with labourers facing the same risks and dealing with them in the same way. They use the same individual and collective preventive equipment and work together with labourers to put in place the health risk prevention measures that they can afford (Trueba 2014). Indeed, miners compete for the mineral and for the jobs and extractive tools available, but they also feel mutually responsible, and share a very strong duty of collective-care. This can be explained by the fact that maintaining good social relations within cooperatives is key for the miners to ensure their long-term job security and survival, as things change very quickly in the mine—something miners call ‘the lottery of the mine’ (la lotería de la mina). A sudden drop in mineral prices, losing the ability to find

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saleable ores due to exhaustion of a workspace or the collapse of a tunnel often means that partners, from one day to the next, find themselves relying on the goodwill of other partners or labourers in order to find a job as labourers.8 Labourers in turn can, and do, become partners after acquiring experience—usually after the death of a partner that hired him or her, or if a cooperative leases another piece of land from the state. As the next section shows, it is these uncertainties and their associated threats for the miners’ lives and livelihoods rather than institutional hierarchies (cf. Fashoyin and Tiraboschi 2013; de Neve 2005; Bambra 2011; Lahelma et al. 2009; Holmes 2013) or the miners’ level of education and OHS risk awareness (cf. van Dijk et al. 2015; Snashall and Patel 2003) what ultimately shapes how health risks are perceived and responded to in Potosí. Indeed, uncertainties, risks and work-related fatalities and injuries are a constitutive part of miners’ everyday life in Potosí. This is, for instance, reflected in the miners’ expression ‘silver is born killing’ and in their acknowledgement that they ‘live and die for the mine’. According to MUSOL,9 a local NGO that assists the widows of miners, four women are widowed each month due to mining activity (Shahriari 2014). Potosí’s cemetery reflects this tough reality, with entire mausoleum sections filled by those that have been ‘eaten’ by the mine (see Fig. 3.1). However, no statistics of deaths or injuries related to mining are recorded in Potosí, as this is something that both government officials and miners themselves are very eager to hide. For most miners, keeping such records would ‘frighten people’.10 Miners fear that if the real magnitude of accidents in the mines was publicly known this would jeopardise their lease agreements with the government and thus, their ability to earn a living and sustain their families. In turn, for most government officials creating employment opportunities and securing national and regional revenues regardless of international mineral markets are the most urgent priorities. Whilst some government officials admit that tackling the miners’ precarious working conditions requires structural solutions that the state alone is unable to address, the fact is that dominant OHS approaches’ emphasis on behaviour change interventions based on training have paved the way for the government to transfer all OHS responsibilities to workers themselves through informative sessions like

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Fig. 3.1 Potosí’s cemetery. ‘Silence! Here rest the men that have drained their lungs in the mine’ (Photo by author)

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the one described in the opening paragraphs of this chapter. Left to yield their own luck, unable to plan for an uncertain future and fully aware of what poses risk to their health, in order to get by miners position their bodies as the site for risk management as they individually and collectively negotiate the multiple risks and uncertainties that affect them simultaneously.

Negotiating Risks: The Emics of Health and Safety ‘Of course it would be safer to use a longer fuse!’ told me Don Anastasio whilst he was inserting a 50 cm long fuse into one of the cartridges of dynamite that he was preparing for blowing the rock. ‘In an ideal world I wouldn’t be here doing this job either’, he added, ‘but one must face reality, and reality means that I cannot afford to pay for longer fuses. Yesterday I paid for my sons’ school meals11 and notebooks and today I bought the dynamite so this is all the fuse I can afford right now’. It was March 2012 and mineral prices had been steadily falling for three weeks now. Just after prices had started to drop Don Anastasio had exhausted the thin vein of tin he had been eking a living from and he was now opening a new tunnel in his workspace trying to find another vein.12 As soon as he had become unable to provide minerals to his regular buyer, the buyer had taken back the drill Don Anastasio was using and loaned it to another miner. This meant that Don Anastasio was now opening the new tunnel by boring holes in the rock with the sole help of an old sledgehammer and a chisel. Without a drill to help him speed up the advancement of the tunnel, and despite the fact that he was an experienced miner, Don Anastasio’s chances to quickly find a mineral vein and secure some income for his household again were not good. He was however hopeful that he would find good silver in his workspace as its walls and roof were filled with arsenic fibres. ‘Arsenic indicates the presence of high quality silver’, he told me, ‘I just need to find it’. ‘Are you not worried about the health effects of arsenic?’, I asked him. ‘These take time [to develop]… it would mean that I have been lucky!’ he answered

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with a cheeky smile. Don Anastasio was fully aware that long-term exposure to arsenic can cause lung and stomach cancer, but developing a long-term disease from mining was for him a sign that he had been ‘lucky enough’ to live a long life as a miner. He was however concerned about the short-term health consequences of the arsenic, especially the risk of eye lesions, as these would impede his immediate ability to work. ‘You must protect your eyes from the arsenic as it can harm your eyes and you could become blind’, he told me just before strongly advising me not to scratch my eyes with my dusty hands. Taking into account the strength of the rock and the intended tunnel width, Don Anastasio estimated that he needed to bore eight blastholes, each one 80 cm long and as wide as the chisel, horizontally into the wall. It had taken him three full days of work plus few hours that morning to do this. He would of course have done this much faster by working within a group of partners or by informally employing labourers. However, without any income he was unable to afford the costs of safety infrastructures such as old wooden beams that placed vertically would help secure the roof in the new passage. Aware of his inability to guarantee anyone’s safety in his workspace Don Anastasio preferred to work alone, avoiding in this manner the risk of having to pay compensation to labourers or their relatives if an accident happened.13 ‘The main risk one faces when making holes into the rock with a machine or with a chisel are the pockets of gas retained inside the rock’, he said. ‘If there is gas [carbon monoxide] we will lose consciousness and will either instantly faint or die… This is one of the perks of working alone’, he continued, ‘that nobody will be here with you to pick you’. To compensate for the risks associated with the lack of immediate support from colleagues due to being a lone worker, unlike most miners in Potosí, Don Anastasio uses an old acetylene lamp instead of a battery-powered headlamp. ‘If there is gas the light will go off so I know we quickly need to leave’. Once Don Anastasio had carefully placed the cartridges of dynamite with their fuses into the eight blast-holes, we sat on the floor in order to make an offering to the tatakachu, an underground Andean deity that miners believe has the power to protect them from accidents. Don Anastasio spitted out the ball of coca leaves14 he had kept in his mouth

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whilst boring the last hole that morning and started to put fresh leaves of dry coca in his mouth making a new ball. He did this very slowly, carefully looking at each leave all the while chatting with me, putting the broken leaves and the oddly shaped ones in his mouth and offering the best-looking ones to the tatakachu by delicately depositing them on the top of a small altar with a figure of the deity he had crafted himself ten years ago when he became a partner of his cooperative. Like many other miners in Potosí, Don Anastasio did this with the hope that the tatakachu would reciprocate the gift by ensuring our safety during the explosion. We stayed there for some 20 minutes, chatting about his trust in the tatakachu as Don Anastasio was chewing the coca leaves and simultaneously gathering courage to go and lit the fuses. The short fuses he had used would only give him about one minute of time to light the eight wicks and seek refugee from the blast. When lit, fuses fill the air with clouds of thick white smoke making it almost impossible to see. This meant that Don Anastasio had to memorise the exact position of each wick before lighting them and then run for shelter. He left me in the ‘safe’ corner of his workspace, right by the tatakachu. ‘You must leave your fears at the entrance of the mine’, he told me with a protective gaze in response to my visible concern. ‘Otherwise you’ll freeze, and it’s when one is not fully focussed that accidents happen’, he added before heading to light the fuses. BOOM! The earth trembled filling the air with dust and dirt that made it very difficult to breathe and impossible to see in this confined space. As Don Anastasio safely returned to where I was, we left his workspace without checking if the explosion had released any ores or unveiled a new mineral vein. ‘In case one of the cartridges failed to explode’, he said. We headed straight to Don Pablo’s workspace. Unlike Don Anastasio, who mined to sustain his family and to offer his children the chance of a better future away from the mines, for Don Pablo mining offered an opportunity for his own social mobility. Don Pablo had recently bought a small shop in town planning to hire labourers to continue mineral extraction for him whilst he worked at the shop. Since the drop in mineral prices Don Pablo had intensified extraction to increase the amount of ores supplied to his buyer and avoid becoming indebted. He had however done this without securing the hastily expanded tunnels and

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cavities in his workspace, and one night the main tunnel had collapsed as a result, impeding any access to the mineral. Aware that the collapse meant that Don Pablo would be unable to pay any wages, most of his labourers went to work for another partner. Only one of them, Macareno, stayed to help, as he hoped to lead mineral extraction in Don Pablos’ workspace once he started working in the shop. Macareno believed that a few days of unpaid work would help his promotion. Needing more people to quickly clear the tunnel, Don Pablo then had asked Don Anastasio to help him. Don Anastasio knew that clearing the passage was an arduous task and he did not normally enjoy working with other miners, but on this occasion he decided to help Don Pablo. As the money he had saved before mineral prices started to drop was now gone, Don Anastasio worried that he would no longer be able to provide for his family and Don Pablo had promised he would hire him as labourer as soon as the passage had been cleared. ‘I can work double shifts until I find a vein in my workspace… and if I don’t I’ll stay here working as labourer’, told me Don Anastasio. Removing the rocks and ores from the mine is not the riskiest part of the miners’ jobs, but it is certainly a physically demanding one. Being an aged miner (48) and suffering from chronic back pain Don Pablo did not normally do this task. To prevent back pain he usually hired a team of three labourers to remove rocks and ores for him whilst he focussed on doing what the miners consider to be the riskiest part of their job—blasting the rock—to avoid the risk of having to pay compensation. However, his circumstances had now changed, and fearing that his inability to pay the weekly contributions to the cooperative would put at risk his status as a partner and his ability to pay for his shop, he felt that he had no other option but to, as he put it, ‘take a paracetamol and swallow the pain with it’. For several hours, the three miners lifted rocks with their bare hands, removed the rubble with shovels and then carried the debris in 25 kg sacks on their backs through narrow tunnels until the main passage of the cooperative from which all the different partners’ workspaces start. From there the miners could transport the debris using the old and heavy wagons abandoned by the state in the 1980s and which the miners still use nowadays (see Fig. 3.2).

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Fig. 3.2 Miners pushing wagons (Photo by author)

After six hours clearing a small section of the collapsed passage we left the mine. It was already dark outside and the air felt pure. As we exited the mine the miners gave their working tools and the leftover cartridges of dynamite to María—the mineshaft guard who was given this job in compensation for her husband’s work-related death. María quickly went to the hut she was living in (right by the mine entrance) and deposited the tools and dynamite under the bed where she slept with her children—near the wood-burning stove she used to heat the hut and cook the family meals. ‘What else could I do?’, asked María fully aware of the risk of death associated with storing the dynamite in a room with a burning wood stove. ‘Living here I do not pay rent… if thieves rob the miner’s essentials I won’t only lose my job but also the roof over our heads…’ ‘See you at dawn, more tomorrow’, said the miners to María as they were leaving.

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Risk Perception Underestimation and OHS The Potosí’s miners are very well aware of the health risks associated with mining. They know their immediate causes and the likely consequences, and yet they often take actions that put their health and lives at risk. Miners do this, as the previous section has illustrated, as a strategy to manage other risks and uncertainties, immediate or distant, that simultaneously affect them and their relatives and over which they have little or no control. María knows that storing dynamite cartridges in the hut where she sleeps and cooks involves the risk of imminent death for her and her five children should the dynamite explode. However, her response towards this risk is shaped by her awareness that as a widow with no financial compensation for her husbands’ work-related death, not taking this particular risk could jeopardise her livelihood and deprive her family of food and shelter. In turn, Don Anastasio weights the risks of being affected by carbon monoxide and the risk of death associated with him using short fuses against his on-going need to earn enough to provide for his family and offer his sons a chance for the future away from the mine. Both Don Anastasio and María are aware of the potential consequences of taking OHS risks, but also of the gains of their decisions. The miners take into account a vast array of risks and uncertainties in their health and safety evaluations and OHS risks constitute only a small portion of their concerns. We know from the existing literature that workers’ need to make a living can sometimes lead to risky behaviours; for example, when workers have to work quickly or despite being unwell in order to maximise earnings (e.g., Sen 2003; Bambra 2011; Lund and Marriott 2011). But the Potosí miners’ risk negotiations illustrated in the previous section reveal a much more complex risk assessment. In addition to recognising the conflicting logics of maximising the earnings and maintaining the safety at work, the miners also have to reckon with many factors that appear to be ‘external’ to OHS considerations—such as the price at which the ore can be sold, the exhaustion of their allocated spaces, relationships with unregulated mineral buyers, the need to repay personal debts or the imperative to make a workspace continuously productive—but which are deeply implicated both in the

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kinds of physical risks miners face on the job and in their (in)abilities to manage them. Miners’ health and safety risk evaluations are not limited to the assessment and prioritisation of OHS risks as prescribed by dominant safety standards (see, for instance, ILO 2011; IOSH 2015) nor are they binary (e.g., earnings versus safety). Instead, the miners carefully balance the overlapping challenges and opportunities that present themselves in the mine and beyond and negotiate present and future risks and uncertainties as a strategy to get by and achieve their aspirations. The fact that there is no direct causal relationship between the miners’ awareness of occupational health risks and their risk behaviours challenges another of the pillar assumptions on which dominant safety standards are based (see, for instance, Swartz 2001; Alli 2008). As mentioned above, social science approaches to risk have long stressed that people’s risk behaviours have to do not only with knowledge about the causes and consequences of risk but also, and perhaps more importantly, with how people perceive a particular risk (Tesh 1981; Douglas 1992; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982), or what they feel towards it (Slovic 2010; Lupton 2013b). Tulloch and Lupton (2003) argue that people respond to risks according to a particular set of values specific to a particular way of life, and Douglas and Wildavsky (1982) highlight how people’s risk responses are intertwined with their culturally defined concerns and fears. Cornwall (2007) shows how people’s (in)ability to make strategic choices configures not only their risk responses but also their risk perceptions. However, typically considered as ‘cognitive limitations’ (Denscombe 1993) that lead workers to underestimate the characteristics and severity of work-related health risks (see, for instance, Holmes et al. 2000; Kahnemann and Tversky 2000; Drakopoulos and Theodossiou 2016), risk perceptions have been not only overlooked but also purposely disregarded by dominant safety approaches. In fact, on the few occasions in which risk perceptions are taken into account within OHS literature they are examined as a strategy to assess workers’ risk misconceptions and the need for further educational interventions and safety training as a strategy to achieve the ‘accident zero goal’ (see, for instance, Arezes and Miguel 2008; Devi 2009; Lehman et al. 2009; Drakopoulos and Theodossiou 2016). Ethnographic evidence however suggests that the underestimation of risk perceptions by dominant safety

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standards hinders the effectiveness of the proposed OHS strategies. This is because without the exploration of their OHS risk perceptions (and of the determinants of these perceptions) it is impossible to unveil the complex circumstances, factors and relationships that impede the miners’ ability to respond to risks as per their wishes and understandings. As shown in this chapter, the miners’ risk responses are determined by how they balance the overlapping risks and uncertainties that simultaneously affect them. It is these overlapping concerns over which they have little control—rather than ‘risk knowledge’—what ultimately shapes how miners perceive, and therefore respond to OHS risks at any given time. Don Anastasio for instance admits that he would like to use longer fuses, but his ability to do so is circumscribed by the uncertainty of his earnings and by his need to sustain his family. He knows that working alone and using short fuses pose important risks to his life and health, but his perception of these OHS risks is tied to the challenges and opportunities faced at work and beyond and to his ability to respond to them. In turn, as the miners’ particular circumstances change, so do their perceptions of the OHS risks they face and their behaviours in relation to them. This is despite the fact that the miners’ knowledge of those risks does not change. This is evident, for instance, in the change of the form of engagement with mining by Don Pablo, who knew that removing rocks and debris from the mine would most likely cause him back pain. Initially, Don Pablo did not take this risk to his health, but after the collapse of the passage, when he was unable to access the ores and feared that his inability to pay his weekly contributions to the cooperative would put at risk his status and privileges as formal partner and his ability to afford the shop, he quickly perceived back pain as a ‘lesser evil’ and took the risk. The miners’ multiple and changing perceptions of risk do not occur in vacuum. They are determined by historical and contemporary global processes and relationships, and by the multiplicative impacts that these have over individual miners, their relatives and the Bolivian government and society more broadly. As I have explained above Bolivia’s traditionally export-oriented economy has shaped Potosí’s labour market and welfare provision, deeply affecting every single aspect of the miners’ lives and livelihoods in ways that made a living and working environment

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unthinkable to many the miners’ daily bread. The resulting uncertainties in the miners’ everyday lives ultimately constrain them to live in the present. For instance, unable to plan for an uncertain future Don Anastasio perceives the long-term health effects of arsenic as a luxurious concern. He however fears the short-term impacts of arsenic, as becoming blind would risk his immediate ability to provide for his family. There are two inter-related issues to take into account here. First, it is how the multiple risks and scarcities simultaneously faced by the miners drive them to live in the present to the detriment of an uncertain future—compelling them to spontaneously accept or side-step OHS risks as they appear at work rather than plan long-term preventive strategies. Second, it is how, in turn, the lack of OHS planning further shapes the risks faced by miners both at work and in their personal lives. Living in the present often imperils the miners’ health and safety. Despite this, in the eyes of outsiders the high rates of accidents in the mines and the miners’ tendency to take OHS risks at work mark them out as feckless and irresponsible (cf. Woodburn 1997) and denies them what Woodburn called ‘the badges of success’ (in Papataxiarchis et al. 1999, 21) by which dominant OHS approaches measure workers’ risk knowledge and safety efforts. However, in this context of overlapping risks, taking or not taking an OHS risk is a risk management strategy. Like for many other disempowered and multiply exposed miners, Don Anastasio’s faith in the tatakachu allows him the courage to take health risks at work when he has no other choice. This mismatch between dominant OHS approaches and the on-theground reality of multiple risks and uncertainties lived by ordinary miners ultimately undermines the mutual trust and precludes the possibility of collaborative action needed for the proposed OHS strategies to succeed. Like many other miners in Potosí, Don Anastasio refuses to attend the government-sponsored OHS training sessions because, as he says, ‘these do not bring any solutions to the safety problems that we [miners] face’. In turn, baffled by the high rates of accidents and by the miners’ reluctance to attend OHS trainings, Federico (introduced at the beginning of the chapter) contemptuously concludes that ‘miners do not seem to care about their own safety’. Meanwhile, whilst the world consumes the ores Potosí produces without minding what

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happens at beginning of the productive chain (Artaraz and Hill 2016), the Bolivian government promotes cooperative mining to shield national revenues from fluctuations in prices without offering any robust support to the miners or enforcing existing trade, labour or OHS legislations that might help lessen some of the difficulties faced by miners (see Fig. 3.3). Deprived, marginalised and constrained to living the shortterm, the miners rely solely on their social relations and physical strength. With little power to respond to the multiple risks and uncertainties that simultaneously affect them, they position their bodies as the site of risk management. However, deemed irrational and non-logical, the miners’ observable risk behaviours legitimise a tendency to blame them for the high rates of accidents in the mines. This way, dominant safety approaches become part of the problem instead of agents of change. Unless dominant OHS approaches engage with the miners’ risk perceptions and with the wider political economy that shapes the hazardous environments in which miners live and work, workers worldwide, just like the Potosí’s miners, will continue to secure a living by means that often require accepting OHS risks. They will continue, as the Potosí’s miners say, living and dying for the mine.

Conclusions The Potosí’s miners live and work under extraordinarily arduous conditions. They simultaneously face a number of physical, socio-political and economic risks and uncertainties that must be carefully weighed against each other as the miners go about their work and lives. OHS is an important aspect of the miners’ lives, but it is one aspect among many others that the miners reflexively negotiate and navigate according to their concerns, life projects, aspirations and assets available to them at any given time. In this context, health and safety risk-taking is no longer imagined or experienced as a domain of the extraordinary few, but rather a constitutive part of the miners’ lives. The ordinary and extraordinary converge in the everyday materiality of life, for instance, when María places dynamite under the bed where she sleeps with her children, or when Don Anastasio risks his life by using short fuses after paying

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Fig. 3.3 Mine entrance (Photo by author)

for his son’s school meals. This convergence is a stark indication of how much extraordinary work-related health risks are embedded in workers’ everyday lives and historical socio-economic processes far beyond their control.

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This brief look at the miners’ everyday lives and risk negotiations allows us to question the universal legitimacy of dominant safety approaches, as well as some of the assumptions that the standard OHS interventions are based on. Centrally, there is the need for distinguishing between OHS risk knowledge and OHS risk perceptions and for revisiting the value of miners’ risk perceptions as a strategy to inform OHS interventions that truly respond to these workers’ everyday realities. This involves moving beyond behaviour-moulding trainings that, as shown, neither shape behaviours nor tackle the OHS problems faced by the Potosí’s miners. It also involves moving beyond narrow risk assessments that, restricted to OHS risks, fail to engage with the everyday complex realities of these ordinary workers and their wider concerns. Finally, it involves re-conceptualising risk and risk-taking as ordinary, inherent and tightly interwoven with all aspects of people’s everyday life instead of as extraordinary and somehow external to people. Only when dominant OHS approaches move beyond an abstracted ideal type of worker and work environment and instead actively engage with the global, historical, multifaceted and ever-shifting socio-political and economic contexts in which OHS risks are assembled, encountered, perceived and ultimately responded to, workers like the Potosí’s miners may have a chance to safely live from the mine. This chapter therefore calls for an expanded OHS agenda that looks beyond workplace risks to engage with the relationship between workers’ exposure to global market forces and their everyday realities and risk choices. It calls for current OHS approaches to re-frame risk-taking as an ordinary and meaningful act, and to co-design interventions with the people whose lives and well-being they are trying to improve. Already in 1995 Paul Richards criticised that risk experts too often underestimate the value of risk-taking, ignoring valuable local expertise. For him, experts should spend more time observing and learning from peoples’ ‘everyday science’ (Richards 1985). This is not just a matter of ‘cognitive justice’ (Leach et al. 2005). It is also a requirement for effective problem solving. Until the miners’ risk management perspectives are incorporated into the contextualised planning and implementation of OHS interventions, dominant health and safety approaches will continue being part of the problem instead of agents of change.

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Notes 1. All personal names have been replaced by pseudonyms. 2. Federico was the health and safety expert employed by the Bolivian government to help decrease the high rates of work-related accidents among cooperative miners in Potosí (Interview: February 2011). 3. In addition to extensive participant observation, field research also included semiformal interviews with cooperative miners and their relatives, government officials, local OHS experts, NGO representatives and researchers. Full ethical approval was obtained from the ethics committee of the University of Sussex prior to the start of data collection. 4. Bolivia’s private mining has historically failed to benefit local development. In fact, the promise of nationalisation of the mining industry was key for the MAS government to rise to office in 2006 and for his re-election in 2009 and 2014. 5. Potosí’s Cerro Rico has been exploited constantly for silver, tin and zinc for nearly 500 years. Nowadays the mine is almost depleted. 6. The official retirement age for Bolivian miners is 60, but Potosí’s miners’ life expectancy is estimated to be 45 (Yeager 2007). 7. To reflect these distinctions, in this chapter I use the term ‘partner’ to refer to formal cooperative members, the term ‘labourer’ to talk about the informally employed mine workers and the term ‘miners’ for both partners and labourers. 8. Partners can be informally hired as labourers by other partners and/or by experienced labourers (see Trueba 2014 for more information on this). 9. MUSOL means ‘solidarity with women’, from Spanish Solidaridad con las Mujeres. 10. President of FEDECOMIN (Interview: March 2010). 11. International and Bolivian NGOs such as Save the Children and CEPROMIN operate in Potosí offering meals to miners’ children for a symbolic weekly fee of 20Bs (£2). Don Anastasio’s three sons benefitted from these programmes. 12. Miners do not always know when a vein will be depleted or whether they will find new ores in their allocated spaces.

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13. According to the Bolivian Employment Law, employers must pay $3,000 in compensation for fatal or disabling work-related accidents. Partners usually employ the labourers informally, but nonetheless miners feel that the official regulations apply to them. However, $3,000 is an amount most partners are unable to afford. Instead partners employ relatives of the deceased or disabled miners as informal compensation. 14. Miners chew coca leaves to relieve hunger and fatigue whilst at work. According to Andean beliefs coca is also essential for people to be able to communicate with the deities (Absi 2005; Harris 2000; Trueba 2014).

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4 Regenerative Medicine, Unproven Therapies and the Framing of Clinical Risk Alessandro Blasimme

Introduction Ever since the early 1970s, medical ethics has been producing and reproducing a dominant model of risk assessment based on the inclusion of patients and research participants in a moral community of individual rights and professional duties. In this chapter, I analyse emerging challenges to this dominant ethical model taking shape in the domain of regenerative medicine. My analysis draws on three cases that stirred controversy over access to cell-based therapies ahead of clinical validation and marketing approval by competent regulatory authorities. Cell-based therapy is one of the treatment approaches that go under the name of regenerative medicine. This label indicates a family of techniques aimed at repairing, replacing A. Blasimme (B) ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 ´ B. Switek et al. (eds.), Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83962-8_4

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or regenerating cells, tissues and organs with the objective of restoring a physiological function that has been lost due to injury, disease, congenital abnormalities or ageing (Blasimme 2013). To this end, regenerative medicine exploits a variety of possible strategies: cell and stem cell therapy, gene therapy, tissue engineering and combinations thereof. Interestingly, in the last decade, this field has witnessed the emergence of alternative framings of what counts as legitimate ways of bringing innovative biomedical products to patients. While some prominent scientists have argued that regenerative medicine, as any other form of therapy, should undergo the lengthy validation process of rigorous clinical trials (Bianco 2013), many practitioners, animated by the urge to harness the promise of regenerative medicine and possibly by commercial interests, have explored alternative routes of clinical validation and market delivery (Blasimme 2013). I studied controversies in this area through interviews with scientists and regulators directly involved in regenerative medicine. Furthermore, I collected regulatory texts, newsfeeds, academic papers and editorials, and I conducted targeted web ethnographies to learn about the narratives that animated patients in this field (Boellstorff et al. 2012; Hine 2000, 2015).1 The choice of a mixed methodology to collect relevant information about the provision of non-validated stem cell therapies has practical as well as analytical benefits. From a practical point of view, I have been looking at controversial cases as they unfolded. Given the absence of archival information about unproven stem cell therapies, I had to construct—as it were—my own documental archive. This forced me to rely on the widest possible array of sources in order to keep pace with the development of the cases as they were taking place. Moreover, given the judicial profile of the cases, I refrained from attempting to engage with providers directly. As to the patients, most of them were going through very painful and complex moments in their lives (as some of the stories below will testify). I have thus been reluctant to interfere with them in such circumstances. Moreover, from an analytical point of view, I was mainly interested in the way patients articulated their case for access to those treatments in the public sphere. I thus opted for an indirect approach, that is, targeted web ethnography, and followed the patients’ efforts to present their views in public through blogs, websites

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and social networks. Based on material collected this way, I present here cases that exemplify novel narratives of clinical risks emerging at the ethical, regulatory and epistemic fringes of medical practice. The case studies illustrate how in highly innovative areas of biomedicine—such as regenerative medicine—actors set out to challenge existing framings of clinical risk—namely risks due to the possible serious adverse effects of cellular therapy—as well as the regulatory provisions that produce and reproduce such framings. Such efforts aptly map onto the distinction articulated in this volume between ordinary and extraordinary framings of risk (see Introduction, this volume). The ordinary type of protective moral inclusion that clinical research ethics has been developing for the last 40 years is now challenged by claims to extraordinary forms of moral consideration. More specifically, patients that are chronically or terminally ill articulate a space of moral segregation in which they can escape the authority and the rules of both clinical research and medical ethics. Physical segregation of diseased bodies has always existed in medicine, but scant attention has so far been paid to deliberate risk-taking as a form of voluntary moral segregation for patients with limited clinical alternatives. Those patients lay claim to this segregation as a state of exception in which they can seek alternatives to rationalistic accounts of risk-taking (see also Zinn 2020, 258). By inhabiting this segregated space, patients become able to disassociate themselves from the ordinary rationalistic epistemology of risk that dominates medicine and gain access to an altogether extraordinary epistemology that allows them to see hope precisely where medicine foregoes it. Nonetheless, in what follows, I set out to show that the understandings of risk emerging from the case studies, regardless of their rational warrant, also bear complex forms of continuity with the ordinary conceptual and symbolic world from which they seek to separate.

Ordinary States of Moral Inclusion To introduce the discussion of how different framings of experimental risk can come to be perceived as normal and acceptable or, instead, excedent and unordinary, it will be convenient to start from a historical

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recollection of how current ethical standards of experimental medicine have emerged. In the aftermath of World War II, the Nuremberg trial inquired into the atrocities of Nazi doctors in concentration camps. In 1947, as a result of the trial, the so-called Nuremberg Code was drafted.2 It comprised a list of ten principles intended to protect the rights and welfare of research subjects. The same principles were since restated in the Declaration of Helsinki developed by the World Medical Association.3 These two highly regarded documents would set the stage for the public discourse on the ethics of medical research and medical practice in the US and in the Western world more generally for the decades to come. However, they were not immediately translated into legal norms and, as a matter of fact, they did not fully prevent medical research reminiscent of what was practiced in the Nazi concentration camps. Medical abuses in research continued to take place as, for example, in the infamous Tuskegee study during which, between 1932 and 1972, some 400 socially deprived African American men from Macon County (Alabama) were deliberately left untreated to observe the natural course of syphilis. In 1974, in the aftermath of the Tuskegee scandal the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research was established and charged, among other things, with drafting a report on the ethical principles that should be respected in clinical research. The document was published in 1979 and is commonly known as the Belmont Report. The Belmont Report formally established three major ethical principles: respect for persons, beneficence and justice. In the context of clinical research, the three principles apply, respectively, to informed consent, risk-benefit assessment and the fair selection of research participants. When in 1981, in a number of US states, the Belmont report was translated into binding norms (the so-called Common Rule4 ), those norms stated that it was up to Institutional Review Boards (IRBs, that is, committees set up at healthcare institutions and institutes engaged in research on human subjects) to perform risk assessment in the first place. In particular, IRBs were typically to be in charge of ensuring that research protocols minimise the risks to participants, and that risks are reasonable in relation to possible benefits and to the importance of the knowledge that is expected to result from the study. Most Western countries adopted

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a similar model of performing risk assessment in medical research. Thus, in the Western world, the burden of risk assessment largely lies in the hands of professionals and regulatory bodies, while the agency of research participants is channelled through procedures of informed consent. The development of such a model is an attempt at bringing research participants within the perimeter of those who deserve a special kind of moral solicitude. The inclusion of patients and research participants into this moral community, however, happens in part through excluding them from risk-related deliberations and through delegating the burden of risk-benefit assessment to specialised bodies. The establishment of such ethical standards in Western medicine over the course of the 1970s and beyond went hand in hand with the development of what Alberto Cambrosio and colleagues term ‘regulatory objectivity’ (Cambrosio et al. 2006), that is, ‘a new form of objectivity in biomedicine that generates conventions and norms through concerted programs of action based on the use of a variety of systems for the collective production of evidence’ (p. 654). A major instantiation of such ‘collective production of evidence’ is the phased controlled clinical trial. In its prototypical form, a clinical trial follows pre-clinical studies on animal models and starts with a Phase I testing the safety of the drug under investigation on a small number of patients who receive the drug at escalating doses. Phase II trials employ a larger panel of patients to test the drug’s efficacy, while Phase III involves an even larger cohort of participants. Finally, Phase IV consists in the post-marketing surveillance of a newly approved drug. The seamless integration of ethical oversight into such form of evidence generation represents a clear example of how scientific norms for the validation of therapeutic claims get coproduced with ethical norms regarding fairness to research participants and respect for their autonomy and well-being (Jasanoff 2004). However, in the 1980s, in the midst of the HIV epidemic, patients’ activism started to put US regulatory agencies under pressure to create ways to overcome this lengthy process (Epstein 1996; Dresser 2001). This resulted in the introduction of several regulatory instruments (such as compassionate use and expanded access programmes—later to be introduced also in other countries) aimed at accelerating the provision of drugs ahead of full validation to a specific category of patients: those with

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very limited or no other therapeutic options. In this domain, the delegative and protective attitude that represented the backbone of clinical research in the post-war period came under attack for being unnecessarily paternalistic and for culpably slowing patients’ access to new drugs. Those narratives were the first signs of a conceptual reconfiguration of medical ethics towards more permissive epistemologies of risk. Patients with no other therapeutic options were no longer tied to a condition of vulnerability whereby they were entitled solely to the protections afforded by medical ethics. In this emerging framing, patients, precisely in virtue of their hopelessness, sought to disengage from those protections and to enter a regime of moral exception in which they could decide to accept higher degrees of uncertainty regarding the safety of treatments that had not yet been cleared for medical use. In what follows, through three case studies from the US and Italy, I illustrate how regenerative medicine has recently become a site for the further articulation of such narrative.5

Articulating Hope and Moral Segregation Regenexx: Recasting Cellular Risk Regenerative Sciences LLC (henceforth, RS) is a company that has developed stem cell-based products used in bone and joint pain treatment. In 2006 RS started to commercialise Regenexx-C, a procedure consisting in the harvesting of stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow (that is obtaining what is called a bone marrow aspirate, or BMA), the cultivation of the cells and their re-infusion at the site of injury or pain. The BMAs are allowed to grow for a few weeks so that—according to the company—the number of mesenchymal stem cells held (controversially) to have the main therapeutic potential in the aspirate, can increase in them. Within two months from harvesting, the cells are re-injected in the patient. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) represent a fraction of the cells contained in the bone marrow and in other human tissues (such as fat, for example). They are able to give rise to bone, cartilage and fat tissue and fulfil a supportive function in blood cell formation (Bianco et al.

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2008). Some scientists believe that these cells, if injected at the site of an injury, can also aid immune response and self-healing, but these properties have not been fully documented yet. Consequently, the claims about the therapeutic potential of transplanted MSCs are the object of a heated scientific controversy (Bianco et al. 2013). Nevertheless, the therapeutic function of MSCs as aids to naturally occurring processes of self-healing is currently being explored in hundreds of registered clinical trials around the world. Yet, companies like RS—as well as those that figure in the case studies below—are marketing MSC-based products ahead of clinical validation. For this reason, in July 2008, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA; the US federal agency charged with regulating pharmaceutical products) sent a warning letter to RS concerning Regenexx-C. In the letter, the FDA pointed out that patients’ cells were being substantially manipulated and that they were being employed for non-homologous use. This means that the cells were not only extensively manipulated before re-injection but also that they were injected in a part of the body different from the site of extraction and where they were expected to perform a different biological function to that they had in their original location. According to regulatory provisions in the US, such procedures imply serious safety risks, as stem cells can give rise to severe adverse effects such as tumour formation, infection, immune diseases and organ failure. For this reason, cell therapies should respond to high safety standards and be treated—from a regulatory point of view— as biological drugs. This implied that Regenexx-C cells could not be distributed—let alone sold—for clinical use prior to FDA’s approval. Two years later, in early August 2010, the Department of Justice, on behalf of the FDA, filed an injunction in the US District Court for the District of Columbia to halt the commercialisation of Regenexx-C. Chris Centeno—the orthopaedic surgeon who founded RS and invented the Regenexx products line—replied that, although he was not acting under the FDA oversight, he was on safe grounds because the procedure was part of the commonly accepted practice of medicine (as a form of transplantation) and, moreover, because he followed the guidelines of the International Cellular Medicine Society (Blasimme 2013). On 23 July

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2012, however, the Court rejected Centeno’s counterclaims and upheld the injunction.6 When Nature magazine reported on the FDA’s injunction against Centeno, comments started to be posted on the journal’s website.7 A terminally ill patient, for instance, claimed that ‘the practice of medicine really needs to be between a doctor and his patient’ and that ‘to not allow autologous stem cell treatments for the terminally ill in [the US] is a travesty’ (Cyranoski 2011). As for the FDA’s injunction the same patient commented: ‘[p]atients are left wondering why the scientific community fails to ever consider what we want’ (Cyranoski 2011). Along the same lines, another commentator ‘applaud[ed] Regenerative Sciences for standing up to the FDA [because] it is about time someone did’ and added that ‘[w]e must stand up for our rights as patients and if our very own cells are not ours I don’t know what is’ (Cyranoski 2011). The commentator concluded by stating that ‘[i]t should be up to me and my doctor to decide what is the best treatment for me not a government agency’ (Cyranoski 2011). The commentators were clearly arguing for the right of individuals to be treated according to their perceived medical needs and therapeutic preferences. Notably, this right was articulated in an adversarial fashion, contesting centralised regulation, governmental interference and medical paternalism, while the FDA was perceived as working against the interests of patients. Notably, the efforts at enforcing restrictive regulations within the US had unforeseen consequences. As a direct result of the FDA’s actions concerning Regenexx-C, RS exported its procedures involving more than minimally manipulated cells off-shore. A brand new clinic was created in the Cayman Islands in order to escape the regulatory action of the FDA. Here patients can still obtain Regenexx-C, paying out of their pockets and avoiding any interference from US public authorities.8

CellTex: Cell Therapy and the Practice of Medicine ‘I would like to ask you and your colleagues to recognise the revolutionary potential that adult stem cell research and therapies have on our nation’s health, quality of life and economy’ (Office of the Governor

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2011). With these words, in a letter sent on 25 July 2011, longtime Texas Governor Rick Perry was inviting the Texas Medical Board (TMB) to consider the postulated therapeutic virtues of autologous adult mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), while drafting regulations on their clinical use. Governor Perry himself had received an autologous stem cell-based treatment for his back pain in the summer of 2011. The physician that performed the intervention was at the time the vice president and co-founder of a company called CellTex. The company offered a comprehensive package including the retrieval, purification and re-injection— either locally or intravenously—of MSCs isolated from the patient’s fat tissue for roughly USD 20,000. However, the procedures sold by CellTex had never been authorised nor previously validated through officially approved controlled clinical trials. Thus, similar to RS, CellTex too operated outside the FDA regulations on the experimentation and provision of stem cell-based therapies. The company must have been fully aware of the fact that it could elicit reactions from regulatory bodies. Indeed, to project credibility on its activities, in December 2011, CellTex appointed the then-editorin-chief of the American Journal of Bioethics, Glenn McGee, as their president for ethics and strategic initiatives. This move sparked controversy as many specialists in bioethics saw a conflict of interest between McGee’s function as an editor of a bioethics journal and his working for a company dealing in unapproved therapies. The controversy that ensued over McGee’s appointment pushed him to resign from CellTex in March 2012, after the case had become public. Later that year, in a warning letter issued on 24 September, the FDA indicated that the CellTex cell products were more than minimally manipulated and intended for non-homologous use. As in the case of Regenexx-C, the FDA argued that CellTex products should be regulated as biological drugs, and thus not be provided to patients without a proper FDA-released licence, following a regular clinical trial. And yet, prompted by the Governor Perry’s letter, the TMB held stakeholders and expert meetings to eventually issue new practice guidelines9 in which it stated that administering investigational agents constitutes the practice of medicine and therefore can be offered to patients under the direction

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of a licenced physician. The physician having obtained written informed consent from the patient about the experimental nature of the procedure, was now only to have the obligation of receiving a green light from an independent ethics review committee (Arnold 2012). This ultimately resulted in a bill enacted in 2017 that guaranteed patients affected by a severe chronic disease or a terminal illness access to stem cell treatments still under clinical trial (ServickJun 2017). This bill, albeit excluding provision of investigational treatments for profit, explicitly sets out to ensure that neither federal nor state agencies can interfere with the free choice of patients to receive those treatments. Notwithstanding the possible emergence of a more permissive regulatory environment in Texas, CellTex did not wait for favourable conditions to fully emerge. After the FDA’s warning letter, the company did not stop its activities, but changed its business model, as it started to offer the retrieval, culture and conservation of fat-derived stem cells—procedures that take place at their central facility in Sugarland (Texas) and through a network of affiliated physicians and partners. However, in an effort to avoid FDA regulatory interference, the re-injection of cultured cells into paying patients is now happening off-shore, in selected clinics in Mexico (Cyranoski 2013). The website of the company abounds in testimonies of patients and their family members describing their frustration with the lack of satisfying treatments for their chronic or degenerative diseases. They all report that, after a series of failed attempts with standard-of-care treatments, they experienced substantial improvement in their symptoms or even got rid of chronic pain entirely only after undergoing the CellTex therapies. One cannot exclude the possibility that these testimonies are simply favourable advertising material produced by the company, or that there exists a form of targeted cooperation between the patients and CellTex and/or among the patients themselves (see, for example Novas 2006). However, it is not the veracity or origin of the statements, but the narrative they orchestrate that is of interest here. CellTex set out to offer a further therapeutic opportunity to patients who have exhausted conventional therapeutic options. The fact that the company operates, from both a scientific and a regulatory point of view, at the fringes of accepted practice testifies to the fact that it locates their patients in a

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state of exception. At the same time, the TMB’s attempt at constructing a regulatory framing for the practice of autologous stem cell-based regenerative medicine legitimised CellTex’s efforts to move beyond the rigid protocols of clinical research and ethics.

Stamina: Cell Therapies and the Welfare State In Italy, since 2009, a private group called Stamina Foundation (henceforth Stamina) has been selling cell-based therapies to patients affected by a variety of serious neuro-degenerative disorders. Stamina’s cell products include bone marrow aspirates (BMAs) obtained either from the patients themselves (autologous setting) or from a family member (allogeneic setting) and are claimed to contain mesenchymal stem cells. These cells are treated to allegedly give rise to neurons before being infused into patients (generally intravenously) in cycles of five injections. However, there exists no published evidence that the neural differentiation of mesenchymal cells is biologically possible (Delorme et al. 2009) nor does any study support the safety or efficacy of the Stamina treatment (Sipp et al. 2017). In late 2011, the method was made available in a public hospital— thus at the expense of the public healthcare system—under a special legal framework for the provision of unlicenced cell-based therapies to patients with unmet medical needs (Rial-Sebbag and Blasimme 2014). The distribution of the alleged therapy by a public hospital, however, occasioned an inspection by the Agenzia Italiana del Farmaco (AIFA, the Italian drug oversight agency) that resulted in an inhibitory injunction forcing Stamina to stop providing its procedure. AIFA’s investigation revealed that Stamina had violated a host of other regulatory provisions required for the use of yet unlicenced cell therapies. In particular, AIFA highlighted the lack of published, peer-reviewed pre-clinical and clinical evidence regarding the Stamina protocol, the absence of risk-benefit assessment by an ethics committee, and the lack of compliance with good manufacturing practice standards in the handling of the cellular products used by Stamina (Blasimme and Rial-Sebbag 2013).

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In the summer of 2012, a number of patients and families appealed to courts against the injunction, claiming that the infusions they had received were showing therapeutic effects. Unexpectedly, in August that year, a judge ordered to resume the treatment for a two-year-old girl affected by spinal muscular atrophy. The judge based her decision only on the testimony of the parents who showed her videos of the child’s alleged progress after she received the first couple of injections. The case soon made headlines and hundreds of similar judicial orders followed throughout the country.10 Among the recurring themes in the narratives produced by the company, its supporters and by the prospective patients of Stamina, one idea sticks out: that a patient for whom no standard therapy is available has the right to access a therapy that, even if not recognised by the scientific community, fulfils the patient’s hope to gain some benefit from it. In the course of their numerous appearances on national and local media, Stamina patients typically presented themselves as members of families who strove to gain access to what they hoped would help them cope with serious illness. However, the virtually unanimous insistence of Italian scientists in characterising Stamina’s therapy as mere quackery (Sipp et al. 2017) eventually persuaded legislators to adopt a less permissive attitude towards the claims of patients and their families. In the meantime, a new Minister of Health entered office and appointed an expert committee to evaluate the feasibility of a state-sponsored clinical trial on Stamina’s procedure. The expert group concluded in late 201411 that the clinical trial could not be performed given the complete lack of scientific basis to undertake a proper experiment on the safety and efficacy of the Stamina method. In the same period, judicial procedures also started to cast a much less favourable light on Stamina and eventually led to the conviction of its founder and of the doctors who had worked for him for fraud.

Ruptures and Continuities To gain a better understanding of the issues at stake in the three cases presented above, it is useful to interpret the claims of the patients

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as claims to moral segregation from the rest of the sick community. This allows us to appreciate both ruptures and continuities between the patients’ framing of risk and the conceptual and symbolic apparatus from which they seek to depart. Segregation is one of the most ancient forms of care in the history of medicine. Sick people have long been isolated from others in order to avoid the spread of disease but also to separate them from insalubrious living conditions. Moreover, the diseased have historically been quarantined or hospitalised not only to prevent microbial contamination (i.e. infection) but also to keep the body of the sick out of sight—as in the case of leprosy or physical deformity. Martha Nussbaum, in her book Hiding from Humanity (2006), very aptly pointed out how disgust is projected upon those bodies that remind us of our own vulnerability, and how this has historically corresponded to the segregation of such bodies. Nussbaum’s account shows that it is not out of place to say that segregation is part of the semiotic constitution of medicine. Humans have long resorted to segregation to cope with diseased bodies, especially when these assume traits that medicine cannot possibly restore to physiological ‘normality’. In the cases that I have presented above, chronically or terminally ill patients inhabit a liminal therapeutic space: they can still have a relationship to conventional medicine and to its technical apparatus, but medicine is telling them that it will not be able to provide a cure. In particular, medicine is telling them that the set of practices that it can still mobilise towards their treatment has very limited boundaries: in most circumstances there are no treatments available except from symptoms management and palliative care; many patients can no longer be included in clinical trials; and, most importantly, they cannot be allowed to voluntarily choose to assume further risks in seeking treatments whose safety and efficacy are, at present, still unproven. It is to break out of such limitations that a state of exception is invoked. Drawing on Nygren et al. (2020), it could be argued that these patients are claiming a new, less constrained identity by challenging the way medicine’s account of risk defines them as moral and clinical subjects (see Chapter 4 in particular). My analysis does not intend to justify those claims, but rather aims to shed light on their conceptual and symbolic constitutions.

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Moral segregation locates patients in a different, less calculative but not totally alien modality of relation with their disease. In re-claiming this space of moral quarantine, as it were, patients invoke a non-mediated experience of their sick state. It is hard to deny that this invocation resonates with commonly held intuitions about granting the sick—and especially the terminally or chronically ill—a fuller degree of freedom from the ordinary obligations of life. It is this intuition that grants plausibility to the claims—first mobilised by HIV patients—to create regulatory room for the compassionate use of still unlicenced drugs. Moreover, the idea that, if affected by a serious and disabling condition, one should be released from the demands of social life, the idea, that is, that normative orders shall be re-calibrated in the presence of extreme suffering, is a widely shared, intuitively accessible piece of the cultural edifice built around disease and sickness (Annas 1989). Interestingly enough, this observation immediately re-assigns the extraordinary claims of those patients to the realm of ordinary moral thinking. This dialectical relationship, signals a line of communication between the moral frames that, so far, I have been trying to tease apart. It seems that, as soon as we try to distinguish the ordinary from the extraordinary, at a closer observation the exception manifests conceptual ties with the rule it seeks to overcome. This shows that the state of exception to which the patients appeal— and that I have described as a state of moral segregation—entails a form of continuity precisely with the ordinary normative order it asks to suspend. Interpreting the departure from the consolidated ethical and epistemic norms of medicine as an act of irrationality is to a great extent correct. However, as I will try to show in the next section, this interpretation fails to recognise the conceptual bonds that the claims of the regenerative medicine patients retain with the practice of medicine and with the ethics of clinical experimentation as well as with the common morality of hope and its role in the context of disease and suffering.

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The Ethical Imagination of Hope and Risk The phenomenology of hope in the practice of medicine and medical research has attracted attention of numerous scholars, from philosophers to sociologists, anthropologists and clinical practitioners (Farran et al. 1995). In most scholarly literature focussing on unproven stem cell treatments, departing from the canons of medicine and medical ethics in the name of medical hope has been described as a departure from rationality fuelled by both the excessive ‘hype’ that surrounds stem cells and by the commercial interests of the providers (Bianco and Sipp 2014; Caplan and Levine 2010; Master et al. 2013; Caulfield et al. 2014; Kamenova and Caulfield 2015; Rachul et al. 2015; Caulfield et al. 2016). Such an interpretation offers valuable insight into the way in which the marketing of therapeutic claims builds up public expectations and gives rise to what Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good and colleagues have called ‘a political economy of hope’ (1990). Alan Petersen, in his book on Hope in Health (2015), has shown that hope is deeply imbricated with contemporary discourses about the capacity of health technologies to respond to patients’ needs, fears and anxieties, thus becoming the object of new health-related imperatives. In this respect, hope is also at the roots of new forms of biological citizenship giving rise to new communities of practice (Rabinow 1992; Rose and Novas 2005). According to many, however, hope is totally impermeable to rational scrutiny. Two alternative normative positions have been derived from this account of hope. On the one hand, it has been argued that since hope cannot be subjected to reason, it coincides with a zone of individual self-expression that admits no interference with choices and decisions taken in its name (Hyun 2013a; b). On the other hand, hope has been depicted as an attitude that can become a source of vulnerability and deception (Bianco and Sipp 2014; Caplan and Levine 2010; Garrard and Wrigley 2009; Simpson 2004; Howe 2003; Schneiderman 2005; Eliott and Olver 2007; Dorcy 2010). However, many other scholars argue that hope is not irrational tout court (Smith 2010) and that it can actually be more productive in terms of agency than other seemingly more rational dispositions (e.g. Zinn 2016; Cook 2018). Rather, hope is more or less rationally

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warranted depending on the plausibility of its cognitive components, that is, the estimates of probability to obtain a given hoped-for outcome. Such understanding of hope has a century-long philosophical genealogy, dating back to Hobbes, Locke and Hume. For scholars in this camp of thought, hope has a legitimate place in the formation of preferences on the part of patients and should thus be taken into account by health professionals as well (Stempsey 2014; Kadlac 2015; Paley 2014; Pergert and Lützén 2012; Herrestad et al. 2014). In the medical field, hope has long been recognised for its motivational force and capacity to provide patients with the resilience, courage and imagination that they need as they go through very demanding phases of their lives. This can enrich the capacity of individuals to take autonomous decisions about their own health. In this view, one should also always challenge hopes as to their rational plausibility in order to prevent unwarranted hopes from obfuscating patients’ foresight, thus ultimately undermining their capacity for rational judgement and therefore for individual autonomy. Complex practices of boundary-work (Gieryn 1983) take place in the field of regenerative medicine to demarcate evidence-based treatments from unsupported concoctions offered to hopeful patients. Most of this work involves scientific societies and professional communities interested in warding off patients from therapies based on illegitimate therapeutic claims (Blasimme 2013; Petersen et al. 2014; Petersen 2015). While such boundary-work is commonplace in scientific circles, contrasting hope and rationality makes it difficult to notice forms of continuity between the framing of hope and risk that are considered medically and ethically viable, and those that are articulated at the fringes of acceptable medical practice. Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good and colleagues have famously described how American oncology—far from being the expression of pure scientific rationality—is deeply associated with hope discourses, as well as with other elements of popular culture such as the relation between psyche and soma (1990). These considerations show that, rather than simply representing a departure from rationality, the extraordinary to which patients appeal in the name of hope shows discursive continuity with the very canon from which it seeks to depart. From an epistemic point of view, the activities of stem cell clinics and therapy providers fall outside the remit of proper science, because they

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do not follow accepted patterns of clinical validation (Blasimme 2013; Petersen 2015). Yet, these activities are not entirely extra-scientific either, at least not in the sense that claims about the therapeutic potential of MSCs are commonplace in science as testified by the large number of officially registered clinical trials exploring the possible clinical use of such cells. From an ethical point of view, clinics, providers and patients are rejecting the common morality of clinical research as defined by the inclusive ethical paradigm that emerged in the wake of World War II. Yet, as mentioned earlier, their claims to a special ethical regime in which— given the lack of satisfying therapeutic options—the norms of inclusion are suspended, resonate with common moral intuitions about what we owe to those suffering. From a regulatory perspective, both providers and consumers of unproven stem cell treatments appeal to a derogation of the rules of clinical research. Yet, also in this case, such derogation is not entirely alien to the very same apparatus from which it intends to depart. Compassionate use or expanded access programmes represent the already accepted exceptions to such apparatus. In the Stamina case, for instance, it is precisely this kind of legally ‘normalised’ exception that provides patients with loopholes to receive an unproven therapy. Currently, the main route for accessing not yet licenced drugs is by participation in a clinical trial. However, this requires assuming the role of experimental object and, as a consequence, accepting to be protected against what is formally classified as unreasonable clinical risks. The patients who opt for unapproved treatments instead, refuse to take on the role of protected experimental objects and assume that of hopeful and active citizens. Nonetheless, this agential transition does not escape the logic of physical instrumentalisation that is typical of clinical research. By accepting to be the substrate of yet another technical procedure, those patients fall back into the very same ontology of passivity they seek to escape. As first noted by Foucault (1982) and Deleuze (1992) forms of self-instrumentalisation are a typical feature of late-modern societies. While not being managed through the institutional and technical apparatus of official clinical science, patients nevertheless become

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technical objects of intervention through the voluntary choice of a selfadministered form of risk management (see also Petersen 2015, esp. pages 9 and 43). Once again, between the ordinary order patients seek to escape and the extraordinary order they aspire to inhabit, there are both continuities and ruptures. Continuity does not imply a lack of difference between the rule and its transgression. It shows, however, that the transgression contains more that the mere negation of the rule. As social anthropologist Henrietta Moore put it, ‘every form of cultural production requires mimesis, repetition, reappropriation’ (Moore 2013, 6). Indeed, also those forms of agency that depend more constitutively on local and contingent circumstances, such as the subjective experience of disease, while recasting clinical risk in unconventional ways, are not produced in isolation. As Cheryl Mattingly noted in her work on clinical border zones, ‘[e]mergent, acted narratives, while improvised to fit context, are by no means invented from scratch’ (Mattingly 2011, 218). Ethnographic work on non-Western risk management practices has also shown syncretism and interwovenness of local—i.e. not based on Western science—and rationalistic framings of risk (Brown 2015). Recognising such shared trajectories means that the analysis should be brought back in contact with the epistemic and ethical structuring norms of the phenomenon it is observing. Simply declaring that the exception is, so to speak, offside vis-à-vis the norm casts it as an irrational and thus illicit departure. And yet, the needs and worldviews that the norm cannot satisfy find realization elsewhere—in geographic, juridical and epistemic otherness in our case—despite efforts aimed at exposing their unruliness.

Conclusion In this chapter I have analysed three controversies in the domain of regenerative medicine as examples of unordinary—and unruly—framings of experimental risk. In all the cases discussed here, the boundarywork that demarcates science from non-science, moral inclusion from exploitation, lawful from illegal medical practice, and that seeks to warrant only ‘rationality-based’ hope responds to the expected function

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of scientific and regulatory authorities. Such boundary-work, nonetheless, is constituted by moral tensions that ultimately bear on the individual experience of disease. Such tensions can thus hardly be brought back under rational control without losing sight of some of the relevant moral issues at play in this domain. In particular, downplaying ambivalence (Nygren et al. 2020) and mapping such controversies onto a rigid division between rational and irrational risk tends to impoverish our ability to grasp the existential weight of disease and the way it contributes—also in ways that one may find doubtful—to the ethical imagination of patients. Henrietta Moore has referred to ethical imagination as a guiding heuristic to make sense of cultural and social transformations mediated by locally determined forms of subjectification (Moore 2013, Ch. 1). This analytic perspective invites a consideration of how moral difference is produced, reproduced and challenged. Simply stressing the lack of normative compliance—albeit logically legitimate— takes affect and performativity out of the frame. For Moore, ‘[h]opes, desires and satisfactions can never be fully captured by forms of regulation, [rather] they emerge as possibilities, forms of improvisation, within cultural and social contexts’ (Moore 2013, 22). The peculiar space in which the confrontation between conceptually separated perspectives takes place is the space in which imagination is called upon. The two worlds that I have described—that of official science and medical practice and that of unconventional and even illicit medical activities—are two radically separate conceptual spaces. In one of these worlds, being sick means relying on an epistemic, ethical and regulatory apparatus that distributes health resources in a rationalised way, thereby allowing access only to treatments already proven to be effective and importantly not posing significant risk to patients. In the other, being sick means undertaking a personal route of individual exploration of precisely those possibilities that science has foreclosed, or has not made available yet. Hopes and desires orient different patients towards different conceptual worlds. But we have seen that those worlds are not completely disconnected. The three stories presented in this chapter illustrate that regenerative medicine has become a site for the articulation of a specific narrative about therapeutic hope, clinical risk and the freedom to access therapy

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ahead of scientific validation. Promissory claims about the alleged therapeutic properties of stem cells eventually find space through regulatory loopholes (Petersen 2015, 68) and can shape a permissive regulatory framework. Moreover, the case studies show that narratives of therapeutic hope can even project legitimacy on the adoption of scientifically unproven procedures and eventually foster specific political economies of hope, as also illustrated by Alan Petersen in the case of the emergent stem cell market (Petersen 2015, 65). The case studies presented here resonate furthermore with Cheryl Mattingly’s account of clinical hope in her ethnographic analysis of how African American families deal with the sickness of their children (Mattingly 2011). In Mattingly’s account, hope connects ‘small-scale dramas […] to larger social histories’ (217). Likewise, narratives of therapeutic hopes concerning unproven stem cell therapies connect the subjective experience of disease to national discourses about the regulatory role of public authorities in channelling, taming or promoting such hopes. Claims to access unproven therapies depend on imagining the struggle against one’s illness as a matter of individual choice, rather than as a process rigidly instructed by the epistemic and ethical authority of scientists and regulators. Patients who were unsatisfied with the standard of medical care, or patients for whom no other viable therapy was available, also laid claim to be freed from the protective apparatus of medical ethics. They saw themselves as members of a separate moral community whose interests were damaged rather than served by the existing regulatory provisions. For those patients, inclusive moral consideration (offered by medical ethics) was an impediment that limited their ability to explore alternative therapeutic avenues. That was the reason why they claimed access to an altogether exceptional kind of moral consideration—one centred on the hope to be cured, rather than on the risk to be harmed. From an analytic point of view, the way ahead may prove intricate indeed. On the one hand, we must be able to distinguish between acceptable and censurable medical practices. On the other, we should remain attentive to the ways in which suffering seeks alternative forms of moral articulation—as eccentric and extraordinary as these might be. Quoting

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Moore again, the analysis should thus attend to the ways in which ‘recognition of diversity and difference produces particular kinds of self-other relations through engagements with specific forms of hope, desire and satisfaction’ (Moore 2013, 12). The exploration of such diversity should neither lead to conceiving of different moral worlds as mutually incompatible nor to automatically accepting the plausibility of any form of difference qua difference. Such exploration, calling attention to both continuities and discontinuities, can serve the purpose of giving voice to difference, thus enlarging our moral vocabulary when dealing with the lived experience of human disease.

Notes 1. In particular I have relied on primary sources such as patents and publications linked directly to the Stamina, Regenexx and CelTex procedures; official documents by regulatory agencies in Italy and the US; legislative sources and documents from legal proceedings directly connected to the cases; publications by scientific societies regarding the clinical translation of stem cell therapies; and scientific literature providing insight into the therapeutic claims made by the companies. Moreover, to integrate my analysis with sources coming from the companies and their patients, I have collected information directly on the companies’ websites and on the websites of patients’ associations. Finally, I have qualitatively analysed posts commenting news about the cases in scientific journals, focussing on those in support of the companies’ activities. 2. The actual authorship of the Nuremberg Code has been a matter of historical controversy. US Supreme Court judge Harold Sebring, who served as chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trial has long been considered the author of the Code (The Hastings Center 1976). However, Dr. Andrew Ivy and Dr. Leo Alexander (two of the expert witnesses sent by the American Medical Association to testify at the trial) have also been identified as main authors of the Code (Moreno 1996).

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3. The Declaration was originally promulgated in 1964 and then periodically updated. 4. ‘Subpart A’ of the Department of Health and Human Services’ regulations of human research (Code of Federal Regulations, Title 45, Part 46). This text is referred to as the Common Rule, because it has been adopted by 16 federal agencies and departments that conduct research involving human subjects. A new version of the Common Rule has been promulgated on 19 January 2017 (Federal Register, Vol. 82, No.12 pages 7259–7274) and shall become effective between 2018 and 2020. 5. In drawing a parallel between the HIV movement and the narratives mobilised in the case of unproven stem cell therapies, I do not intend to suggest any historical or ideological connection between the two. Rather, I simply wish to highlight that the ethical, regulatory and epistemic framework of clinical research ethics is once again challenged on the basis of claims to moral segregation with the aim of offsetting regulatory interference. 6. See http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCOURTS-dcd-1_10-cv01327/pdf/USCOURTS-dcd-1_10-cv-01327-0.pdf (Accessed March 2014). The decision was confirmed in appeal on 4 February 2014. See: http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/947528 CDDA0B9A5A85257C7500533DF4/$file/12-5254-1478137.pdf (Accessed March 2014). 7. It should be kept in mind that comments to online articles cannot be traced back to a specific person. Even when those comments are signed, one cannot be sure that the author is providing her real name. The same applies to the biographical details provided in the text of the comments. The quotes reported in this section should thus not be taken as being representative of the thinking of any particular category of people. Rather, they provide valuable information into the kind of counter-arguments that can be mobilised against the effort of the FDA to bring this controversy to a close. All the quotes in this section were retrieved from the online version of Cyranoski (2011) in late September 2011. 8. See: https://regenexxcayman.com.

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9. ‘Practice Guidelines for the Use of Investigational Agents’. These guidelines are included in the Texas Administrative Code, as Title 22, Part 9, Chapter 198 (Standards for the Use of Investigational Agents) as rule §198.3. 10. See: Origine e Sviluppo del Cosiddetto Caso Stamina. Atti dell’indagine conoscitiva svolta dalla 12a commissione permanente del Senato (igiene e sanità), n. 41 marzo 2017. XVII legislatura. Available at: https://www.senato.it/application/xmanager/projects/ leg18/file/repository/relazioni/libreria/novita/XVII/IC-41_stamina. pdfr. 11. Ibid.

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5 Commentary: Clear and Present Danger—Dodging and Dealing with Risk and Uncertainty in Everyday Life Atreyee Sen

A significant number of academic explorations of risk are representative of a global turn towards studying ‘risk societies’ (cf. Beck 2002). Many anthropologists place emphasis on environmental threats and other anxieties about the future brought about by modernisation, capitalism, and unfettered industrialisation (cf. Macvarish 2010; Nugent 2000; Zaloom 2004). There are several anthropologists who focus on policy and legal investments that attempt to resolve structural problems and assist communities living under conditions of risk, disillusionment, and suicides (cf. Rose 2008; Livingston 2009). However, as Das observed, ‘although public acknowledgment of harm is important and has received enormous attention in juridical and public policy literature, A. Sen (B) Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 ´ B. Switek et al. (eds.), Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83962-8_5

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the work done in the recesses of everyday life, within local communities, kinship networks, and families has received somewhat less attention’ (2008, 293). Consequently, with some noted exceptions (e.g. Biehl 2005; Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997; Scheper-Hughes 1992) social scientists have been complicit in overlooking ‘what suffering actually does to people’ (Wilkinson 2004, 213, italics in original). Kolling’s, Blasimme’s, and Trueba’s contributions to this volume fill this gap by emphasising the importance of analytically understanding the relationship between fear, risk, and bodily integrity, especially among marginalised communities, and underlining the need to ‘reflect on the ways in which individuals actively experience the social significance and moral meaning of their physical afflictions, material deprivations and loss’ (Wilkinson 2004, 114, italics in original). In their chapters, the authors effectively address concerns about the anticipatory dimensions of risks and use multiple ethnographic perspectives to show how populations feel, express, and experience risk, in terms of physical, mental, and economic challenges. Instead of classifying human action as risk-averse or risk-preferring, they show how peoplebased, ‘bottom-up’ analysis of danger and vulnerabilities is usually better suited to identify the human dynamics that lie at the heart of ‘remaking the everyday’ (Das 2008). The authors ask and address questions that problematise risk: What kind of uncertainty has been introduced by the threat of violence, loss of income, and serious illness? How is familiar, that is ordinary, human action (e.g., walking, talking, and exchange), and relationalities (e.g., family life and professional relationships) disrupted by risk? What forms of moral contemplation and demands are mobilised by actors to shape their understanding of a better life? By creatively responding to these questions, Kolling, Trueba, and Blasimme highlight the potential of risk to rupture the ordinary, as well to integrate itself into the quotidian. This ordinary/extraordinary dialectic entails dwelling in and navigating maximal modes of crisis (ranging from shootouts to medical emergencies) that configure the everyday lives and logics of communities studied by the authors. My reflections on these three preceding chapters are framed by a few ethnographic musings on material practices related to risk that I encountered during my fieldwork in

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Dharamsala, with a particular focus on the lives of Tibetan refugees who faced years of political imprisonment in Lhasa, China.

Risk as Desperation and Defiance While everyday life shot through with risks can generate overwhelming vulnerabilities, it may also become an abstract locus of defiance. Kolling’s evocative recreation of a slum scenario in peri-urban Brazil, Trueba’s poignant account of the lives of miners in Potosí, and Blasimme’s eloquent representation of patients undergoing medical treatment for declining health conditions, offer stark narratives on the ways in which ordinary people attempt to resourcefully survive social, economic, and medical marginalisations. Kolling and Trueba highlight how living with the possibility of death and disability from bullets and blasts acted as a form of defiance against a wider neoliberal economy that remains increasingly complicit in the perishing and peripheralising of small-scale, working-class communities across the world. For example, while Dona Nilda’s experiences (in Kolling’s chapter) of hiding in the bathroom of her new housing accommodation during a shootout accentuated the slum dwellers’ desperation, the collective evening walking tours organised by women also flaunted their defiance (albeit limited) against women’s daily mobility being entirely defined by their experiences of a violent, masculinist street culture. Even though ‘violence could not be contained and it could and did erupt unexpectedly’ (Kolling, this volume), it also created what the author describes as new modes of endurance – ordinary people found fresh ways in which to restrict their vulnerability by learning, intuiting, and engaging with their new urban environment that morphed and regenerated in the context of the drug trade in Brazil. In a similar vein, in Trueba’s account, Don Anastasio, a miner holding a blasting device in his bare hands deep in a mining hole in Potosí, preferred to use a dynamite by himself. He could not afford to pay compensation for potential injuries caused to other miners recruited to share his job. While this lonely act of toying with death highlighted his economic desperation, it also brought forward a narrative of his agentive capacity to provide

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food, rent, and affective resources for his family; especially against the backdrop of global mining industries using health and safety training as a ruse to turn a blind eye towards pathetic working conditions of mining communities in many developing economies. Both authors show how defiance becomes embodied in living with danger, as poor workers’ daily micro-resistances become increasingly incorporated as an existential reality within various subsistence economies in the Global South. This defiance is fittingly expressed in the disdain of Don Anastasio, who, like many other miners in Potosí, refused to attend the governmentsponsored health and safety training sessions because, ‘these do not bring any solutions to the safety problems that we [miners] face’ (Trueba, this volume). Blasimme’s chapter also brings forward an intimate relationship between despair, demands, and defiance. The author shows how certain groups of patients used social, political, and media forums to expressly demand the authorisation of unlicensed and experimental cell therapies, especially if the individuals were affected by disabling or life-threatening diseases. Blasimme shows how a number of families appealed to courts against an injunction imposed by a drug oversight agency, claiming that the potentially banned infusions showed therapeutic effects for patients. The families won the case. While the demand for therapy, and the legal battle against the injunction, highlights the desperation of a vulnerable community, it also casts light on how conditions of vulnerability mobilise people to defy existing legal strictures and demand ‘the right to risk’: experiment with their bodies to prolong the possibility of a healthy future. Together, Kolling, Blasimme, and Trueba’s accounts show that people who are constantly faced with their own mortality, and the mortality of others they care for, can treat risk as a convoluted ideal that becomes entangled with expressions of both fear and determination. Ordinary people’s engagement with these extraordinary forms of risk and risky behaviour becomes embedded in daily resistances, as they correct, contradict, and obscure moral, economic and bioethical principles on conserving human life. The authors show how everyday risks appear to be exceptional whereby people’s survival can be considered ‘miraculous’. And yet these encounters with the extraordinary are an extension of the ordinary and an incorporation of violence, wounding, and potential loss

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as commonplace events in daily life. Before moving on to a discussion of the temporalities of risk in these contexts, I introduce some tensions over emerging material practices within a Tibetan refugee community in Dharamsala, to further highlight the simultaneity and coproduction of competing narratives of risk and defiance.

Material Testimonies to Endured Risk in Dharamsala A number of European philosophers such as Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, and Badiou have debated the distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary; they mainly describe it as the difference between normality and an event. Deleuzian (1992) conception of repetition and difference has however shown that what appears to be extraordinary human action may be subjectively experienced as deviation from the past, but its reproduction thins the line between routine and the dramatic. This complicates our understanding of risk as its reproduction and repetition in everyday life might make its experience and exhibition unspectacular: in which risk is not quite normal, but it might cease to evoke empathy as a departure from the normal. In the following sections I want to capture these rhythms of experiencing and disseminating narratives of risk, and the cultural anxiety produced through its diminishing status as ‘extraordinary’. Dharamsala, a small hill town located in the scenic Kangra Valley in Himachal Pradesh, one of the states along the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, is the exile home of thousands of Tibetan political prisoners. It is also a centre of regional refugee politics, which has gained currency in the context of the emerging Rohingya crisis in South Asia. Over the past 50 years, more than 150,000 Tibetans fled to India navigating long, hazardous journeys across the mountains, and many refugees did not survive this risky endeavour (Chen 2011). Currently there are approximately 120,000 Tibetans in various camps across the region. In 1960, the Dalai Lama established the controversial but internationally funded Tibetan government–in-exile which was based out of Dharamsala (Bhatia et al. 2002). Since then, the town has come to be described by local

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Tibetans as Dhasa, a combination of Dharamsala and Lhasa. Many NGO leaders active in Dharamsala claimed that they consider the Tibetans as a community facing ‘the risk of extinction’, not only due to the erasure of Tibetan language, art, and culture both in Chinese territories and in exile but also because of the lack of livelihood, barriers to social integration, and health-related issues caused by long-term displacement (Davis 2010). There are several prominent organisations that coordinate an emotional, financial, and residential infrastructure in Dharamsala, especially to support victims of prison brutalities in China. Stories of imprisonment and persecution are integral to community life in the region. Most former political prisoners living in Dharamsala, who are not hidden away in monasteries or hospitals, do not carry visible scars or disabilities that could easily attract the attention of fellow Tibetans on the street. This invisibility is related to a modified form of torture in Chinese prisons. In response to the proliferation of human rights organisations that offered to survey the condition of political prisoners in China from the 1980s onwards, imprisoned Tibetans were whipped with sand-filled belts rather than leather whips which left no marks on their bodies. To further hoodwink the surveyors, prisoners were made to stand barefoot in the snow, and then forced to walk, so that the skin from under their feet got ripped off. As a result of such tactics, despite the pain, Tibetan prisoners did not display physical scars when exhibited for inspection by international human rights officers (Sen 2014). However, over the decades, prisoners who completed their sentences took with them objects from their prison cells (cups, saucers, and blankets), instruments of torture, photographs of dead cellmates, bloodied work shirts from prison labour camps, and other items that they had accumulated over their years in the penitentiary. I conducted research among these political prisoners, primarily to explore their emotional and bodily movement away from extreme and brutally violent life conditions. It was during this fieldwork that I came across a peculiar culture of circulating, consuming, exhibiting, and classifying material objects, mainly items that symbolised people’s encounters with political cultures of confinement.

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Tenzin (30) was a young member of the Gu Chu Sum Association in Dharamsala that acted as an interest group for former Tibetan political prisoners. Even though he had a family who lived in a permanent shelter, Tenzin often lived in a special housing colony run by the association, and preferred to stay isolated in prayer, meditation, self-reflection, or ‘just crying’, as he told me. After being tortured and imprisoned in China for several years on account of his small-scale political activism, he could not cope with sexual intimacy. When I met him, Tenzin carried around a bag strapped across his shoulder that contained small handcuffs and some anus-prodders with which he was tortured in prison. He found it horribly painful to defecate even though he did not have any signs of mutilation on his body. On the days that he felt particularly angry to see other young Tibetans, some of them being his close friends, ‘drinking, eating and dating white tourists’, Tenzin would randomly enter local bars and throw his torture instruments on a table. This would lead to chaos and confusion in the bar, but Tenzin would have felt that he had delivered his message to apathetic Tibetans. There were several political prisoners who were not as combative as Tenzin in expressing their anger, but would use market days and other informal drinking places in Dharamsala, to silently sit in one corner and display prison objects. There were also religious and social gatherings organised for political prisoners, which were attended by other Tibetans living in and around Dharamsala. Circulation of prison objects was central to such meetings, and these memorabilia were tied to stories of threat, danger, imminent risk, and death. Who was tortured and how, who was killed and why: these narratives were shared by several political prisoners while holding up items from their prison life. Some former prisoners wore small thumb-cuffs from which they were hung while being beaten in prison, while others put electric cattle prods into their mouths to show how their tongues were singed when they did not parrot government propaganda. The celebrity Buddhist monk Palden Gyatso, who endured 33 years of incarceration in China, would refuse to be photographed without his torture instruments. These practices of distributing and displaying objects from former prison life seemed to enable my informants to visibilise and measure their experiences of risk as a form of defiance against the silencing mechanisms of prisons. I

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suggest that it also empowered them to use prison objects as psychological weapons against fellow Tibetans who disregarded this tyrannical past and wanted to use their flight to exile to ‘move on’ to better futures.

(In)visibilising Risk Many young local Tibetans criticised the dramatic displays of torture instruments and disliked prolonged public story-telling about ‘risked lives’ by former political prisoners. Some teenagers told me that they appreciated the flow of international aid into the Tibetan community in Dharamsala and were worried whether this trend would continue after the death of the popular 14th Dalai Lama. So instead of reliving the past and remembering the suffering faced by a community of displaced prisoners, many young Tibetans preferred enjoying a little affluence and freedom in the present. A few of them who had lived in the region for a while explained to me that the presence of specific refugeebased programmes and NGOs from the US and Europe had given Tibetans in Dharamsala an opportunity to start new businesses (ranging from Tibetan arts, crafts, and jewellery to hotels and computer training schools), rise above impoverishment, and learn English. This in turn had encouraged groups of homeless refugees to engage with their imagination of ‘western lifestyles’ and make themselves viable as more global citizens. They would wear designer clothes donated to the community by several international organisations, distributing what was often given away by wealthy families in the west to various charitable groups. These young Tibetans also had computers, laptops, I-pods, guitars, and cell phones, which had been discarded as ‘outdated’ and shipped to Dharamsala by several US tech companies. Some of the younger businessmen travelling between Dharamsala and nearby towns easily acquired funds for mountain motorbikes. Even the Tibetan monasteries received large international donations which allowed monks to sport DKNY spectacles (Sen 2014). Many refugee women and children aspired for a global staging of the modern Tibetan self through fusion art, music, food, and fashion. For

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example, a group of young women pooled resources, sought out sponsorship, and organised Miss Tibet contests (the only national beauty contest in exile) to exhibit the desirability of the female refugee, instead of presenting their physical frames as tortured, emaciated objects of horror or pity. ‘We also want to be sexy, and forget death. And the pressure of remembering those who risked their lives for a cause. So many people tell me that I am a bad refugee. If I show my body, an international audience will lose sympathy for our community, there will be no money for us anymore. Refugees can’t wear this’, one of the pageant contestants told me while showing me her bikini for the swimsuit round. Younger children, some of them born and raised in Dharamsala, also resented being branded as disempowered and ‘dirty refugee children’, said Tsundue (12) who felt legacies of confinement were not ‘cool’ enough (Sen 2014). Wearing a Spiderman T-shirt, he preferred cartoons, superhero movies, comic books, and western music to attending regular rounds of candlelight marches against the execution of Tibetan political prisoners in China. The conflicting tensions between these young people and former political prisoners played out within his family: Tsundue’s preference for ‘cool’ things was contested by his grandfather. He once told me: ‘Every time I am reading a comic book, grandfather will show me his wounds and the knives with which he was cut open. I want to vomit and hide more in my comic books. I always tell him I am reading Tintin in Tibet to bring some balance’. Tsundue’s grandfather, like some other former prisoners, would display torture instruments, photographs of wounds, and belongings of dead cellmates, especially to younger children, in the hope that their progenies would develop a political consciousness about a nation they had never seen. While refuting the dualistic semantics of persons and things, Strathern (1999) wonders about the subject, conceived of as agent, consciously and purposefully guiding consumption activities to suit his or her preferred identity. The prison objects displayed by the political prisoners may have inhibited a rapid journey away from memories of incarceration, towards what many Tibetan young refugees embraced as a consumption-based, materialist identity (‘a magazine model’ of life, as described by a former Tibetan prisoner). Nonetheless, the exhibition of instruments of torture allowed the political prisoners to demand a certain acknowledgement

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of their sacrifices. Several Tibetan prisoners stated that when they were detained in China, their focus on everyday survival in an inhumane prison environment did not allow them to understand, let alone appreciate the kinds of risks they confronted to serve their nation. Prison stories involved an act of sharing (with other Tibetans, with families, with local Himachali people visiting the market), which in turn enabled certain political prisoners to collectively vocalise and value their identity as courageous people who staked their lives for a free religious and political future for Tibetans. They were ordinary humans who overcame extraordinary forms of risk. Thus, both grief (about the lives lost in prison, the loss of control over normal bodily functions, and importantly, the homeland left behind) and gladness (about their bravery, survival, and their nationalist pride) were mapped onto what would otherwise appear to be objects of gloom. This visibilisation of encounters with extreme and extraordinary risk, however, came with an anxiety of its tentativeness. For example, the everyday practices of slum dwellers in Kolling’s account, actions of patients in Blasimme’s chapter, and those of miners in Trueba’s text highlight the ways in which ordinary people risk their emotional and physical health in order to prolong the potentialities of life. Yet, in all these cases there still remains a high chance that individual risks would be invisibilised, supressed, and eventually forgotten by the state, housing development agencies, employment organisations, corporate firms, cooperative sectors, and wider scientific and medical communities. The Tibetan political prisoners also lived in the shadow of being forgotten by community and kinship networks. According to Lobsang, a former political prisoner I met in Dharamsala, as more young Tibetans walked around town with their new music and mobile devices, filled their homes with modern appliances, and wore designer clothes, they tended to shun the ‘depressing’ company of attention-seeking prisoners. Lobsang concluded that ‘all that these people [young Tibetans] want to do is to forget their political history, be able to speak English with an American accent, drink beer, show off their new found material assets, colour their hair, and ultimately shake hands with Hollywood stars [a reference to the presence of Richard Gere and Jackie Chan in Dharamsala]’.

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According to Miller (2001), material cultures represent a certain organisation of agency. In several of his works on mass consumption (1987, 1994, 2001), he turns to the example of a haunted house to argue for a theory of materiality. While discussing the agency of an object, he suggests that a haunted house actively constrains its inhabitants, and compels people to comprehend human transience by constructing an external ‘ghost’. Thus, overall material environments have the potential to create subjects who are then driven to develop an account of their experiences in the shadow of things. The circulation of material objects among political prisoners in Dharamsala is one such haunting. The battle over objects is closely related to a battle for agency among the subjects. In their everyday lives, some Tibetans refuse to constrain their subjectivities by the dominance of prison artefacts; others do not see themselves, socially and physically, separate from the prison objects, which continue to play an intrusive role in their subjective experiences. My ethnography illustrates how all Tibetan refugees, from former prisoners to young entrepreneurs, are defiantly gauging their social position within their exile environments, and ‘are using these objects to formulate ideals and argue through problems’ (Miller 1994, 315–316). Similarly, in the accounts developed in the preceding three chapters, ordinary people’s relationships with ‘extraordinary’ material objects (guns, drugs, blasting devices, extracting tools, fences to ward off shooters, and unproven medicines) impacted their understanding of a protected and healthy future, and underlined their agency to accommodate, and at times, transform their dissatisfactory present. These dangerous objects then become the centre-piece, a motif around which individuals experiment with unpacking different techniques of living, livelihoods, and building human relations. Time and space becomes vital in how ideas of risk evolve, develop, and change, which I highlight further in the following section.

Temporalities of Risk According to Manalansan (2005), who discusses the capacity of persecuted queer communities to foray into uncharted spatial and political

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territories, risk acts as a temporal rite of passage into extraordinary forms of knowledge and experiences, which cannot be encountered within the remits of routine (147). But it can also generate conflict within communities over the degrees and levels of risk that allow people to sustain a certain status in society. It becomes the responsibility of those experiencing lesser risk (e.g., the new generation of upper-class queer couples in a tolerant social universe) to respond with reverence to those who made bigger sacrifices in the past (e.g., the beatings, loneliness, and slurs faced by earlier queer activists). The narratives developed by former political prisoners and young Tibetans show that both communities risked their lives, property, and homeland as they journeyed through mountainous region to live as refugees with little legal rights in a foreign land. Once in Dharamsala, however, many political prisoners imagined that their past experiences as extreme risk-takers would place them higher up in a hierarchy of risk. Eventually, the process of visibilising and invisbilising risk allowed former prisoners to construct wider social hierarchies based on the positionalities of risk-takers. The actions of young Tibetans underline the contested nature of this imagination, as they now aspire for a risk-free future and want to use the influx of goods and services into the displacement economy in Dharamsala, to re-invent themselves as global citizens (Sen 2014). Such complex short-range and long-term ‘risk horizons’ (Das and Teng 2001, 517), created through engagement with particular material objects, resonate with the stories presented in the preceding chapters. For example, Eliana in Kolling’s chapter wanted to build an innocuous wall to enclose her backyard and ward off drug dealers who hide there during shootouts. This unbuilt wall was a potent symbol. It was an ordinary slum dweller’s minor strategy to endure uncertain life conditions in the present. However, Eliana’s practical thought plugged into a much wider global anxiety about the diminishing urban futures of women workers, as public spaces in impoverished metropolitan areas got rapidly criminalised over time. In all the case studies discussed, family concerns and kinship networks remained central to temporal discourses of risk. Melissa (in Kolling’s chapter) was keen to protect her family from witnessing the horror of a man being killed at her doorstep. She wondered whether moving to an upgraded slum environment was risking the future lives of her children.

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So did Maria (in Trueba’s chapter), a widow on low compensation after the death of her miner husband, when she deposited dynamite under the bed she slept on with her children, right next to a burning stove. In Blasimme’s chapter, the families of patients expressed the desire to risk the lives of their children suffering from serious illness to receive unlicensed, life-extending therapy. And Tibetan political prisoners deployed shock and storied knowledge about incarceration as a tactic to ensure that the next generations paid tribute to a political history of sacrifice. All these ethnographies highlight ordinary people’s changing ideas of normalcy, future-making, and ‘the politics of contingency’ (cf. Malaby 2002), which provokes them to take risks, in order to foreclose the possibility of greater, impending tensions and dangers within families. Eventually, these forms of self-constitution through diverse, often transgressive practices, show how communities of risk-takers actively navigate temporal geographies of risk (i.e. individual biographies intersected with taxonomies of time/space constraints) through material, familial, and ethical networks. The mapping of the ordinary/extraordinary in this ‘distribution of risk’, then creates implicit laws of inclusion and exclusion with communities. The discursive regime that determines the expressive politics of risk, and fuses modes of being into ways of doing risk, opens up a battlefield of political, economic, and cultural forces that make up meaning, recognition, and signification among vulnerable communities.

Conclusion In 1982, social anthropologist Mary Douglas and political scientist Aaron Wildavsky (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982) argued that each cultural milieu has its own risk portfolio where different forms of risk become matters of concern at particular critical moments in time. In such moments, there is usually a consensus about what to fear. And most communities quickly come to share an understanding about what not to be afraid of. Such adaptations in turn create what some contemporary authors describe as new regimes of risk (cf. Hacking 2003; Zinn 2008; Scheper-Hughes 2012). Even though the respective chapters in this section show how notions of risk are variable and flexible

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in time and space, all the authors reflect on how ordinary actors articulate a fundamental human desire: to live without the constant fear of death. While some organisations adapt to new and emerging demands made by communities to be recognised as extraordinary risk-takers (as in Blasimme’s chapter), others overlook the need to include vulnerable communities into a dialogue about poverty, income, and everyday insecurity (as in Kolling and Trueba’s chapters). Douglas and Wildavsky (1982) argued that the meanings, ontological implications, and moral qualities of risks are socially and culturally constructed by means of collective representations. Risks should thus be viewed as embedded in social and political histories of community life including, as all the chapters in this section show, the ways in which these histories (and the futures imagined as their extensions) make certain forms of risks and social suffering (in)visible. According to Boholm (2003), who examines the possibilities of developing a broader anthropology of risk, cultural theorists tend to argue that risk does not stem from the precautionary strategies of individuals, but it is a phenomenon shaped by social processes. Stepping outside the paradigms of economic sustainability, biosecurity, and environmental debates, which have often been deeply influenced by the relativistic construction of risk (cf. Slovic 2010), Kolling, Blasimme, Trueba, and my research bring forward a more gritty, everyday and fragile perception of risk within communities. The authors reveal how the extraordinary rhetoric of ‘risking one’s life’ (for a cause, for mobility, for economic sustenance, and for prolonging a healthy life) makes mediations (with criminalised groups, the state, scientists, political actors, global corporations, and peer groups) alarmist, frantic, and fractured. Instead of confronting risk, threat, and danger as intangible academic ideas, our analysis highlights the ways in which suffering, surviving, and negotiating new understandings and categorisations of risky behaviour give renewed meaning to social demands, collective rights, and community solidarities. In this sense, our studies show how ethnographic attention allows social sciences to ‘awaken’ and to engage in what Iain Wilkinson calls ‘critical humanitarianism’ that is essential to our understanding of life in terms of suffering (Wilkinson 2015, 46).

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Varied human dispositions towards navigating risk also open up an alternative way of conceptualising defiance and resistance, and patterns and rhythms of ordinariness that infiltrate extraordinary assemblages of risk. The ethnographies carefully crafted by the authors have shown that ordinary and extraordinary risks when rooted in complex webs of human relations and actions cannot be understood in terms of dualisms and oppositions. Instead, multiple notions of risks can be refracted through global economies and political systems, and get redistributed as an everyday crisis among marginal social groups. Communities produce heterogenous forms of resistance, from overtly challenging regulations to covertly playing for power and control over their localities, to create and condition knowledge about risk as ‘a tangle, a multilinear ensemble’ (Deleuze 1992, 159). Luhmann’s (1993) distinction between danger and risk, even though developed in the context of broader European debates on unpredictable environmental threats, suggests that both these terms allude to an anxiety and an uncertainty about future harm. He argues that ordinary people are distinctly uncomfortable if they imagine that this harm will be caused by sources beyond their control. So if people perceive harm as a corollary of risk, the concept develops an agentive quality; it turns into a decision owned by the actors concerned about harm, even though there is little assurance or insurance that the potential risk taken will overcome any danger. For example, an experimental medicine may not guarantee a long life, a fence may not keep out armed and hardened criminals. What remains is the effort, the attempt. I suggest that contemporary debates about risk are salient in all chapters in this section as they reflect people’s resolute attempts to successfully struggle for and win control over their bodies, memories, and destinies, while responding boldly to a changing political, economic, commercial, and legal landscape that determine the futures of sick, poor, and invisible lives. This landscape, as argued in the Introduction to this volume, is ordinarily extraordinary. It not only engages people with extraordinary risks on a daily basis, but it also incorporates risk, danger, and suffering into the very fabric of ordinary lives. The daily extraordinary ordeal lived by the Potosí miners, Brasilian slum dwellers, patients undergoing uncertified therapy, and Tibetan former

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prisoners finds its expression in the convergence of bodies with extraordinary objects (objects of torture; explosives under the bed, bullets in the streets, blood on the doorstep, re-injected, and potentially harmful stem cells in bloodstream). Everyday and intimate materiality of life is where the ordinary and extraordinary simultaneously reside, making risk and suffering not an occurrence out-of-place, but an urgent matter ‘exactly where it belongs’ (Introduction, this volume).

References Beck, Ulrich. 2002. Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited. Theory, Culture and Society 19 (4): 21–51. Bhatia, S., T. Dranyi, and D. Rowley. 2002. A Social and Demographic Study of Tibetan Refugees in India. Social Science and Medicine 54 (3) (February): 411–422. Biehl, Jo˜ao Guilherme. 2005. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press. Boholm, Åsa. 2003. The Cultural Nature of Risk: Can There Be an Anthropology of Uncertainty? Ethnos 68 (2): 159–178. Chen, Susan T. 2011. When ‘Exile’ Becomes Sedentary: On the Quotidian Experiences of ‘India-Born’ Tibetans in Dharamsala, North India. Asian Ethnicity. December, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2012. 630568. Das, Veena. 2008. Violence, Gender, and Subjectivity. Annual Review of Anthropology 37: 283–299 Das, T.K., and Bing-Sheng. Teng. 2001. Strategic Risk Behaviour and its Temporalities: Between Risk Propensity and Decision Context. Journal of Management Studies 38: 515–534. Davis, Britanny. 2010. Embodying Cultures: Rethreading Meanings of Tibetan-ness in Dharamsala, India. Electronic Journal of the ACA-UNCA. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. What is a Dispositif? In Philosopher: Essays Translated from the French and German by Timothy J, Armstrong, ed. Michel Foucault, 159–168. London: Harvester, Wheatsheaf.

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Douglas, M., and A. Wildavsky. 1982. Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hacking, I. 2003. Risk and Dirt. In Risk and Morality, ed. R. Ericson and A. Doyle, 22–47. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and Margaret M. Lock. 1997. Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California SPress. Livingston, Julie. 2009. Suicide, Risk, and Investment in the Heart of the African Miracle. Cultural Anthropology 24 (4): 652–680. Luhmann, N. 1993. Risk: A Sociological Theory. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Macvarish, Jan. 2010. The Effect of ‘Risk Thinking’ on the Construction of Teenage Motherhood. Health, Risk and Society 12: 313–322. Malaby, Thomas. 2002. Odds and Ends: Risk, Mortality and the Politics of Contingency. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 26: 283–312. Manalansan, Martin F. 2005. Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Spatial Politics in the Global City. Social Text 23 (3–4): 84–85. Miller, Daniel. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Berg. ———. 1994. Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach: Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad . Oxford: Berg ———. ed. 2001. Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors. Oxford: Berg. Nugent, Stephen. 2000. Good Risk, Bad Risk: Reflexive Modernisation and Amazonia. In Risk Revisited: Anthropology, Culture and Society, ed. P. Caplan, 226–248. Pluto Press. Rose, Nikolas. 2008. Race, Risk and Medicine in the Age of ‘Your Own Personal Genome.’ BioSocieties 3: 423–439. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil . Berkeley: University of California Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2012. The Other Who is Also Oneself: Immunological Risk, Danger, and Recognition. Cultural Anthropology 27 (1): 162–167. Sen, Atreyee. 2014. ‘It’s Cool to be Cosmo’: Tibetan Refugees, Indian Hosts, Richard Gere and ‘Crude Cosmopolitanism’ in Dharamsala. In Whose Cosmopolitanism? Critical Perspectives, Relationalities and Discontents, ed. Nina Glick Schiller and Andrew Irving, 87–102. Oxford, New York: Berghann. Slovic, P. 2010. The Feeling of Risk: New Perspectives on Risk Perception. London: Earthscan. Strathern, Marilyn. 1999. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone Press.

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Wilkinson, Iain. 2004. The Problem of “Social Suffering”: The Challenge to Social Science. Health Sociology Review 13 (2): 113–121. ———. 2015. Social Suffering and Critical Humanitarianism. In World Suffering and Quality of Life, ed. Ronald E. Anderson, 45–54. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. Zaloom, Caitlin. 2004. The Productive Side of Risk. Cultural Anthropology 19 (3): 365–391. Zinn, Jenns O. (ed.) 2008. Social Theories of Risk and Uncertainty: An Introduction. Blackwell.

Part II Shifting Dangers: Macro and Micro Politics of Risk

6 ‘Keeping the Conversation Going’: Understanding Risk in a Context of Escalating Conflict in Syria Julie L. Shackelford

Damascus, 25 March 2011 The chanting begins after midday prayer at the Great Mosque and quickly spills into the courtyard and neighbouring suq (marketplace): ‘Allah, Suriyyeh, huriyyeh bas!’ (‘God, Syria, freedom only!’). Regime supporters attempt to co-opt the protest and insert the president’s name into the chant but are soon overpowered. For a short time, anyway. Before long, plainclothes security agents forcefully disperse the crowds, while throughout the city regime

This chapter has been adapted in part from my PhD thesis from University College London (2015), in which I explored the social role of heritage in Syria both prior to and during the uprising that began in March 2011.

J. L. Shackelford (B) The International People’s College (Den Internationale Højskole), Elsinore, Denmark

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 ´ B. Switek et al. (eds.), Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83962-8_6

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supporters take to the streets, honking horns, waving photographs of the president and chanting vociferously. Although the protest lasts only a few minutes, the pro-regime rallies continue well into the night.1

Introduction The progression from peaceful protest to full-scale war in Syria provides a unique glimpse into the dynamics of risk in an environment of escalating conflict. As Patel et al. (2014) note ‘most individuals opposed to a regime can be assumed to be willing to participate in a protest only when they believe that the personal benefit of doing so outweighs the expected personal costs. The number of fellow protesters is an important factor in an individual’s decision to join, since the larger the crowd is, the less likely he or she is to be persecuted’ (Patel et al. 2014, 66). In Syria, this was very much the case at the start of the uprising. Those who joined the protests early on, often described their decision to do so as a moment of ‘awakening’, a visceral moment in which a socalled ‘barrier of fear’ (hajiz al-khawf ) was ‘broken’ (mkasura).2 Nasser, an activist from Damascus now living in Europe, remembers the moment of rupture clearly. For him, the moment came in early March when he learned about the popular protests (muthaharat ) that had erupted in the southern city of Dera’a over the arrest and torture of a group of young boys for writing political graffiti on the walls of the city (see Fig. 6.1). Years later, the boys would emphasise that, at the time, they thought of what they were doing as ‘something silly’ (Naief, age 14 at time of incident, cited in MacKinnon 2016) and considered their act as ‘just playing around’ (Yacoub, aged 14 at time of incident, cited in AsherSchapiro 2016) and having ‘fun’ (Bashir, age 15 at time of incident, cited in Birrell 2013), but for the many Syrians, like Nasser, who heard of the events and subsequently joined the protests, the boys’ naïve heroism and subsequent abuse pushed them over the edge from ordinary to extraordinary and shattered the ‘barrier of fear’ (see Lyng in this volume for an analysis of the importance of the boys’ action).3 In Damascus, rumours of the ah.dath (‘events’, ‘happenings’) spread like wildfire.4 Nasser’s response was visceral and immediate: ‘I felt it in

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Fig. 6.1 Graffiti by the children of Dera’a: ‘It’s your turn, Doctor’ (ijak addur, ya Doktur)—an implicit reference to Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad (who also happens to be a trained ophthalmologist). Original source unknown. Retrieved from the Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution (http://www.cre ativememory.org/?lang=en)

my heart’, he said, putting his hand over his chest. ‘Something just called to me: “come”. When I was at work, when I was at home, it did not matter. I heard the calling in my heart. I had to go’. Thinking back on the day he joined the protest movement, he said simply: ‘If I died, I didn’t care. I had to go’.5 Likewise, Khalil, a law student in his late-twenties originally from Dera’a but who had come to the Damascus to study at university, echoed much of Nasser’s sentiment and laid bare the extraordinary danger that he and other demonstrators faced for daring to vocalise their discontent. Speaking with him a few days after the protest in the Great Mosque of the Umayyads in Damascus (relayed in the epigraph), he winced as he lifted his shirt to show me where security agents had beaten him. The swelling and discolouration were still highly visible. After lowering his shirt and exhaling painfully, he began to recount his experience participating in the protest. Although he had successfully evaded arrest, the marks on his body made it clear—it had been a close call: ‘The mukhabarat [plainclothes

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security agents] were everywhere!’ he exclaimed. ‘For each one of us, there were at least three of them!’ In his voice was a mixture of excitement over participating in the protest and disappointment that nothing had come of it, nothing of the revolution he hoped was on the horizon. The following Friday he would return to the Great Mosque hoping ‘today was the day’, but it was not to be. As he entered the courtyard, he was forced to walk through a gauntlet of plainclothes security agents holding clubs and glaring menacingly. Additional security agents were positioned around roads and alleyways, while still more stood in the courtyard as though daring the faithful to protest. The message was clear, and no protest was held. Afterwards, the men filed back through the gauntlet, frustrated and dejected. From then on, few demonstrations would be held at the Great Mosque.6 While many, such as Nasser and Khalil, remember the early days of the uprising to be marked by peaceful demonstrations calling for dignity (karameh) and reform (iislah) and a shared joy among participants for having broken the ‘barrier of fear’,7 such optimism quickly faded when confronted with the sobering reality of an increasingly violent crackdown and a regime completely uninterested in dialogue.8 As time went on and the numbers of beaten, detained and dead mounted, protesters’ chanting escalated from calls for dignity and reform to demands for freedom (huriyyeh), an end to Emergency Law9 and, ultimately, the removal of the president, himself (Yalla irhal ya Bashar! ).10 Before long a ‘point of no return’11 was reached. For everyday Syrians living at the heart of such uncertainty, within just a few short months, what had started as extraordinary and unthinkable ahdath had already normalised into increasingly ordinary and ‘enhabited’ routine (Billig 1995; see also Bourdieu 1990). Likewise, for members of the opposition (as well as their families), their initial daring acts of defiance had become not only routine, but actually necessary to their very survival. As one young man implored a crowd gathered together for Ramadan,12 in the northwest city of Rastan: Listen! … We shattered the barrier of fear with our voices! … To stop now is harder than to continue and to go forward, because to go back means certain death. We will be hunted. … We can’t turn back. Everybody here

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is a martyr in waiting. Either we die free or we die. (cited in Abouzeid 2018, 73)

Poignantly underscoring the gravity of this newly emergent, ordinary– extraordinary ‘risk context’ (Boholm 2015, 10), for many opposition activists such as this young man in Rastan, political dissent that had once been unthinkable now became their most likely means of survival. In light of all this, several questions come to the fore. Firstly, how did such a drastic transformation in risk context and individual perceptions of risk occur as the ‘barrier of fear’ was broken and ‘peaceful uprising’ devolved into all-out war? Second, after the barrier was broken, what was the ‘new normal’ of everyday life like for local inhabitants—whether activists or otherwise? How did once ‘extraordinary’ events become mundane and ‘ordinary’ and, conversely, ‘ordinary’ ones suddenly ‘extraordinary’ and fraught with danger? In addition, how did individuals make sense of and adjust to the new risk context(s) in which they suddenly found themselves? Finally, how did materialisations of risk, such as photographs and video of protests circulating endlessly online or the marks of political graffiti that lingered on walls throughout the country, impact such a rapidly changing risk context? To answer these questions, the pages which follow examine the shifting dynamics of risk from the start of the uprising in March of 2011 until my departure from Syria in January 2012. Grounded in ethnographic research that I conducted throughout this period, what follows will focus specifically on the dynamics of risk as it relates to three interrelated areas: mosques, graffiti and social media. Beginning with an examination of the mosque as a ‘traditional’ site of protest at the start of the uprising and its subsequent ‘silencing’ as such by the Assad regime, the chapter then turns to examine some of the ‘non-traditional’ ways with which opposition activists expanded their toolkit of ‘leaderless resistance’ (Ross 2012) to, in the words of Richard Rorty (1979), ‘keep the conversation going’. As a crucial component of a pluralist democracy that privileges dialogue and a superfluity of meaning, to Rorty (1979), ‘keeping a conversation going’ encourages the opening up of space for discursive— and, I would argue, material —contestation between various parties rather than the monopolising control of meaning and value by one over

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the other(s). As noted by Victor Buchli (1999), from a Foucauldian perspective the mere supposition of a particular narrative is felt to inevitably hinder the production of meaning and value to at least some degree, thereby leading to repression and violence (physical and/or symbolic). However, Richard Rorty opposes this view and takes a more optimistic stance. To Rorty, it is precisely in the articulation of different narratives and the oscillation between them that meaning, value and, indeed, democracy, itself, are generated (Buchli 1999, 14). Thus, by ‘keeping the conversation going’, others may contribute to and further the articulation ad infinitum (ibid.). In Syria, for nearly fifty years, any ‘conversation’ over the historical past, present identity or future fate of the country has been dominated by the ruling Assad family and its allies, thereby creating a ‘dominant tradition of Syrianness’ (Shackelford 2015) that, until 2011, had been rarely contested. As a ‘geo-political construct and mode of nationalist belonging’ (ibid.), until 2011 this dominant view had pervaded all aspects of public—and often private—life, bolstered by an intangible yet unmistakably potent barrier of fear. What follows takes a ‘conversational approach to risk’ by exploring a small strand of the material–discursive (Barad 2003) contestation that emerged in the spring of 2011 when that barrier of fear was broken, and the absolute authority of the president was rent asunder. Using mosques, graffiti and social media as our guides, we now trace some of the twists and turns this conversation took, as it entered such extraordinarily uncharted waters.

I. Mosques At the start of the uprising in Syria, mosques were an important symbol and gathering place for members of the opposition (Pierret 2012). Many of the early demonstrations took place in and around mosques (such as nearby suqs) which, for the past fifty years of Ba’athist rule, had been one of the few places available for mass gathering (ibid.). For example, in Dera’a, a city viewed by many as the initial centre of the uprising, protesters had garrisoned themselves in the Omari Mosque for a week until security forces broke through and desecrated it (Ajami 2012, 74). Likewise, the Great Mosque of the Umayyads in Damascus had served

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as the seat of some of the first popular protests in the capital, such as that described in the epigraph on 25 March. However, the creation of ‘mosque committees’ hired by security forces to pack prayer rooms and break up Friday demonstrations (Pierret 2012) soon curtailed such demonstrations. By August 2011, mosques gradually began to lose their importance in the uprising. In part, this resulted from increasingly repressive tactics employed by the regime at mosques in restive areas. Likewise, the increased militarisation of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other opposition forces and their ability to take control of neighbourhoods or even whole towns further reduced the importance of mosques as ‘safe zones’ for demonstrations (Pierret 2012). In addition, the symbolic capital associated with some mosques at the start of the uprising became overshadowed by the intensity of heavy artillery fire which regime forces unleashed on mosques (and indeed whole cites) that were in FSA hands. Despite regime attempts to ‘silence’ the mosque as a site of social action, however, by the summer of 2011, such attempts instead did the opposite by ‘counter-inventing’ (Wagner 1975) further dissent. Thus, as their importance in the uprising began to wane, opposition activists soon found other ways to ‘extend’ (ibid.) the role of the mosque as a traditional site of protest and ‘keep the conversation going’. In Damascus, of the numerous, new forms of risk-taking in which opposition activists began to engage, some of the most memorable include: flash mob demonstrations; dyeing the water of seven of the city’s largest fountains red ‘to symbolise the blood of the martyrs’; hiding cassette players in trash cans that would later start blaring anti-regime music; circulating parodies of well-known nationalist-orientated ad campaigns; pointing a laser light at the presidential palace on Mount Cassioun to show they were no longer afraid of the regime; and releasing ‘freedom balloons’ into the skies over the city (see Fig. 6.2).13 In Syria, although the regime may have been able to (re)assert physical and symbolical control over certain forms of public conversation, such as protesting in the Great Mosque of Damascus, it could neither control nor contain the sudden superfluity of meaning that the breaking of the barrier of fear unleashed. For Khalil, Nasser and the countless other opposition activists who sought to keep the conversation of Syria

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Fig. 6.2 Screenshot of video depicting the release of ‘freedom balloons’ into the early morning skies. Damascus, October 2011. Published on YouTube by Kafar Sousah Revolt on 12 October 2011 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 4hC6Il1EajY)

going, despite the high cost that such new social actions could incur, they were nevertheless risks worth taking. Through their stubborn resistance and will not to be muted and made invisible, opposition activists thus ‘took on’ (Derrida 2002) the dominant tradition of Syrianness by opening a space for dialogue and refusing to let the regime have the last word.

II. Graffiti Before the uprising, graffiti (shi’arat ) had been a relatively mundane occurrence in Syria, with most consisting of religious calligraphy and iconography (see Fig. 6.3), praise for the president (or his father) or simple tags to show that one ‘was there’ (see Fig. 6.4). However, when the boys in Dera’a were arrested and tortured for writing political slogans, graffiti suddenly transformed from a relatively mundane, ordinary activity into an extraordinary, political act. When the boys were

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Fig. 6.3 Graffiti in Syria before the conflict. Religious graffiti on the wall of a private residence in Palmyra, autumn 2010. The nearest text (right) reads: ‘May God accept your pilgrimage and forgive your sins’. An icon of the Kaaba and Sacred Mosque of Mecca (al-Masjid al-H . aram) are depicted far left (Photo by author)

finally released two weeks later with marks of torture on their bodies, their families—and soon the nation—were outraged. Thus, within the context of the Syrian uprising, graffiti became a particularly potent act laden with extraordinary significance. As Rafael Schacter (2008) reminds us, ‘[g]raffiti can … awaken us to otherwise hidden arguments, can hint and insinuate at different ways of approaching our world, re-affirming … a place of social discussion and heterogeneity, rather than austere social hegemony’ (Schacter 2008, 60). In Syria, as rumours of the events in Dera’a spread, the elevation of the boys’ ordeal to the status of ‘origin myth’ soon took hold and ‘the kids of Dera’a’ became “icons of the revolution”’ (Birrell 2013). In an endless chain of recursivity, writing on the walls led to protests in the mosques, where the chants sung and banners waved echoed, in turn, the writing

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Fig. 6.4 Graffiti in Syria before the conflict. Tagging in the Old City of Damascus, autumn 2010 (Photo by author)

on the walls. In this way, the one-sided monologue imposed by the regime was suddenly replaced by countless running dialogues occurring simultaneously throughout the country. In Syria, graffiti artists ‘represented the values and objectives of the revolution by reappropriating the walls that once bore pictures of Assad’ (Omareen 2014, 98). Much like the use of political graffiti elsewhere (see Ferrell 1993 for a good review), political graffiti in Syria worked in conjunction with other forms of protest and civil disobedience to ‘[suggest] and [beckon] people to resist, to take action’ (Peteet 1996, 143) and keep the conversation going. As both a risky performative act and its embodied materialisation, graffiti thus took its place in a constellation of opposition tactics designed to interrupt, extend, invert and ‘play’ (Derrida 1978) with the dominant hierarchies of power. As such, it became a crucial form of civil disobedience that subverted the repressive strategies of the regime, mobilised people to social action and

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asserted new social collectivities, all the while reverberating back on and transforming other spheres. To paraphrase Julie Peteet’s (1996) observation concerning political graffiti during the First Palestinian Intifada (1987–1993), graffiti in the Syrian uprising was a physical embodiment of activists’ risk, determination and ingenuity that did not merely ‘reflect’ or ‘signify’ defiance or resistance to the normative structures of power but, rather, openly acknowledged and subverted them through their very act of enunciation. The barrier of fear breaking again, and again and again. Ad infinitum.

Walking in the Ruins In November 2011, I visited my original field site of Palmyra to find that eight months of unrest had taken its toll on the city.14 In the contemporary town, graffiti was ubiquitous (see Fig. 6.5). Graffiti bespattered the walls of all public buildings, several private residences and even the newly reconstructed defensive walls of the archaeological park city. In the square just outside the park, a large billboard with an advertisement for Syriatel15 had been defaced with blue spray paint—implicitly indexing an earlier layer of anti-regime graffiti that it attempted to obscure, but whose ‘presence of absence’ lingered in its defacement. Opposite the billboard, just outside the rod iron fence of the Palmyra Museum, a small concrete structure bore similar markings. Before the uprising, graffiti had been relatively common in Palmyra, with inscriptions mainly depicting religious themes and limited to the homes of the devout. This new graffiti was entirely different in nature. Although most had been effaced by the time of my visit, some Arabic and English phrases were still legible, such as the English words: ‘Freedom’ and ‘Stop killing Syrians’. Of the graffiti written in Arabic, nearly all were effaced except for the phrase ‘Allah u-Akbar ’ (‘God is great’). According to residents, regardless of how people felt politically, no one would dare to efface this religious assertion. After observing the graffiti in town, my companion and I decided to go for a walk in the archaeological park to see what, if any, changes had occurred there. We had only walked for a few minutes on the main

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Fig. 6.5 Graffiti in Palmyra, November 2011. Clockwise from left to right: defaced Syriatel billboard located in President’s Square, Palmyra; broken and defaced 1 × 2 m nationalist-oriented ad campaign situated at the entrance to the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palmyra; graffiti on the exterior side of the newly reconstructed defensive wall of the archaeological site (All photos by author)

road when two teenage boys rode past us on a motorbike. Pumping their fists in the air and shouting ‘huriyyeh!’ (‘freedom!’) as they rode by, the boys alighted about a hundred meters in front of us, covered their faces with kaffiyehs and sprinted to a fallen limestone column built during the Roman period but now lying broken on the side of the road. Taking out a can of blue spray-paint, they proceeded to write ‘Free’ on the fallen column before running back to their bike, uncovering their faces and resuming their bombastic chanting and fist-pumping, as they rode away through the ruins. My companion and I were dumbstruck. Iconoclashic in the Latourian sense, in which ‘one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive’ (Latour 2002, 16), ambivalence immediately set in. On the one hand, the boys’ actions just felt wrong,

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Fig. 6.5 (continued)

but on the other hand, the image of the graffiti spray-painted onto the fallen Roman column was powerful —stunning even (see Fig. 6.6). Watching the boys take that risk—sprinting to the column, spraypainting ‘Free’ and then dashing away—was awe-inspiring yet also terrifying. We felt certain the mukhabarat would come at any moment to take the boys away. Yet no one did. Instead, the boys laughed and chanted as they rode away triumphantly. Life in Palmyra was clearly quite different than Damascus. In ‘ordinary times’, a mark of political graffiti would have been a severely punishable offence in Syria. But these were no ‘ordinary times’. Before the uprising, and even in its early days—when the ‘normal’ boundary between ordinary and extraordinary was still somewhat coherent—the mere existence of political graffiti on any surface, in any context in Syria, made the exceptional risk inherent in its execution unmistakably obvious. Indeed, as observed by Rafael Schacter (2008), who employs Bruno Latour’s notion of iconoclash to explore the ‘clash’

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Fig. 6.6 Anti-regime graffiti spray-painted onto a fallen Roman column in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palmyra, November 2011 (Photo by author)

over graffiti production in London, one could not view such a graffito ‘without immediately perceiving [its] inherent illegality’ (Schacter 2008, 39). To Schacter, when as viewers we encounter such images, we immediately ‘internalise [the] conscious act of transgression created through its performance’ … ‘induc[ing] a sense of corporeal illicitness to graffiti’s very appearance’ (ibid.; emphasis in original). As a result, we experience a feeling of ‘admiration [or] reverence for the effort and audacity of the transgression whilst viewing the images’ (ibid.). In other words, the risk involved in a graffito’s production bestows upon it a trace of its illicit creation. This then evokes a sense of wonder and awe by those who later encounter it. While one may experience some level of this admiration whenever one encounters a graffito, as Schacter notes, the intensity of the experience is nevertheless proportional to the ‘physical difficulty’ (2008, 41)

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and—I would argue—risk inherent in the graffito’s initial production. This was clearly the case in Syria, where the context of escalating conflict significantly amplified the potency of such images—even more so with regard to my experience in Palmyra, where I actually witnessed the act of transgression occur. For my companion and me, the boys’ actions had a visceral effect, palpably underscoring its particular risk context. We did not just see the graffito visually; rather, we experienced it synesthetically with all our senses. As the boys darted away on the motorbike, leaving my companion and me in the dust, a powerful agency and corporeality emerged from the newly created graffito–pillar, endowing it with a heightened ability to ‘capture, hold, and transform’ those who encountered it (ibid.; see also Gell 1998). In a very poignant and visceral way, the boys’ high-risk ‘action’ (Goffman 1967) became potently embodied within the materiality of both the graffito and the Roman column of which it was now a part, thereby grounding, in material form, the new ordinary–extraordinary risk context in which we all now found ourselves.

The Great Mosque Speaks Again Back in Damascus a few weeks later, I encountered a second political graffito in an even more stunning location. Walking westward through Suq Qamariyya, I began the short climb up the ancient limestone steps that long ago had led to the main entrance of an ancient Roman temple but, since the eighth century, had been incorporated into the eastern wall of the Great Mosque of the Umayyads, arguably the most valuable edifice in all of Syria.16 Turning left at the top of the stairs, I suddenly stopped short. There, on one of the massive limestone blocks of the mosque’s exterior wall, a spray-paint dialogue was unfolding. Just to the left of one of the ancient stone columns, someone had spray-painted the words ‘Suriyyah Allah hamihah’ (‘God protects Syria’)—a slogan that at first glance appeared neither blatantly for nor against the regime. Later, someone else had added ‘wa al-Assad ’ (‘and al-Assad’) to the sentence—demonstrating a clear pro-regime affiliation.17 This was then carefully painted over in

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a colour very similar to that of the wall itself so that, again, only the original message remained18 —an act that while anti-regime in nature, was not blatantly so. Atop the newly painted section, a third and final layer completed the ensemble with the words ‘and al-Assad’ once again inscribed in the exact spot they had previously been effaced. Altogether, it looked something like this:

‫ﺳﻮﺭﻳﺎ ﻭﺍﻷﺳﺎﺩ‬ ‫ﷲ ﺣﺎﻣﻴﻬﺎ‬

I stopped short, astounded by what I saw. To leave a mark on the wall of the Great Mosque of Damascus was obviously a far riskier endeavour than that engaged in by the boys on the motorbike. In Palmyra, the boys had committed the act in broad daylight and had barely attempted to hide their identities, as they rode away laughing and chanting popular slogans. Their city had been under tribal rule for weeks due to an agreement between the government and tribal elders (cf. Shackelford 2015), so the danger the boys faced when spraying the graffiti was actually rather low (even if my companion and I—who had been living in Damascus— felt it was quite high). Indeed, when I visited the city in November, residents spoke of their town as ‘Free Palmyra’ (Ahrar Tadmor ) and not one police officer or security agent was observed. In contrast, for the opposition activist(s) who dared to spray the graffito and/or contribute to the dialogue unfolding at the Great Mosque in Damascus, such an act was an undeniably high-risk endeavour—a purposeful act, pregnant with meaning and fraught with danger. Unlike Palmyra, Damascus was not under tribal rule; it was the stronghold of the president. Although I had not observed the actual act of spray-painting occur, nevertheless, much like my experience in Palmyra, the presence of graffiti in the ‘Damascus Bubble’, in the heart of the Old City, on the wall of the Great Mosque, also had a visceral effect. ‘How did they do that?’ I

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wondered, as I hastily resumed walking and tried not to draw attention to myself. In my mind, I imagined a solitary figure sneaking furtively in the night down the winding side streets of the Old City (male, dressed in black, a can of spray-paint tucked snuggly under his shirt). The open plaza in front of the main entrance to the mosque would have been too risky, I reasoned, but here—near the back entrance—the shadows of the massive limestone column jutting out from the wall and the twists and turns of the narrow streets would have provided just enough protection to inscribe the short phrase.19 Regardless of who actually produced the graffito or how the act transpired, the risk embodied in the mark was palpable, visceral. Its message, crystal clear: while activists may no longer be able to protest inside the Great Mosque, they could still ‘keep the conversation going’ by other means, even within the regime stronghold of Damascus. No place, it murmured, was immune. The corporeality of the graffito and the highrisk nature of its production bestowed upon it an auratic quality. Defined by Walter Benjamin as ‘the unique phenomenon of distance’, (Benjamin 1968 [1955], 222), to Lynn Meskell (2004), aura can also more generally refer to ‘a perceived emancipation that engulfs people and things, an essence that one experiences as mesmerising’ (Meskell 2004, 182). While graffiti is always in some sense endowed with auratic qualities (Schacter 2008), with regard to this particular graffito, the corporality of the inscription, the high-risk nature of its production, the specific character of its medium (the Great Mosque), as well as its blatant ephemerality when juxtaposed with the longevity of its material surround were all significant factors affecting its aura. The danger and the difficulty with which it was produced, as well as its inherent illegality, were also factors. In addition, compounding all this was the specific phrase the initial graffiti artist had chosen to inscribe: ‘Suriyyah Allah hamihah’ (‘God protects Syria’).20 Before the crisis, ‘Suriyyah Allah hamihah’ had been a common phrase intimately linked to the president. It was invoked in patriotic songs and speeches, incorporated into the design of flags, coffee mugs and other memorabilia and even employed in nationalist-oriented ad campaigns.21 With the onset of the uprising, the phrase had quickly become a slogan of regime support. Thus, to find that phrase here, severed from its usual

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referent and then inverted as a performative rupture in the conventional power structure it once affirmed, was mesmerising.22 As an act of détournement (Debord 1967) par excellence, the graffito on the Great Mosque combined an illicit performative act with the materiality of the most symbolically potent edifice in all of Syria and the language of a well-known patriotic slogan heretofore linked explicitly to the Assad regime to create an act of ‘violent subversion that disrupt[ed] and [overthrew] every existing order’, (Debord 1967, thesis 209).23 What is more, loyalists’ attempts to ‘reverse the reversal’ by inserting ‘and al-Assad’ into the phrase only intensified the détournement , for, if the president were still the unambiguous referent of the phrase, there would be no need to insert his name. Finally, through its inside–outside juxtaposition, the graffito reactivated the tradition of the Umayyad Mosque as a site of political protest but in an unexpected and very non-traditional way. Thus, as political graffiti began to proliferate throughout the country, a new, extraordinary conversation of Syria took off, transforming in diverse, creative and heretofore unimaginable ways. As noted by Zaher Omareen in his thought-provoking piece, ‘The Symbol and Counter-Symbols in Syria: Power and Propaganda from the Era of the Two Assads to the Revolution of Freedom and Dignity’ (2014), the imagery employed by the Assad regime and ruling Ba’ath party was ‘essentially a monologue – blind sanctification of the Leader’ (2014, 99). In contrast, ‘the multidimensional images of the revolution encourage[d] dialogue, debate, free expression and contestation’ (ibid., 98). In this way, the inherent risks involved in carrying out such creative acts of resistance ‘openly challenge[d] the regime’s symbols and propaganda’ thereby ‘building a dialogue for the country’s future’ (ibid.).

III. Social Media In the spring of 2011, decades-long media censorship had stunted most Syrians’ ability to develop any sort of expertise with new information and communication technologies (ICTs). Thus, in the early days of the uprising, while information, photos and images of events did circulate among friends and family, it was rare for such content to circulate in wider spheres (see Fig. 6.7). By the summer of 2011, however, a steady

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Fig. 6.7 Screenshot of video depicting early demonstration in Hariqa (Damascus), 17 February 2011. Published on YouTube by shirkhorshidiran on 18 February 2011 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTl7Gjhne68)

flow of videos and images began to emerge via social media websites, such as YouTube and Facebook, and satellite television channels, particularly Al-Jazeera (Khamis et al. 2012; see also Preston 2011b). Beginning in the summer of 2011, opposition activists increasingly employed social media to describe and document attacks, highlight regime abuses, coordinate protests and other activities, communicate information to a wide range of audiences and shape public opinion (Khamis et al. 2012). ‘Online’ and ‘offline’ activities became intimately connected, as activists employed social media to plan and organise events and activities, record them as they occurred and disseminate news of them after they had taken place. In order to mitigate risk and circumvent regime attempts to silence them, online activists engaged in a variety of diverse tactics. For example,

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‘Syrian cyber dissidents’ (Macleod and Flamand 2011) often used pseudonyms and multiple SIM cards, as well as other methods to share digital information via Facebook and Twitter. Loosely divided between ‘those who report’ and ‘those who publish’, the activists on the street would gather testimony and eyewitness reports while the ‘computer crew’ would then cross-reference the material with other sources before sending out updates on social media sites (ibid.). Although Facebook and YouTube had been banned in Syria since 2007, in February 2011, the censorship laws were relaxed and the ban lifted (Preston 2011a). Felt by some to indicate the regime’s commitment to reform, the number of Facebook users swelled considerably. However, the lifting of the ban also carried with it some unforeseen consequences.24 Before the uprising, having many friends on Facebook was generally considered a positive thing in Syria, with many of my informants taking great pleasure in having a lot of Facebook friends. I myself had often received friend requests from Syrians I had never met, simply because they were a friend of a friend on Facebook. The reasons for this were twofold. Firstly, there was status to be gained from having lots of Facebook friends that outweighed the risk of ‘friending’ someone unwanted. Secondly, before the shattering of the barrier of fear, the thought of posting anything particularly polemic was simply unthinkable to most Syrians. With the start of the uprising, however, such lackadaisical attitudes towards requesting and accepting Facebook friends, as well as a general tendency for low privacy settings (which made it easier to ‘friend’ and be ‘friended’), inevitably led to clashes regarding the events unfolding. Particularly after the censorship laws were relaxed, countless stories of ‘Facebook wars’ emerged where people who had once been friends, suddenly realised—via Facebook—that they had opposing political views. A ‘Facebook war’ would then ensue, with friends and friends-offriends getting involved.25 Considering the generally low privacy settings of most Syrian Facebook users and the fact that most Syrians I knew had well over 500 friends, the ‘Facebook war’ would soon take on a life of its own. Before long, friendship would dissolve into enmity.

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For many, the uprising had made the once pleasurable experience of going on Facebook and other social media sites simply unbearable. As one informant, a Palestinian woman in her late-20s who had lived in Syria all her life lamented: I used to love going on [Facebook]… looking at photographs and talking to friends… but now… it’s completely different. I’ve lost friends in real life because of things that have happened on Facebook. There’s a lot of fighting there. Suddenly someone posts something, and it starts a huge fight. It used to be all about socialising, but now… I hate it. I don’t use it anymore.

Thus, for many Syrians, a once ordinary, enjoyable experience was suddenly transformed into an extraordinary, treacherous minefield with the potential to break down relationships both on- and offline. While the upsurge in ‘Facebook wars’ was distressing for many informants, as the months progressed, other, more ominous repercussions for the relaxation of the censorship laws soon became apparent. Before the conflict—when the laws were still in place—many Syrians had often used Facebook and other social media sites; they just did so via proxies, a relatively low-risk practice that made the surveillance of internet activities difficult. Once the ban was lifted, however, surveillance became much easier, particularly when combined with the Syrian penchant for low privacy settings. In addition, the common Syrian practice of accepting friend requests from people one did not know or had met only briefly, also meant that it was relatively easy for someone (e.g., the mukhabarat ) to be accepted as a ‘Facebook friend’ by someone suspected of having anti-regime inclinations. Thus, in tandem with the presence of undercover security agents at the protests themselves, infiltration of Facebook soon became a core strategy of the regime.26 Once word of mukhabarat infiltration spread, users sought to mitigate this risk by quickly modifying their Facebook habits, and online behaviour more generally. They would, for example, change their name and/or profile pictures to something more generic or difficult to identify, defriend people they did not know or with whom they had conflicting political viewpoints or simply refrain from using Facebook altogether.

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For those who chose to continue using Facebook and other social media sites, however, ‘online’ activities often had ‘offline’ repercussions. Talking about this one day in May, Khalil stated matter-of-factly: ‘Everyone disappears on Tuesday.’ Confused by his assertion, I inquired ‘Why not Friday?’ In my mind, if there was a particular day of the week that most people were likely to ‘disappear’ (i.e., to be taken away by security forces), then, to me, Friday seemed most likely, for it was after midday prayer on Fridays that most large-scale protests were held. I reminded him of his own experience at the Great Mosque (recounted at the start of this chapter) and the dangers he encountered that day. He raised his eyebrows (a Syrian gesture expressing negation) saying: In the beginning, it was like this, but now… all the mukhabarat have to do is sit back, wait for protesters to put videos on Facebook, YouTube… and then… [leans back and crosses his arms behind his head, mimicking a lazy secret police officer] … just look at the videos. They have special software, so they can recognise faces. If they recognise you, someone comes to your house and … [brushing hands together] … that’s it. You disappear. Protests happen on Friday. The mukhabarat look at videos during the weekend. And on Tuesday… you disappear.

A few months later, while perusing through the countless photos and videos uploaded to social media during the first year of the uprising, I observe a marked shift in the protesters’ appearance, underscoring Khalil’s dire assertion. In the photos and video from the start of the uprising (see Fig. 6.8), participants can often be found facing cameras directly, holding banners and defiantly chanting songs and slogans. However, as the conflict escalated and people began to ‘disappear’, a noticeable shift can be discerned, with protesters increasingly turning away from the camera and covering their faces lest they, too, be identified and ‘disappear on Tuesday’ (see Fig. 6.9). Thus, the once ordinary use of social media by opposition activists was suddenly found to be an extraordinary double-edged sword. On the one hand, it provided a crucial means to disseminate information about events, coordinate future activities and garner support for their cause. On the other hand, it also inadvertently provided the regime with a useful

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Fig. 6.8 Early protesters do not hide their faces and face cameras directly. Protest in Douma (outskirts of Damascus), 8 April 2011. Originally posted to Flickr as ‘Syria Demonstration 30’ by Shamsnn (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ 61606819@N07/5606924846). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

tool to identify and persecute protesters, enabling it to shift its strategy from attempting to break up protests as they occurred (typically after Friday prayer) to simply letting them happen, watching the videos over the weekend and then arresting the protesters identified in the days that followed. This, more sinister, side of social media was not lost on activists, however, and they soon adapted accordingly: choosing more small-scale, decentralised forms of protesting; covering their faces and turning away from the camera in order to avoid identification and protesting more frequently in order to stress the capacity of the authorities and hinder their ability to search and detain individuals. In this way, ‘peaceful uprising’ devolved into full-scale war in Syria, and an ordinary–extraordinary risk logic emerged in which it became riskier not to protest.

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Fig. 6.9 Later protesters cover their faces and/or turn away from cameras. Here, is an image of an anti-regime protest in Yabroud (near Damascus) on 2 March 2012 that circulated on numerous sites online, including: http://www. saiia.org.za/opinion-analysis/why-sa-must-fight-against-war-in-syria and http:// www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/03/201237101424192726.html/. Original source unknown; copyright given variously to Reuters, UPI and FreedomHouse2/Flickr/Creative Commons

Conclusion: Towards a Conversational Approach to Risk In the early days of the uprising, many protests occurred in and around mosques because this was, in effect, ‘what you do’. Historically, mosques had often served as sites for political rallies or to voice political frustration (Bianca 2000; Pinto 2011; Rudolff 2010; Walker 2004). Indeed, in a region where public squares are relatively rare, mosques were among the few places that even afforded (Gibson 1986) the possibility of mass gathering. However, by the summer of 2011, the importance of the mosque began to wane, and its role as a ‘voice’ of protest gradually grew silent. In response to the ‘silencing’ of the mosque, opposition activists soon found a wide range of new forms of nonviolent social action to ‘keep the

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conversation going’, including graffiti and social media, creating a mobilising recursivity that, despite its best efforts, the regime could neither contain nor control. While the intended audience for such acts of leaderless resistance was, in many respects, local, the materialisation and recontextualisation of such events and activities online via social media greatly expanded the scope of their impact. Thus, much like the findings of Ferrell et al. (2001) with regard to BASE jumping, the media saturation with such images ‘elongate[d] and expand[ed] the meaning of an ephemeral event’ by ‘construct[ing] a multi-faceted audience for a seemingly secretive endeavour’, (2001, 177–178; see also Peteet 1996). In this way, such widely circulated materialisations of risk kept the Syrian conversation going by poignantly shaping popular perceptions of events taking place (both within and outside the country) while simultaneously influencing how the conflict, itself, unfolded. However, as revolution slowly devolved into all-out war, ‘extraordinary’ became ‘ordinary’, and a new everyday risk context emerged. By Ramadan, the grey walls of the public sphere had gradually become saturated with political graffiti, causing the aura of transgression to wither away. As such, the once extraordinary sight became increasingly banal and ‘enhabited’. Thus, in Syria, despite the shock, aura and stupeur (Bourdieu 1998) that was felt at the start of the uprising, after six months of protests, a ‘new normal’ had begun to set in, making it difficult to remember what ‘ordinary life’ was even like anymore. As this new sense of ‘ordinary’ set in, the conversation that had been unleashed in the ‘Kingdom of Silence’27 began to stagnate, and activists were forced to go to even greater extremes to keep the momentum going. As ‘edgeworkers’ (Lyng 1990) negotiating boundaries between democracy and dictatorship and, at times, even life and death, activists deftly adjusted their behaviour, as the ‘edge’ itself also shifted. For some, such as graffiti artists, it was the magnitude of the risk that intensified—with once-unthinkable sites, such as the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palmyra and the Great Mosque of the Umayyads in Damascus suddenly becoming viable canvasses for the spray-paint can. For others, it was the scope of the dialogue—with cyber activists working tirelessly to expand their reach to ever greater numbers of potential sympathisers via citizen and social media.

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In the end, however, as the severity of the risk context became amplified and this new, amplified risk context became normalised, the voluntary risk-taking that had been so crucial at the start of the uprising gave way to more imposed forms, whether as moral obligation or simply as a means of survival in this, now normalised, ordinary–extraordinary risk context. Thus, as peaceful revolution devolved into all-out war, risk context and calculus shifted for activist and common citizen alike. While some continued to pursue nonviolent methods of leaderless resistance (cf. Sharp 1973), others began to take up arms—joining the newly formed Free Syrian Army or other armed rebel groups. Still, others decided to leave the country entirely. Throughout this period, while most Syrians may not have often framed their actions in terms of ‘risk’ (khatar ), per se, they were nevertheless engaged in a variety of behaviours that happened to be more or less ‘risky’. This risk and its properties emerged and transformed as the conversation of Syria shifted from a unidirectional, top-down monologue to a more pluralistic, dialogical conversation, opening up a new, extraordinary space for the superfluity of meaning to thrive, new social actors to join in, changes in the ‘vocabulary’ employed and, at times, even the ‘language’ of the conversation altogether. Perhaps not surprisingly, this newly emergent superfluity brought with it greater levels of uncertainty and, thus, risk—a risk that many Syrians, including Khalil, Nasser and countless others, still say was ‘worth it’. At the time of writing, the tenth anniversary of the Syrian Uprising looms near, and both war and risk continue to evolve. While no consensus may yet have been reached, at least one thing is certain: the Assad monopoly over the conversation of Syria has truly and definitively been broken. Through military fighting still raging on the ground, as well as countless websites, social media forums, books, articles (including this one), exhibitions, films and so much more, the conversation of Syria continues. In light of all this, when we look specifically at the role of risk and risk-taking in the conversation at hand, what we find is that, through all the twists and turns, it is risk that has made the conversation meaningful . As Richard Rorty argued throughout his career (cf. Rorty 1981, 1989, 1999, 2000), dialogue—i.e. conversation—is the basis of pluralist

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democracy. In his view, the substance of what we care about lies in our solidarity among fellow human beings: it is solidarity that keeps us in line (and in the conversation) and not some cosmic law, and it is solidarity that determines what we feel is valuable and, therefore, worth taking a risk for. Much of this goes to the heart of why opposition activists were demonstrating in Syria in the first place. As a pragmatist, for Rorty, the practical implications of his work were not merely ‘to philosophise for philosophy’s sake’ but, rather, to make society better, more inclusive and less cruel. If, in his view, there is no God to judge you or some higher ‘Truth’ towards which to aspire, it thus becomes our children and our children’s children that will be the judge of the work we have done. They will judge us by what we leave behind for them. For Rorty (following John Dewey), that should be enough (cf. Rorty 1989, 2000). This sentiment has been echoed by many Syrian activists with whom I spoke. Whether their revolution is ultimately ‘successful’ is, in some sense, beside the point—particularly as the conflict continues to rage nearly a decade after it began. What is significant for them is that, for the first time in over a generation, everyday Syrians have found their voice and joined in the ‘conversation of mankind’ (Oakenshott 1959). And the conversation has changed because of it. Acknowledgements The research for this chapter was conducted as part of my doctoral thesis at University College London under the joint supervision of Danny Miller and Paul Basu and with generous support from the American Philosophical Society, the University College London Graduate School Research Projects Fund and the University of London Scholarship Fund. In ´ addition, I would also like to thank Beata Switek and Allen Abramson for their immeasurable assistance and patience with me in writing this chapter. Finally, I must express my immense gratitude to the many friends from Syria who must remain nameless for reasons of security, but without whom this chapter would not be possible. May their conversation continue always.

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Notes 1. The events recounted here are compiled from eyewitness accounts from informants who participated in them, personal experiences and observations, media reports (e.g., Slackman 2011) and online videos (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZZz4phxjh8). 2. This visceral temporal rupture relates to the ancient Greek word, kairos, meaning the right, critical, or opportune moment. As Heidrun Friese (2001), in her introduction to the edited volume The Moment, observes ‘[s]uch “decisive” moment, laden with meaning, is of a specific kind. As a moment it is transitory, but it is nevertheless filled with eternity. Such moment—abundance of time strikes from a hidden, invisible place and turns into the fulfilled present; like a disclosing flash, it is “seen” and “recognised” as the final truth’ (2001, 5–6). 3. Many see the events in Dera ‘a as the ‘spark’ that lit the fires of unrest in Syria. While the ‘actual’ transpiring of events that occurred there is still fiercely debated and, in truth, will never be known for sure, for a more comprehensive account as told by participants and eyewitnesses, see Asher-Schapiro (2016); Birrell (2013); Fahim and Saad (2013); Hanano (2012); MacKinnon (2016). 4. The earliest news reports about the events in Dera ‘a, whether internationally or by the official Syrian news agency, SANA, did not break until 18 March 2011. However, rumours of the events travelled much earlier via word-of-mouth and the sharing of mobile phone images and videos. 5. Personal interview, 7 May, 2020. Numerous other first-hand accounts echo these sentiments. Among many others, see Abouzeid (2018) and Halasa et al. (2014), as well as the anonymous documentary ‘Smuggling 23 minutes of Revolution’ (uploaded to YouTube in November 2011; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Zj3d_40wrrc). 6. Fieldnotes, March–April, 2011. 7. Cf. ‘Smuggling 23 minutes of Revolution’. 8. The first deaths of protesters in Syria occurred in Dera’a after security forces attacked those gathered at the Omari Mosque after

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Friday Prayer, killing four (Human Rights Watch 2011). The mass nationwide protests that erupted the following Friday, on 25 March 2011, including that which took place at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, directly responded to this. Syria’s Emergency Law came into force in 1962 with the coming to power of the Ba’ath Party. Although repealed by Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, on 21 April 2011 (decree 161), the move was greatly criticised for being merely cosmetic and ‘useless’ (cf. BBC News 2011). The phrase, Yalla irhal ya Bashar ! (‘Come on Bashar, Get Out!’), is the title of a protest anthem made famous during mass demonstrations in Hama in early July 2011. It was initially reported to have been written and led by the well-known Syrian singer, Ibrahim Qashoush, who was later found dead in the Orontes River with his throat cut and his vocal cords ripped out. However, this authorship was later called into question (cf. Harkin 2016). Cf. Frantz Fanon (1963, 89): ‘In armed struggles there exists what we might call the point of no return. Almost always it is marked off by a huge and all-inclusive repression which engulfs all sectors of the colonized people’ (emphasis added). See also Gorman (2014, 232). The Islamic lunar calendar consists of twelve months, with Ramadan being the most venerated. It is marked by daily fasting from sunrise to sunset and the giving of alms to the needy. In 2011, Ramadan began at sunset on Sunday, 31 July and ended at sunset on Monday, 29 August. For more on such tactics, particularly by the group known as The Calendar of Freedom, see Atassi (2011). An ancient Semitic city located in the heart of the Syrian Desert, Palmyra (Ar. Tadmor ) was an important caravan stop on the historic Silk Road. Inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1980, the ancient city was seen as the archaeological ‘crown jewel’ of Syria and ‘Bride of the Desert’. Beginning in August 2010, I had been researching the social role of the site in the everyday lives of local inhabitants; however, this research was cut short due to the start of the unrest in March 2011 when road closures and increasing unrest

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in the countryside made travel outside the so-called ‘Damascus Bubble’ increasingly difficult. At the time, Syriatel was one of two licensed mobile phone companies in Syria which, until June 2011, was owned by the president’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf, a well-known member of the president’s inner circle and considered at the time to be the wealthiest man in Syria. Within the context of the crisis, he quickly became one of the country’s leading symbols of corruption (BBC News 2012; see also Wedeen 2013). For an in-depth discussion on the historical significance of the Great Mosque of the Umayyads in Damascus, among many others see Bianca (2000), Burns (2007), Degeorge (2004), van Leeuwen (1999); Walker (2004). For its incorporation into the Syrian national imaginary under the Assads, see Pinto (2011). It was clear that ‘and al-Assad’ was a later addition because its positioning was off-centre, and the grammar was incorrect. The evident concern in choosing a colour of paint that matched as closely as possible that of the wall and the meticulous care with which the paint was applied were in stark contrast to the haphazard effacement of other political graffiti observed elsewhere, such as Palmyra. This reaction adhered quite closely to Gell’s observation that ‘any object that one encounters in the world invites the question, “how did this thing get to be here?”’ and furthermore consists of ‘playing out their origin-stories mentally, reconstructing their histories as a sequence of actions performed by another agent’ (Gell 1998, 67). For more on the ‘hierarchy of spaces’ among graffiti artists, see Schacter (2008, 48). See Pinto 2011 for an excellent discussion of the use of this phrase as a form of official political propaganda that was also actively appropriated by various groups within Syrian society to express patriotic support for the regime in the face of the external threat of ‘Western imperialism’. For examples of this phrase’s use as a sign of regime support on social media, see https://www.facebook.com/GodprotectsSyria?fref=photo; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxBOv8J3MJs).

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23. For more on graffiti as détournement , see Schacter (2008). 24. That is, ‘unforeseen’ to some users. Others with whom I spoke described the duplicity of such actions to be very much in line with regime strategies. 25. According to www.urbandictionary.com, a ‘Facebook War’ refers to ‘the partaking or observing of a heated cyber argument on someone’s Facebook wall’ (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define. php?term=Facebook%20War). 26. The fears among informants of mukhabarat infiltration on Facebook and other websites were not unwarranted. On 15 March 2011, the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) was officially formed as a group of computer hackers to support the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Targeting websites of known political opposition groups, western news organisations and human rights groups (among others), the SEA has used spamming, website defacement, malware, phishing, and other attacks to make Syria ‘the first Arab country to have a public Internet Army hosted on its national networks to openly launch cyber-attacks on its enemies’ (Noman 2011). 27. The phrase ‘Kingdom of Silence’ to refer to Syria is attributed to Riad al-Turk (b.1930), also known as ‘the Old Man of the Syrian opposition’ (Wright 2009; see also Syria Stories 2010). Imprisoned four times in Syria as a political prisoner for nearly twenty years, alTurk continues to be a prominent advocate of democracy in Syria and a leader of the Syrian opposition.

References Abouzeid, Rania. 2018. No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. Ajami, Fouad. 2012. The Syrian Rebellion. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

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Asher-Schapiro, Avi. 2016. The Young Men Who Started Syria’s Revolution Speak About Daraa, Where It All Began. Vice News, 15 March. https://news.vice.com/article/the-young-men-who-started-syrias-rev olution-speak-about-daraa-where-it-all-began. Atassi, Basma. 2011. A Colourful Uprising in Damascus. Al Jazeera, 13 December. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/12/201112 11105436823841.html. Barad, Karen. 2003. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–831. BBC News. 2011.Syria Protests: Bashar al-Assad Lifts Emergency Law. BBC News, 21 April. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-13161329. ———. 2012. Bashar Al-Assad’s Inner Circle. BBC News, 30 July. https:// www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-13216195. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Boston, MA: HMH. Bianca, Stefano. 2000. Urban Form in the Arab World: Past and Present. Zurich: ORL-Schriften. Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Birrell, Ian. 2013. Revealed: The Boy Prankster Who Triggered Syria’s Bloody Genocide with Slogans Sprayed in His Schoolyard. The Daily Mail Online, 27 April. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2315888/Revealed-Theboy-prankster-triggered-Syrias-bloody-genocide-slogans-sprayed-schoolyard. html. Boholm, Åsa. 2015. Anthropology and Risk. New York, NY: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1998. Homo Academicus. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Buchli, Victor. 1999. An Archaeology of Socialism. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Burns, Ross. 2007. Damascus: A History. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Debord, Guy. 1977(1967). Society of the Spectacle. Black & Red Translation. Open Source Edition. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/ society.htm. Degeorge, Gérard. 2004. Damascus. New York, NY: Random House Incorporated. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge. ———. 2002. Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Fahim, Kareem, and Hwaida Saad. 2013. A Faceless Teenage Refugee Who Helped Ignite Syria’s War. The New York Times, 8 February. https://www. nytimes.com/2013/02/09/world/middleeast/a-faceless-teenage-refugee-whohelped-ignite-syrias-war.html. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York, NY: Grove Press. Ferrell, Jeff. 1993. The World Politics of Wall Painting. Social Justice 20 (3/4): 188–202. Ferrel, Jeff, Dragan Milovanovic, and Stephen Lyng. 2001. Edgework, Media Practices, and the Elongation of Meaning: A Theoretical Ethnography of the Bridge Day Event. Theoretical Criminology 5: 177–202. Friese, Heidrun, ed. 2001. The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gibson, James. 1986. The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face to Face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Gorman, Daniel. 2014. From the Outside Looking In. In Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline, ed. Malu Halasa, Zaher Omareen, and Nawara Mahfoud, 224–233. London: Saqi Books. Halasa, Malu, Zaher Omareen, and Nawara Mahfoud, eds. 2014. Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline. London: Saqi Books. Hanano, Amal. 2012. The Syrian Schoolboys Who Sparked a Revolution. Lifestyle, 30 March. https://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/the-syrian-school boys-who-sparked-a-revolution-1.458306#full. Harkin, James. 2016. The Incredible Story Behind the Syrian Protest Singer Everyone Thought Was Dead. British GQ, 7 December. https://www.gqmagazine.co.uk/article/syria-civil-war. Human Rights Watch. 2011. “We’ve Never Seen Such Horror”: Crimes against Humanity by Syrian Security Forces’. Human Rights Watch, 1 June. https://www.hrw.org/report/2011/06/01/weve-never-seen-such-hor ror/crimes-against-humanity-syrian-security-forces. Khamis, Sahar, Paul Gold and Katherine Vaughn. 2012. Beyond Egypt’s “Facebook Revolution” and Syria’s “YouTube Uprising”: Comparing Political Contexts, Actors and Communication Strategies. Arab Media & Society, 28 March. https://www.arabmediasociety.com/beyond-egypts-facebook-rev olution-and-syrias-youtube-uprising-comparing-political-contexts-actorsand-communication-strategies/.

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Latour, Bruno. 2002. What is Iconoclash? or Is there a world beyond the image wars? In Iconoclash, Beyond the Image-Wars in Science, Religion and Art, ed. Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour, 14–37, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lyng, Stephen. 1990. Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking. American Journal of Sociology 95 (4): 851–886. MacKinnon, Mark. 2016. The Graffiti Kids: How an Act of Teenage Rebellion Sparked the Syrian War. The Globe and Mail , 2 December. https://www.the globeandmail.com/world/article-the-graffiti-kids-how-an-act-of-teenage-reb ellion-sparked-the-syrian/. Macleod, Hugh, and Annasofie Flamand. 2011. Tweeting the Police State. Al Jazeera, 9 April. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/04/201 14814358353452.html. Meskell, Lynn. 2004. Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present. New York, NY: Routledge. Noman, Helmi. 2011. The Emergence of Open and Organized ProGovernment Cyber Attacks in the Middle East: The Case of the Syrian Electronic Army. OpenNet Initiative, 31 May. https://opennet.net/emerge nce-open-and-organized-pro-government-cyber-attacks-middle-east-case-syr ian-electronic-army. Oakeshott, Michael. 1959. The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind: An Essay. Cambridge, UK: Bowes & Bowes. Omareen, Zaher. 2014. The Symbol and Counter-Symbols in Syria: Power and Propaganda of Freedom and Dignity. In Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline, ed. Malu Halasa, Zaher Omareen, and Nawara Mahfoud, 84–101. London: Saqi Books. Patel, David, Valerie Bunce, and Sharon Wolchik. 2014. Diffusion and Demonstration. In The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics in the Middle East, ed. Marc Lynch, 57–74. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Peteet, Julie. 1996. The Writing on the Walls: The Graffiti of the Intifada. Cultural Anthropology 11 (2): 139–159. Pierret, Thomas. 2012. The Role of the Mosque in the Syrian Revolution. Near East Quarterly 7. Pinto, Paulo. 2011. “Oh Syria, God Protects You”: Islam as Cultural Idiom under Bashar al-Asad. Middle East Critique 20 (2): 189–205. Preston, Jennifer. 2011a. Seeking to Disrupt Protesters, Syria Cracks Down on Social Media. The New York Times, 22 May. https://www.nytimes.com/ 2011/05/23/world/middleeast/23facebook.html.

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Walker, Bethany J. 2004. Commemorating the Sacred Spaces of the Past: The Mamluks and the Umayyad Mosque at Damascus. Near Eastern Archaeology 67 (1): 26–39. Wedeen, Lisa. 2013. ’Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria’. Critical Inquiry 39: 841–873. Wright, Robin. 2009. Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East. Princeton, NJ: Penguin Books.

7 The Edgeworker’s Habitus: Climbing and Ordinary Risks Matthew Bunn

Climbing (and extreme sport more broadly) has an unusual relationship to the ordinary. On the one hand, it is positioned as unproductive risk, taking for granted the preciousness of human life in a bid to achieve a fleeting ‘thrill’. Yet on the other, sports like climbing require careful development of skills and perceptual schemes that allow for effective moderation of the inherent dangers of the vertical, and the level of ‘risk’ that he/she feels can be controlled (see West and Allin 2010; Heywood 1994). These abilities, both historically (Simon 2005) and contemporaneously, are often valorised as a powerful form of symbolic capital that maximises distinction (Bourdieu 1984, 219) through the misrecognition of ‘inherent’ capacity climbers have for endurance under M. Bunn (B) University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 ´ B. Switek et al. (eds.), Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83962-8_7

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pressure, integrity and courage. In a sense, climbers bring the ordinary, through careful self-governance, into the steepening angles of the climber’s extraordinary. Yet, while climbing could be constituted as an escape (Lyng 2005) from late-capitalist governance, climbers embody and utilise the very neoliberal ideals of choice and risk management to frame and even perceive climbing as a possibility (Bunn 2017a). As Gershon (2011) points out, neoliberalism is only possible through the performance of individual subjectivities and the wider social ideals that are constructed through these. Neoliberal practices are thus translated, slowly and carefully, into climbing practice through the relative character of risk and the ability to build skilful responses as preconscious platforms for the identification of the features of risks. The risks of climbing are not contained in an objective relation to the world, one where risk increases as one becomes more proficient and opts for more ‘dangerous’ objectives. Rather, perceptual schemas and embodied skills change the relationship to these environments, one that consequently continues to readjust the severity and extent of the risks present in each engagement with vertical terrain. This is a manifestation of the habitus that relies on a system of preconscious habits to inform and transform the engagement with dangerous terrains. This chapter engages with how habitus functions at the edge. Climbing draws from the ordinary; deep systems of governance and (self ) control that allow for the recognition and perception of the extraordinary; the conditions, experienced in place (Casey 1997) as an analogical and literal precipice (and intersection) of human control. Although climbing tests the boundaries of the extraordinary, pushing into terrains that reimagine the potential forms of embodiment accessible to the human being, climbing never properly removes itself from the ‘dominant ordinary’ (Introduction, this volume). Thus, the risks and boundaries that climbing negotiates are ones that are given focus through the safeties and logic of late capitalism (Bunn 2017b). However, rather than giving focus to the broader social-structural conditions, this chapter articulates the use and development of a ‘phenomenological habitus’ (Crossley 2001a) that is produced through the relational (Boholm and Corvellec 2011) logic of climbing risks. To

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articulate these I draw on two aspects of high-risk climbing: firstly, the nature of movement, an aspect I argue requires a strongly improvisational disposition to continually adjust and readjust to the nuances of terrains; and, second, the experience, and overcoming, of fear. Fear must regularly be confronted while climbing, yet is hard to train without immersion in it. Because of this, I refer to a notion of ‘emotional callusing’ to explore the way that climbers adopt social logics for its management. This chapter is based upon a multisited ethnography (Marcus 1995) of ‘high-risk’ or ‘high-consequence’ climbing styles. These included forms of rock, ice, alpine and expeditionary climbing that are primarily centred in North America, but include Europe, South America, Australia and New Zealand. During the course of this fieldwork, I participated extensively in these styles, forging my own habitus as part of my own insight and access to the phenomenology of climbing. Habitus was both a theoretical and methodological (Wacquant 2013) tool in this process, one that facilitated a deeper understanding of the process of embodiment climbers undergo.

Edgework and Habitus Stephen Lyng (1990) uses the term edgework as a concept to explore the desire for, and experience of, voluntary risk practices. It has been used in explanations of ‘extreme’ sports such as mountaineering (Simon 2005), skydiving (Laurendeau 2006) and BASE jumping (Laurendeau 2011). However, it has also been applied to areas of voluntary risk beyond sport, including volunteer search and rescue (Lois 2003, 2005) and to other risky leisure practices such as sadomasochism (Newmahr 2011). This broad application demonstrates the strength of the emergence of both risky practices and the recognition of voluntary risk in social research, along with the need to develop a sufficient theoretical base to explore them. Edgework has been defined in detail elsewhere (for instance see Lyng 1990, 2005, 2009), hence only a brief discussion is provided here. Edgework refers to the negotiation of boundaries, or edges, between consequential human states (life–death, sanity–insanity and so on). These

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states are pursued because of the powerful sense of self-determination and realness that are experienced within them. They allow for a powerful, if fleeting, sense of control and self-affirmation that is difficult to find in the often deeply rationalised conditions of late-modernity. Although much of this experience rests on an ‘illusion of control’ (Lyng 1990, 872; Laurendeau 2006), where edgeworkers feel that they have control over their fate well beyond what could be achieved, there is also a need for a carefully honed system of skills and abilities to even enter dangerous terrains. For this, it is useful to consider the way in which these skills are developed as systems of habit and disposition through the concept of habitus. Habitus, broadly, refers to the embodiment of structures in the shape of dispositions. But it does not mean that agents absorb these structures in a perfect way representing a singular, unified image of the social, or at least a given social field. Embodiment of the social structures that constitutes these social fields is always partial. The schemes of perception are limited by the social position and social capital of the agent and the position that they occupy and positions that might be likely for them to occupy. This limitation in turn means that actions never fully reproduce structures, as they in part constitute novel characterisations of action, and thus create adjustments to objective conditions and possibilities. This, as Hilgers (2009) notes, is the permanent mutation that characterises habitus. Indeed, Bourdieu notes that the ‘partialness’ of the appropriations of ‘generative schemes’: is a question of reconstituting the ‘fuzzy’, flexible, partial logic of this partially integrated system of generative schemes which, being partially mobilised in relation to each particular situation, produces, in each case, below the level of the discourse and the logical control that it makes possible, a ‘practical’ definition of the situations and the functions of the action … and which, with the aid of a simple yet inexhaustible combinatory, generates the actions best suited to fulfil these functions within the limits of the available means. (1990, 267, emphasis in original)

Bourdieu emphasises the combinatory and improvisational aspects of habitus, expressly rejecting critiques that deem it too deterministic (see

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Jenkins 1992, 81). Because of the impossibility of complete harmony between objective circumstance and dispositional appropriation, improvisational adjustment, to greater or lesser degrees, is a fundamental condition of habitus in all situations. While deliberate strategies are continually being made, and remade, there is a continuing practical adjustment that never properly rises to the level of conscious control. Hilgers notes that ‘the degree of freedom varies, in fact, with the social position of the individual and the degree of officialisation, institutionalisation and ritualisation of the context’ (2009, 741). In most cases, it is possible to identify several formal or organisational processes conducive to a more circumscribed development of habitus, where structures are clearly delineated and more rigidly maintained and enforced. For example, as shown in the fighting ethnographies of Wacquant (2004), Spencer (2012) and Garcia and Spencer (2013), fighters must carefully embody rules and techniques that are formally developed and enforced. Likewise, in a study of ballet dancers, Wainwright et al. (2006) go so far as to identify an ‘institutional habitus’ that characterises different schools of ballet dancing, whereby dancers develop a particular dancing style based upon the dance schools or companies where they were trained.1 In contrast, one of the core organisational features of climbing is just how much of the decision-making about how to practice stylistic purity falls to the climber. There is little in the way of a formal organisational component governing the climber’s choice of routes; for example, when to climb and what techniques to deploy.2 The ground rules, so to speak, occur in the field and in relation to the terrain as it is observed and encountered. The act of climbing can be understood through the informal, self-regulating nature of the pursuit. As Donnelly aptly summarises: The system of rules and conventions that exist in climbing (termed ‘ethics’ by climbers) is socially constructed and socially sanctioned. That is, the rules are created by a form of consensus among climbers – both verbally and through climbing journals – transmitted by the same means of communication, and enforced by self-discipline and social pressure. Ethics are based on the premise that given enough time and enough resources (human, financial, technical), anything can be climbed …

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Ethics also permit an informal level of competition by ensuring that climbers attempting similar types of ascent employ similar means. (2003, 294–295)

As Donnelly suggests, climbers still adhere to systems of ethics and styles that govern what it can be rightly called ‘climbing’. As Joseph Taylor notes in a history of Yosemite climbers, ‘to climb well meant disciplining oneself to rules that, while unwritten, were clear to participants’ (Taylor 2010, 4). However, without coaches or governing bodies that formally regulate styles, climbers must internalise these systems in ways that prioritise individualised decision-making. This informal regulation has a direct impact on the organisation of the logic of climbing. The climber’s experience is a continuous encounter with different landscape features and one that entangles risk with intensity of experience. Because of this, a climber learns in situ, and must develop dispositions that are not possible to dissociate from the moments of action where they are enacted. While the skills of climbing are learnt in such a way, they are made sense of through the ordinary forms of cultural and social capital that are attained through professional or educational experience and brought into leisure practices (Bunn 2017a). Climbers require time where they are safe, where they can plan and strategise their next trip, which routes they will climb, and even, how these form part of training for the next climb. Even simplistic elements of climbing practice, for instance, being able to store equipment somewhere safe, being able to leave the mundane obligations of day-to-day life behind for days or even weeks on end, requires a particular configuration of dispositions, objective conditions and freedom to be pursued. In effect, climbing makes sense when a distance from urgency is present, when the extraordinary terrains are temporary and the ordinary safe, reliable and constant. This allows for the careful construction of the risks of climbing into something that, at the very least, appears controllable. Because of this control ‘the danger, the unpredictability, the risk, the irrationality of climbing are substantially matters of choice; climbers can have their activity raw, medium or well-done according to how they feel or what they want from the sport’ (Heywood 1994, 187, italics in original). For an individual, producing

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risks around these dangers is a matter of self-regulation, of having the reflexive capacity, along with the time required to enact it, to align personal ability and experience with an appropriate objective.

An Experimental Body High-consequence climbing rarely concedes the opportunity to rehearse in situ. A climber pushing into new terrains of physical difficulty rarely will do so in an environment where falling is tantamount to death (see Bunn 2017a). Firstly, a climbing route will typically be assessed with a degree of rationalised knowledge, as routes often have ‘known’ dimensions accessible through guidebooks and social interactions. However, simultaneously, climbing is a body-centric activity that deploys the body in spaces that can be only partially known. The unknown aspects of the climbing terrain will demand improvisational technique to successfully ascend. A basis of the confidence of a climber therefore comes through the embodied understanding that it is possible to ‘figure out’ and to feel a way through a terrain, if they are equipped with a general understanding of the forms of difficulty that they are likely to face.3 To become a proficient climber, the best technique is to spend large amounts of time actually climbing. As Lewis remarks: The practice of rock-climbing trains or cultivates the body towards a better configuration for climbing. The phrase ‘the best training for climbing is climbing’, a well-rehearsed truism within climbing culture, indicates the centrality of the actual practice of climbing for the formation of climbing bodies – as opposed, for example, to developing a climbing body by pulling weights in a gymnasium. (2000, 74)

While training has been increasingly taken up in climbing as new knowledges and technologies have become available (indoor walls, training guides, etc.), these only have limited bearing on the in situ novelties of terrain and exposure (the sense felt when being out in an open position high above the ground). Rock, ice and snow surfaces are made up of a vast array of features that may help, hinder or entirely

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obstruct upward movement. The angle of the cliff will determine what features are usable, and for how long. Rock and ice type and quality will require different approaches, given that its surface may have good friction or may be slick, loose or solid. This must all be negotiated by the climber who at the same time must remain aware of the difficulty of leading, the weather, the length of the climb and how close it is to the climber’s absolute ability, everything considered.4 The body is therefore adjusting technique, speed and style to match the ‘gravity’ of the situation.5 These variations are further emphasised by bodily capital (Wacquant 1995). The specific proportions of the body, reach, weight and overall bodily capacity of a climber require adaptations of style. For example, Chisholm (2008) considers the gendered embodiment of climbing through the elite female climber Lynn Hill. Hill would climb with John Long, an elite male climber who was ‘almost twice her size’ who adopted a very different style of ascent to the one available to her: The big lesson for me here was to realize that despite what appeared to be a limitation due to my small stature, I could create my own method of getting past a difficult section of rock. John’s size and power enabled him to make long reaches and explosive lunge moves that were completely out of my range. I, on the other hand, often found small intermediate holds that John couldn’t even imagine gripping. But more importantly, I realized that no matter what our physical differences, with the right combination of vision, desire, and effort, just about any climb was possible. (Hill, quoted in Chisholm 2008, 22)

In this case, the body of each climber is at the same time advantaged and restricted by its very dimensions and must adapt an appropriate hexis—a way of the body engaging with and moving in the terrain. Here, where Long can avoid the need to use smaller holds by reaching further for larger ones, if he had to, he would have found it difficult to use these smaller holds because of his extra weight, hand size and body positions possible for him. Hill, on the other hand, did not have the same variety of positions or holds at any given point and had to improvise. Given her smaller stature, however, she is also less impeded by weight and thus able to utilise the smaller holds.

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A climber requires different methods of training to adapt. For shorter routes with easy access that are technically more difficult, the body needs more power, more ultimate strength and more gymnastic technique. On alpine terrain, where routes are much longer and often having unforeseen difficulties, the emphasis shifts towards endurance and stamina. Easier routes require simpler, even intuitive movement. As the level of difficulty increases, however, the climber needs to experiment with new bodily positions. These can be learnt in several ways. When a climber moves into more advanced climbing methods and styles, the body must go through a process of training in what can be difficult, if not counterintuitive methods. The climber must test positioning of the body in certain ways with the use of available holds. A stance may feel awkward, but possible. Even when one hand grasps a great hold, there may be nowhere to place the feet. Sol, a male climber in his mid-twenties, explains the role of bodily experience as part of learning during one of our fieldwork conversations: I think it’s more of a learning the movements and what, I guess, what body positions and how small [the] holds [you can hold on to] and how delicate the moves [that] you can do [are]. You know, like, how steep an angle you can smear on or how small a crimp you can crimp on [is]. Those kind[s] of things that, you can’t really learn that stuff without trying it, or trying hard as you can. And again, it’s pretty irrelevant to the number grade, you can be on a climb that has this tiny crimper on it. You either know you can or cannot pull off that hold.

Learning the movements of climbing requires climbing—experimenting with the ways to position the body to gain vertical ground. This requires a bodily knowing of how limits feel, and become a relational point of risk. Through training, protrusions of rock that seemed too small to grip become possible through the right technique and application of strength and the right amount of time spent in the position. As Boholm and Corvellec (2011, 178) suggest, there must be a ‘situated cognition positing a relationship of risk linking a risk object and an object at risk’. Climbers continue to modify themselves (the object

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at risk) while adjusting their perception of the risk object. This understanding is slowly accumulated as a capacity to know the body as it moves in the vertical terrain. The extraordinary is steadily and iteratively inscribed in ordinary practice. Learning the initial climbing movements can be difficult and exhausting. A revealing example of such a process is the development of the technique of crack climbing. In most crack climbing situations, a climber will ‘jam’ their appendages inside the crack. This is typically completed either by constriction or by torquing the hand or foot in some way to lock an appendage into position. But this ability does not come easy: beginner crack climbers regularly complain of how painful it is, especially on the feet.6 Further, since the new climber is uncomfortable, they may panic and apply an excessive amount of pressure in relation to what is needed to maintain the position. This is also because the climber has very little awareness in this terrain, uncertain of the technique, without the ‘feel’ for how close to the edge of their abilities they actually are. I was climbing a crack with a relatively inexperienced climber. This was her first ‘crack climb’. She continued to attempt to position her feet in the crack, jamming and torqueing them into constrictions. But she found this position too painful to be maintained. She thus began to modify her technique to what is called ‘laybacking’. This technique is physically demanding and far less efficient on a crack such as this. Because she was on a ‘top-rope’ it was possible for her to experiment with laybacking without concern of injury. Earlier in the route, as I watched from above, I attempted to instruct her on how to crack climb. But as the climb went on it was clear that she was unprepared to try and develop this technique and fell into a focused attempt at laybacking her way up the crack. After multiple rests and falls (safely sagging onto the rope) she eventually arrived at the top of the climb. (Fieldnotes, Blue Mountains, Australia. May 2012)

In the above account, the body was called on to experiment, but with a relatively high level of safety in this situation, the climber could allow herself to fall off the wall. Through such experiences, climbers can

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attempt a variety of techniques that build an increasingly broad repertoire of dispositions to draw upon as the circumstances demand. In the following example, once again of crack climbing, an experienced climber on lead had to confront his inexperience in crack climbing by drawing on this broader repertoire: While climbing a long alpine rock route, my partner Mitch and I were leading two pitches each before changing leader. I finished my first ‘block’ and swapped with Mitch. I was envious of the next lead: a corner crack that looked like it would perfectly accept my hands using a jamming technique. This is my favourite kind of rock climbing and one that I have spent more time practicing than any other. Mitch on the other hand had spent more time ‘face’ climbing, using the various protruding features of rock as hand and foot holds to move upwards. He regarded the crack with nervousness but set out with resolve to take his turn on lead. From my position I could not watch him climb, as the belay was hidden around a corner in case of the leader pulling off loose rock. After a long time, he had only climbed half of a rope length and was building an anchor. I was frustrated at how long it was taking. Soon enough it was my turn to second. I noticed that he had placed lots of protection. The crack was not very difficult and I quickly jammed my way up to the belay, smiling at the rhythmic movement. When I reached Mitch’s belay he commented that I had made it ‘look easy’. He went on to note, that since he had done little crack climbing, he could not quite work out a useful technique to efficiently climb using the crack. He instead resorted to using face holds. This would have made the climb substantially harder, as the face offered small, thin positions for hands and feet. In turn, my experience in this style of climbing meant that I could put my hands and feet in and effectively ‘walk’ up the crack (Fieldnotes, Cirque of the Invincibles Expedition, Remote North America, August 2012)

Thanks to his experience with other climbing styles, Mitch managed to improvise and cobble together a method of ascending through a section that otherwise called for a particular form of embodiment. Yet, Mitch did so without stopping and formulating a theoretical scheme to ascend. The body was launched into the terrain. It could devise a method, inching slowly up, using the features that were presented. This was a body adapted broadly to the practice, but which had to ultimately

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rely on skilful improvisation in the circumstances it confronted. Yet, because of Mitch’s lack of experience with cracks, he relied on using techniques that were less efficient in this terrain and made the ascent more difficult. All this also meant that Mitch felt less secure, which led him to place more protection. Throughout the time spent climbing, the body itself is modified through a dispositional orientation towards inventive practice. The dispositions are not static, but transformed through putting the body to work in the vertical terrain. They are dispositions that are made for improvisation, and so inform practice as they are enacted . Habitus, then, should be thought of as more than a storehouse for a collection of dispositions; it reflects a returning to place and, hence, an ‘implacement ’: ‘The customary body contains its own sedimented memories of place, contiguous places, places of a like kind, etc. Moving in or through a given place, the body imports its own implaced past into its present experience’ (Casey 2000, 194). Habitus, allows for the generation of improvised, yet practiced, actions that mould, more or less roughly, into the place it is inserted into. But, and as the need for improvisation testifies to, place is not a passive receiver of body, but body transports these memories of place back to and through place, as place intersects bodies (more often than not in the unconscious structuring of embodiment, see Thrift 2003, 310).

Emotional Callusing Climbers must diligently apply themselves, especially in earlier periods of development, to alter their response to fear in a process I call ‘emotional callusing’. I borrow here from Spencer’s (2009) discussion of ‘body callusing’ towards pain among mixed martial arts fighters. Body callusing is a process in which the bodies of the fighters become a reflexive site of action as the fighters work directly upon the body with the intention of hardening it for the purposes of fighting. Emotional callusing refers to deliberating subjecting oneself to a particular type of circumstance to alter an emotional response to a more conducive form for a difficult environment and/or activity. In the case of climbing, emotional callusing is

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required to make the extraordinary ordinary, where the extreme sense of omnipresent danger requires, a taxing, dynamic process of inculcation.7 As the body develops a greater sensitivity to the intricate details of the vertical environment, the climber is also becoming more emotionally adjusted. This is because emotions are a response to dispositions informed by a specific embodied context within the social world. Furthermore, ‘the function of emotion language is to render such states and activities intelligible by locating them within the contexts which occasion them and to which they constitute a purposive response’ (Crossley 2001b, 45). Fear, anxiety and panic represent an emotional response to the vertical environment that is implaced through the specific alignment of disposition and condition. As Probyn (2004, 231) acknowledges, ‘the body feels, enacts an emotion, and then brings into being the past. It is therefore the feeling body which has the consequence of summoning the past – a spectral past as future’ (Probyn 2004, 232). Emotional callusing thus refers to the enacting of a practiced emotional way of being that is stimulated in the relation between habitus and objective condition. Climbers enact the past through these emotional responses, whereby the tolerance of the presence of fear becomes deeply rooted in returning to the vertical. Hence, the emotions of climbing, most notably fear, play out within the social material. They are a relationship between the subject, their climbing partner, the expectations and anticipations of broader both concrete and abstract forms of the climbing community and the specific material configurations of vertical place. Climbing requires ‘emotion norms’ (Zembylas 2007, 447) that go beyond discipline for socially normative behaviour, as emotion invokes the possibility of access into the material conditions in which social norms operate. That is, the socially constructed normative behaviours of climbing are built in the material conditions of the placial (Casey 1997, 2000), and hence, emotional callusing is an objective requisite for their practice. However, through ‘emotional callusing’ climbers continually alter their response to such emotions and other forms of emotional and physical distress and, hence, can produce durable dispositions that alter these earlier perceptions, or at least counteract them. This change in response takes place as climbers experience extreme emotional states, where they

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can work to redouble focus on the task at hand and ignore the fear. A climber, through repeated exposure to such experiences, learns to engage not with the emotion, but soberly with the conditions that make up the situation. The response, then, is to become callused to the experience of fear to retain focus on avoiding the perils that generated the emotional response. Emotional callusing, however, regulates climbers’ reactions not only to fear and anxiety but also, at times, of joy and excitement. Through the hardening necessary to become a committed climber, fear becomes pleasure and distress, joy. Mitchell makes a similar point in his mountaineering ethnography as ‘strenuous effort becomes fun, necessity offers opportunity, labour is leisure’ (1983, 207). Crossley suggests that ‘we do not have different ways of expressing being angry or in love. We have different ways of being angry or in love … we have different ways of taking up a relationship to our environment’ (Crossley 1995, 53). Emotional states are not just expressions coming from a stable and consistent self, but rather, in the moment of action, constitute the complete embodiment of the individual. In the case of fear, it is not merely that climbers modify their responses to fear; they also come to embody an entirely different experience of fear. The ongoing result of emotional callusing is a climber that embodies not only new responses to fear, but a shifting way of being afraid. The need to keep calm under pressure arises repeatedly whenever fear and danger are present. As the climber deepens the engagement—climbing longer, harder or more dangerous routes—being afraid is dynamically adjusted. This conditioning continues to align the individual with a deepening immersion in the field. Over time, the conditioning normalises the emotional demands of being in the vertical environment. Climbers come to treat the vertical—once terrifying and difficult places—as an ordinary place to be. To further articulate this process, I will consider examples of inexperienced and experienced climbers to show how these represent different ways of perceiving and being in danger. The various components of these examples will then be deconstructed to more fully describe the dispositional modification discussed above.

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Fear In Mitchell’s (1983, 166) ethnography of mountain climbing, he suggests that ‘fear is the luxury or the burden of those without urgent things to do. In the midst of the climb, the mountain may pose precarious and problematic circumstances but the climber does not perceive them as such, only as challenges to be met’ (Mitchell 1983, 166). While this may represent the ideal response, whereby fear is lost because of the nature of the experience of climbing, Mitchell’s argument overlooks the difficulty (and rarity) of this attainment. Despite the assiduous development of the ability to respond to danger in a ‘hardened’ way, climbers may still experience fear at any point in their career. Perhaps one of the best indications of this is a climber who discovers that they do indeed have the luxury to hesitate. In an interview, Dena, a female climber in her mid-twenties, described a struggle that an experienced climber underwent to overcome a challenging, poorly protected section of climbing while she was belaying him: There was just one move that he didn’t want to fall on because he had [poor quality protection]… like it was something he didn’t want to fall on, and he literally went up and down and up and down and up and down to his rest spot, try it again, back to his rest spot, go up, back to rest spot. So like I was literally belaying him for about two hours…Eventually he had a fall and his [protection] held, and then he did it easily.

Such going back and forth, to and from, a challenging spot is a behaviour frequently observable among climbers, particularly on shorter climbs. It would be hard to suggest that the climber whom Dena was belaying was not experiencing fear, precisely because he had the physical ability to climb the route (as demonstrated by the climber moving through the section after falling). Given that the route was within the climber’s physical abilities, his apprehension, therefore, stemmed from pushing close enough to the limit/edge of these abilities while the questionable protection was not a satisfactory safety barrier between himself and the ground. The climber continued to return to his rest spot after attempting the moves out of fear , on route, in action. Thus, fear is not

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a luxury, but hesitation is. However, it is the luxury of hesitating itself that is not always afforded. For Lois (2003), search and rescue workers’ ‘paralysing fear’ only worsens a situation during a difficult rescue for both the casualty and the rescue team. A rescuer’s hesitation in the moment of fear may cost the victim or even the rescuer’s teammates their lives. Rescuers must therefore suppress fear to focus on the task at hand— at times so much so that the victims in need of rescue can become peripheral (Lois 2003, 93–97). These are situations where hesitation— the possibility of stepping back to gain time to consider the optimal approach—would be a dangerous luxury and where the urgency of the operation demands continuing engagement. Like learning to trust in, and experiment with the capacities of the body, responses to fear must be given durability, but only through an active process of reinterpreting the risk object and its relationship to the object at risk. When first confronting the exposure of climbs with open space below and in visual peripheries, an inexperienced climber is prone to think that ‘there is too much slack in the rope’, ‘I will swing across the wall’, ‘the rope will cut’ or ‘I am going to die!’ The palms sweat, the legs shake in a manner that climbers refer to as ‘Elvis legs’ or ‘sewing machine legs’; that is, bouncing from the ankle and vibrating into the thigh. The fear becomes constant: the thoughts of catastrophic failure escalate and the climber soon is swallowed by an inescapable panic. They may simply fall off, sagging onto the rope anticlimactically. Or instead, they may manage to climb through this experience. Whatever the case, the embodied reaction is to ‘overgrip’ holds wasting energy when a relaxed adjustment of the hand would be equally as effective, and to climb without elegance, scraping and bashing flesh against the rockface. I have seen savage bruises, cuts and scrapes caused by nothing other than panic. Succumbing to panic is a way of being afraid ; and it is a way of being afraid that is unconducive to being a climber. The development of dispositions fit for the climbing field is impeded by untamed fear. Fear must therefore be incorporated into an embodied way of being that continues to work to the advantage of the climber. In the following interview excerpt, Dena recounts her experience as a novice traditional rock climber who has recently completed her first

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leads. She explains the process of emotional callusing that is undergone through rationally calculating the odds of hitting the ground: That’s what happens when you’re freaking out. You’re like, okay, ‘I’m feeling a bit freaked, but there are four pieces of good gear below me, I’m certain at least three of them are good… I’ve only got a few… if the [top] one pops I’ve still got heaps of space between me and the ground… my belayer’s not tiny so I’m not going to pull him off the ground.8

Here, she describes the process that she goes through in order not only to calm herself while on lead but also to try and convince herself of a more reasonable evaluation of her circumstances. Importantly, she treats this process as a normal part of settling down while climbing on lead. Even though it may appear odd to be making assessments about the chances of hitting the ground while leading, it is through such calculations that fear, if not eliminated, may be at least reduced to a sustainable level (not panicking). Climbers are hence working on modifying the perceptual grasp of vertical terrain to more usefully assess what should be constituted as a risk. The ground is the most obvious risk object, yet, effectively applying proper climbing safety techniques removes it: or, at least removes it as an irrational fear. However, the control of fear is not something that is forcefully trained in the first few years of climbing to transform it into a normal, unreflexive disposition. Fear requires constant vigilance as it may occur at unexpected times, or when a climber overestimates their abilities and selects a route that is too demanding. In another interview, this time with an experienced expeditionary climber, Ben recalls a situation when one of the team on an expeditionary big wall climb began to lose his composure. It was Ben who maintained the doxic appreciation of how to manage fear on a big wall and the consequences of panic: I remember this one route, you know, there was a guy, he’s just like, ‘we’re gonna die!’ You know? ‘We’re gonna die!’ And he’s just… I’m just like, ‘whoa, man. If we freak out and we stress and we don’t focus on what’s in front of us, we will die… if we start losing it here – yeah – we’re gonna make a mistake and we’re gonna be too hasty and we’re gonna do something dumb! Just chill, and just figure it out, and let’s focus!’

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An experienced climber embodies a level of fear tolerance, but also, importantly, a method derived from doxic principles that inform the way fear is embodied. Through repetition, climbers develop emotional callusing, adjusting their perceptual schema to focus on the logic of climbing practice to remain calm in difficult situations. The climber does not consider the idea of falling 500 m, but instead focuses on where their last point of protection is. When the situation is desperate and the danger very real, they will attempt to stay calm and to ignore the voice in their head that tries to draw their attention to all the ways in which the situation can go horribly wrong. As John, an experienced climber put it in an interview: ‘What we’re trying to do is overcome, is to ignore that little voice in your head that’s saying “this isn’t safe, don’t do it”. You try and sort of shout it down and ignore it to climb through something’. With full awareness, John acknowledges that fear is actively engaged with throughout a climb. This management of fear is not therefore a process of learning by rote, merely repeating the exercise in an unreflexive manner. Throughout the engagement with climbing, a climber must actively seek to modify dispositional configurations to align them with a deepening engagement with the doxic modalities of the field. In this way, habitus is continually adjusted, yet never entirely synchronised: The relationship of immediate adaptation is suspended, in an instant of hesitation into which there may slip a form of reflection which has nothing in common with that of the scholastic thinker and which, through the sketched movements of the body … remains turned towards practice and not towards the agent who performs it. (Bourdieu 2000, 162)

Emotional callusing functions most accurately to account for the shifting of the extraordinary into an ordinariness. It will require many routes for a climber to learn to tolerate not only fear and anxiety but also physical discomforts that can range from mild to excruciating. This may be the pain caused by a tight rock shoe,9 the brief but tremendous agony of blood returning to cold hands while ice climbing (known as the ‘screaming-barfies’, since the pain urges a climber to simultaneously

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scream and vomit), or it could be thirst, hunger or exhaustion. Alternatively, it could also be nights spent sitting on tiny ledges when there is nowhere big enough to lie down. As Ben notes: Shivering and suffering and freezing… that’s a sense of, you know… that equals joy, that equals your success. So, you may be hating it at that moment, but I mean like, if you’re really bummed, like and you hate it… you know the suffering part is fun… maybe not at the moment, but you know it’s gonna pass. You know you’ve got to endure, you know?

Many styles of climbing require a readiness to suffer, with the suffering, at times, close to the limits of one’s endurance. However, regardless of their level, many of the discomforts that accompany ascents of cliffs and mountains must be reinterpreted to acquire worthwhile experiences that function as cultural capital. Sometimes this is recognisable while the experiences are taking place; at other times, it may become enjoyable, but only later.

Conclusion: The Sense of Danger Makes Sense in the World of Safety Habitus, applied as a social phenomenological concept, allows for understanding much of the practiced and steadily habituated turning towards the vertical from the conditions of the late capitalist, or neoliberal era. Habitus at the edge, balanced between the ordinary and extraordinary, is a perceptual schema orientated to recognising and enacting means of negotiating vertical terrains. Yet it at once draws from the ordinary world to produce knowable, calculable and controllable risks, while applying these to an extraordinary terrain and practice. Climbers hence never properly exceed the ordinary, as the ordinary is what gives sense to the extraordinary. It provides the vertical with technologies of ascent, of recording and codifying knowledge, of means of travel and perhaps most important, with logics of risk. It is through this juxtaposition and interplay, the back and forth between in situ improvisation and callusing and

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the ordinary meaning-making of neoliberal being that gives climbing its value. This chapter draws out two key aspects of the way in which habitus facilitates this relationship. Firstly, improvisational capacity is necessary in order to negotiate vertical terrains. Climbers must genuinely adapt to a system of practice, whereby the abilities to utilise the body and manage emotional responses become rehearsed only in the actions themselves, and so can only be properly known in the terrains in which they are enacted. The movements, particularly on routes of high consequence, require a readiness to respond to a wide array of possibilities. On the other, the emotional enactment of the past is a central means of gaining and regaining access into vertical space. Emotional callusing restores a sense of capacity throughout the embodied recognition of climbing, and the features of its terrains, whereby climbers confronted again by the intimidating places of the vertical. Moreover, during ascents, the in situ adjustment of emotional callusing presents an orientation towards conducive means of negotiating the ongoing emotional relationship of the climber with both socially and placially normativity. This chapter hence demonstrates the steady temporality of incorporation of the ordinary into the extraordinary. Through the examples of bodily movement and emotional callusing, it is demonstrated that there is a speed, a temporality, an accumulated being through which a sense is steadily forged of how to be a feeling, moving body in an extraordinary place. Climbing thus remains an expression of the ordinary world; juxtaposed yet entirely consistent with the structures and logics that compose the climbers’ materials and equipment, which allow enough temporal freedom to exit from and return to the urgencies of the social world. The safeties, flexibility and rationalisation of many contemporary societies are required for making sense of these extraordinary vertical spaces, yet to only have a taste of danger when and where one feels so inclined. Inasmuch, climbing is both a freedom from, and an expression of, neoliberal being, relying on the extensive markets, technologies and ideological commitment to the personally responsible, yet risk-aware individual, to draw meaning from the pursuit of edgework.

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Notes 1. This concept itself, while oft used, does damage to the recognition of the properly relational sociology of Bourdieu. For an extended critique, see Atkinson (2011). This problem is also discussed in relation to different sporting ‘habitus’ in Bunn (2016). 2. Climbing has not always existed in this state, particularly in highaltitude climbing. Parallels to military organisation were often present in climbing when expeditions were government-funded and nationalistic—focused on making the first ascent of a mountain for national honour. For examples, see Ortner (1999) and Bayers (2003). For a comparative example of Soviet alpinism see Maurer (2009). 3. Climbers utilise a large number of techniques to understand the ‘degree’ of danger that could be faced during a climb. For an extended discussion, see Bunn (2017a). 4. As Heywood (1994, 184) explains, in traditional climbing ‘the climbing team (usually two or three) starts from the ground, without much in the way of preliminary inspection, and ascends to the top relying on a brief guidebook description, direct observation and experience, and protecting itself with ropes and leader-placed, removable devices which do not damage the rock surface’. These routes can be one pitch, however typically are ‘multipitch’ consisting of at least two pitches (a pitch is typically between 30 and 60 m). The first climber is known as the leader, who is at more risk while they navigate to the top of a pitch of climbing to secure the route for the rest of the climbing team. 5. The term gravity here carries multiple meanings, including both physical and social gravity. Climbers must grapple with the seriousness of the undertaking, but are also bound by the ethics (acceptable techniques) in order to maintain good style during the ascent. See Hage (2011) for an extended discussion of social gravity. 6. This bears similarities to what Spencer refers to in his ethnography (2009, 2012) of mixed martial arts fighters as ‘body callusing’. This is a social process of training the body to withstand higher pain thresholds in order to deepen involvement within the sport.

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7. I have met climbers that do not neatly fit into this category, either. Some climbers approach dangerous situations with wilfulness, at times bordering on recklessness, seemingly oblivious to risks. With this said, it is worth making two points. Firstly, these are exceptional cases; and secondly, many of these climbers act this way in their youth and have on occasion reported to me that they were not entirely aware of the risks they were taking at the time. Many of these climbers ease back as they learn more about the dangers they face. 8. While leading on single pitch climbs with a large platform to stand on, the belayer is usually unanchored. If a light person belays a heavy climber and the climber falls, it can pull the belayer off the ground, increasing the chance that the climber will hit the ground. 9. In order to prevent a rock shoe from rolling around on the foot, it is fitted very tightly. This increases sensitivity and the ability of the climber to stand on smaller edges. See Barratt (2011) for a greater discussion, in particular of the way in which the climbing shoe creates a technological mediation of the terrain.

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Bunn, Matthew. 2016. Habitus and Disposition in High-risk Mountain Climbing. Body and Society 22 (1): 92–114. ———. 2017a. A Disposition of Risk: Climbing Practice, Reflexive Modernity and the Habitus. Journal of Sociology 53 (1): 3–17. ———. 2017b. Defining the Edge: Choice, Mastery and Necessity in Edgework Practice. Sport in Society. Online First: 1–14. Casey, Edward. 1997. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2000. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Second Edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chisolm, Dianne. 2008. Climbing Like a Girl: An Exemplary Adventure in Feminist Phenomenology. Hypatia 23 (1): 9–40. Crossley, Nick. 1995. Merleau-Ponty, the Elusive Body and Carnal Sociology. Body and Society 1: 43–63. ———. 2001a. The Phenomenological Habitus and Its Construction. Theory and Society 30 (1): 81–120. ———. 2001b. The Social Body: Habit Identity and Desire. London: Sage. Donnelly, Peter. 2003. The Great Divide: Sport Climbing vs. Adventure Climbing. In To the Extreme: Alternative Sports, Inside and Out, ed. Robert Rinehart and Sydnor Synthia. New York: State University of New York Press. Garcia, Raul-Sanchez, and Dale Spencer. 2013. Fighting Scholars: Habitus and Ethnographies of Martial Arts and Combat Sports. London: Anthem Press. Hage, Ghassan. 2011. Social Gravity: Pierre Bourdieu’s Pheneomenological Social Physics. In Force, Movement, Intensity: The Newtonian Imagination in the Social Sciences, ed. Ghassan Hage and Emma Kowal. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Heywood, Ian. 1994. Urgent Dreams: Climbing, Rationalization and Ambivalence. Leisure Studies 13: 179–194. Hilgers, Mathieu. 2009. Habitus, Freedom and Reflexivity. Theory Psychology 19: 728. Jenkins, Richard. 1992. Pierre Bourdieu. London: Routledge. Laurendeau, Jason. 2006. “He Didn’t Go in Doing a Skydive”: Sustaining the “Illusion” of Control in an Edgework Activitiy. Sociological Perspectives 4: 583–605. Laurendeau, Jason. 2011. “If You’re Reading This, It’s Because I’ve Died”: Masculinity and Relational Risk in BASE Jumping. Sociology of Sport Journal 28: 404–420. Lewis, Neil. 2000. The Climbing Body, Nature and the Experience of Modernity. Body and Society 6: 58–80.

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Lois, Jennifer. 2003. Heroic Efforts: The Emotional Culture of Search and Rescue Volunteers. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2005. Gender and Emotion Management in the Stages of Edgework. In Edgework: The Sociology of Voluntary Risk-Taking, ed. Stephen Lyng, 117– 152. New York: Routledge. Lyng, Stephen. 1990. A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk-Taking. The American Journal of Sociology 95 (4): 851–886. ———. 2005. Edgework: The Sociology of Voluntary Risk-Taking. New York: Routledge. ———. 2009. Edgework, Risk, and Uncertainty. In Social Theories of Risk and Uncertainty: An Introduction, ed. Jens Zinn. Wiley-Blackwell: London. Gershon, Ilana. 2011. Neoliberal Agency. Current Anthropology 52 (4): 537– 547. Marcus, George E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. Maurer, Eva. 2009. Cold War, “Thaw” and “Everlasting Friendship”: Soviet Mountaineers and Mount Everest, 1953–1960. The International Journal of the History of Sport 26 (4): 484–500. Mitchell, Richard. 1983. Mountain Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Newmahr, Staci. 2011. Chaos, Order, and Collaboration: Towards a Feminist Conceptualisation of Edgework. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40 (6): 682–717. Probyn, Elspeth. 2004. Shame in the habitus. The Sociological Review 52 (2): 224–248. Ortner, Sherry. 1999. Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Simon, Jonathan. 2005. Edgework and Insurance in Risk Societies: Some Notes on Victorian Lawyers and Mountaineers. In Edgework: The Sociology of Voluntary Risk-Taking, ed. Stephen Lyng, 203–226. New York: Routledge. Spencer, Dale. 2009. Habit(us), Body Techniques and Body Callusing: An Ethnography of Mixed Martial Arts. Body and Society 15: 119–143. ———. 2012. Ultimate Fighting and Embodiment. New York: Routledge. Taylor, Jason. 2010. Pilgrims of the Vertical . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thrift, Nigel. 2003. Still Life in Nearly Present Time: The Object of Nature. In Country Visions, ed. Paul Cloke. Harlow: Pearson.

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Wacquant, Loic. 1995. Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labour Among Professional Boxers. Body and Society 1: 65–93. ———. 2004. Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. Habitus as Topic and Tool: Reflections on Becoming a Prizefighter. In Fighting Scholars: Habitus and Ethnographies of Martial Arts and Combat Sports, ed. Raul-Sanchez Garcia and Dale Spencer. London: Anthem Press. Wainwright, Stevens, Clare Williams, and Bryan. S. Turner. 2006. Varieties of Habitus and the Embodiment of Ballet. Qualitative Research 6: 535. West, Amanda, and Linda Allin. 2010. Chancing Your Arm: The Meaning of Risk in Rock Climbing. Sport in Society 13 (7): 1234–1248. Zembylas, Michalinos. 2007. Emotional Capital and Education: Theoretical Insights from Bourdieu. British Journal of Education Studies 55 (4): 443– 463.

8 Commentary: Action, Edgework, and the Situated Logics of Risk Stephen Lyng

The two chapters immediately preceding, authored by Matthew Bunn and Julie Shackelford, represent important contributions to our understanding of ‘non-ordinary’ risk-taking. Although it would appear that the two chapters deal with entirely different forms of individual risktaking—Bunn’s focus on the dangers of scaling cliffs and peaks in the sport of mountain climbing versus Shackelford’s examination of the risks to political protesters of victimisation by agents of repressive regimes— these two authors share a common interest in risk-taking that cannot be explained in terms of cost/benefit calculation. This common empirical focus is what I refer to as ‘non-ordinary’ risk-taking, for lack of a better term. The assertion that individuals most often make conscious decisions to take a risk when they perceive that the benefits of the action S. Lyng (B) Department of Sociology, Carthage College, Kenosha, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 ´ B. Switek et al. (eds.), Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83962-8_8

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outweigh the costs is regarded as a truism by most observers of human behaviour. Consequently, when we confront forms of volitional risktaking that seem to defy the cost/benefit calculus, for example in the recent growth of ‘extreme sports’ (represented by the sport of mountain climbing), high-risk criminal enterprises (with a high likelihood of apprehension and conviction), dangerous political and economic endeavours (where the risks taken rarely generate high rewards), we tend to view these risk-taking behaviours as ‘paradoxical’. Exploring the situational logics that govern such apparently paradoxical behaviour is a key goal of both of these chapters. In the present chapter, I respond to the efforts by these two authors to address issues relating to the situational logics of voluntary risk-taking and offer my own observations and recommendations for advancing this research stream. I will begin with a brief review of the key insights provided by each author. I then identify important common themes that link these two studies. At various points in the chapter, I also discuss some possibilities for building on the specific insights and common themes of the chapters in order to chart some new directions for futureresearch on voluntary risk-taking.

Edgeworker’s Habitus: Embodied Skills and Emotional Calluses Matthew Bunn’s (2016, 2017a, b) ongoing research initiative to analyse the relational risks of mountain climbing is distinctive within the field of risk research because it is informed by his intimate personal connection to the empirical domain he studies. As an experienced mountain climber himself, he has acquired special access to empirical evidence that is crucial for understanding the problem he has chosen to address— that is, discerning how risk management skills and resources, developed and transmitted in social interaction and coded in social structure, are inscribed and operationalised in performing bodies. While his work clearly belongs to the ethnographic tradition that serves as the unifying methodology of all the chapters in this volume, his data collection approach aligns more strongly with the ‘participant observation’ variant

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of ethnographic research. This methodological approach is crucial for understanding how he arrives at the central insights of his study: in seeking to explore the corporeal processes involved in conducting edgework in the spaces of ‘vertical terrain’, he had to immerse himself in the visceral and emotional circumstances that he shared with the subjects of his study. In doing so, he has achieved a form of embodied verstehen that is the source of his most important insights. In developing an embodied conceptualisation of edgework skills, Bunn relies on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical perspective, in particular Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Consisting of deep-rooted systems of bodily dispositions that are not immediately accessible to consciousness, habitus is shaped by the structural logics of specific ‘social fields’. One of Bunn’s most important achievements in applying the concepts of habitus and field to edgework practices, in considering ‘how habitus functions at the edge’, is to bring greater conceptual coherence to the analysis of distinctive edgework elements. By emphasising the improvisational characteristics of habitus, he captures one of the most important features of the edgework skill orientation—the value given to one’s capacity to ‘ad hoc’ a successful response to the challenge at hand (Lyng 1990, 875). While Bourdieu’s original conception of the connection between habitus and social field highlights the improvisational nature of all expressions of habitus, this quality is definitely accentuated in the acquisition and use of edgework skills. Bunn’s theoretical treatment of edgework skills in these terms and his empirical documentation of his theoretical claims represent an important refinement of our understanding of these skills. The additional strength of Bunn’s use of the habitus/field conceptualisation, however, can be found in how it connects the improvisational dimension of edgework skills to other defining features of the edgework experience. Although Bunn did not specifically mention these other elements, they are general empirical patterns that accord with Bourdieu’s conception of habitus. One such pattern is a belief embraced by participants in many different types of edgework that they possess a basic ‘survival capacity’ that is innate in nature (Lyng 1990, 859). This sense is clearly consistent with Bourdieu’s (2000, 159) description of the embodied dispositions of habitus as ‘a kind of infallible instinct’, traits

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that are perceived by edgeworkers as part of their genetic heritage. Similarly, the tendency of edgeworkers to regard their risk-taking experiences as ‘beyond words’ (Lyng 1990, 861) may be viewed as a consequence of the role habitus plays in generating these experiences. Practical strategies that are triggered through one’s actual engagement in edgework situations take form ‘without passing through consciousness and calculations’ (Bourdieu 2000, 177), which gives the experience an ineffable character. Thus, Bunn’s incorporation of the habitus/field construct into the edgework theory achieves a higher degree of theoretical parsimony than previous versions of this approach, since several of the defining elements of edgework are attributable, in part, to the nature of habitus. If Bunn’s research on mountain climbing adds depth to our understanding of edgework skills (while also bringing greater theoretical parsimony and coherence to the conceptual framework), his insights on the management of fear in edgework pursuits also expand the analysis of edgework sensations and emotions. Managing fear in high-risk situations is unquestionably a major practical challenge for edgeworkers and yet previous edgework studies have not moved significantly beyond general assertions about this process, such as the claim that paralyzing fear is ‘controlled’ or transformed into feelings of exhilaration and omnipotence (Lyng 1990, 860). However, the processes by which these emotional transformations are achieved have not been sufficiently described. Bunn addresses this omission by discussing a process he labels as ‘emotional callusing’. Consistent with his analysis of habitus at the edge, emotional callusing involves the acquisition of a particular set of dispositions towards fear—an aspect of one’s habitus that develops through a sustained engagement with the social and existential conditions of the mountain climbing enterprise. Confirming the findings of other researchers that have dispelled the myth of edgeworkers as fearless individuals, Bunn points out that emotional callusing does not result in the elimination of fear but rather creates a new way of experiencing it. Thus, fear is an ever-present emotion but climbers become ‘hardened’ to it through practice, which allows them to shift their attention to immediate challenges and formulate effective responses to the dangers at hand. As a consequence of this process, the extraordinary space of mountain

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terrain becomes accessible to climbers as ‘an ordinary place to be’ (Bunn, this volume). I will return to the idea of emotional callusing later in the chapter in examining the convergences between Bunn’s and Shackelford’s work. At this point, however, I will address several considerations arising in Bunn’s analysis that point to important areas of future research. The first of these issues involves the third major theme in Bunn’s study—the importance of social and cultural capital for establishing a space in which climbers can reflexively engage with the dispositions of habitus relating to climbing skills and emotions. Bunn’s attention to this problem follows from his decision to employ Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field in his analysis. Since Bourdieu conceives habitus as consisting of dispositions that are not immediately accessible to consciousness, it is necessary to explain how climbers make sense of their experiences in ways that sustain their commitment to the sport. For Bunn, in his broader project, an explanation of this problem is suggested by the demographic evidence on mountain climbers—the fact that most individuals involved in the sport are members of middle or higher classes (Bunn 2017b). Among the many consequences of the class origins of climbers, the most important one for Bunn is how class location impacts the process of interpreting their experience: only individuals possessing sufficient amounts of material resources and protected time and space for consciously processing, planning and training for their climbs can maintain a positive relationship with their edgework projects. In Bunn’s words, in this volume, the ordinary provides ‘the vertical … with logics of risk’. Thus, mountain climbing is dominated by middle and upper classes who possess sufficient economic, social, and cultural capital to move in and out of high-risk situations. With the discretionary time and safe spaces that these capital resources afford, they can socially construct their risk-taking experiences as reasonable and rewarding endeavors. This argument draws our attention to the diverse social milieus that make edgework an option available to particular individuals. In contrast to Bunn’s ongoing project, much of edgework research involves studies that have demonstrated the usefulness of the concept for understanding forms of volitional risk-taking more typical of the lower class individuals who lack (or reject) opportunities to engage in distanced reflection on

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their edgework experiences. For instance, one area of edgework research that has seen significant growth in recent decades is the study of street crime, a form of criminal activity clearly dominated by lower class individuals (Banks 2013; Landry 2013; Garot 2015; Hesketh 2019). Inspired by the work of Jack Katz on the emotional and sensual rewards of ‘stick-up’ and other kinds of street crime1 , this line of research deals with criminals who are deeply immersed in chaotic daily circumstances created by intersecting forms of risk-taking, including alcohol and other drug abuse, persistent gambling, illicit sexual encounters, and violent criminal actions. What distinguishes this lifestyle pattern are the creative ways in which street criminals combine different forms of risk-taking— such as embarking on criminal projects while high on drugs—and the opportunistic nature of their criminal enterprises. As Katz points out, the ultimate goal of these individuals is finding ways to ‘stay in the action’ at all times through the continuous pursuit of a wide range of edgework projects. Thus, what we find in the lifestyle pattern of the criminal ‘hardman’ is an approach to doing edgework that directly contradicts the pattern described by Bunn. As opposed to moving in and out of zones, criminal hardmen strive to maintain a state of chaos in their lives and the lives of anyone associated with them. And yet, they are no less capable of sustaining their commitment to doing edgework, to socially constructing their risk-taking experiences as rewarding and worthy endeavours. As Bunn points out, an especially important challenge in maintaining the commitment to a dangerous sport like mountain climbing is internalising a belief in one’s ability to control risks that, in strict probabilistic terms, are actually beyond anyone’s ability to control—what I have referred to elsewhere (Lyng 1990, 872) as a sense of ‘controlling the seemingly uncontrollable’. Again, Bunn proposes that this can be achieved when mountain climbers can establish distance from the immediate risk environment, which ‘allows for the careful construction of the risks … into something that … appears controllable’ (Bunn, this volume). However, the opposite is true for criminal edgeworkers. As Katz (1988, 219–220) states, the hardman ‘embraces rather than avoids or succumbs to chaos; the hardman seizes on chaos as a provocation to manifest transcendent powers of control’. Rather than distancing himself

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from the risk-taking situation, as a way to establish a sense of control, the hardman seeks to expand risks and immerse himself in the ensuing chaos in order to control it through the force of his will: he ‘brings on chaotic situations that then are transformed into courses of action that make selfrespecting sense through the imposition of the form and discipline of a stickup’ (Katz 1988, 225). The work of Katz and others involved in the phenomenological study of crime (Ferrell 1996; Garot, 2010) suggests an important consideration that bears on Bunn’s contribution to edgework research. If on one hand ‘climbing makes sense when a distance from urgency is present’ (Bunn, this volume) and, on the other, if a hardman seeks to create allencompassing chaos to establish a sense of control, then it is important to capture the modal diversity of engagement with edgework. After more than two decades of empirical research on edgework, it is clear that this concept has been useful for understanding volitional risk-taking across a wide range of social locations within existing gender, race, and class structures. Acknowledging this state of affairs in edgework studies leads us to an issue initially raised in Bunn’s analysis that now assumes greater significance in light of social group variations in edgework practices. If Bunn’s attention to Bourdieusian concepts strengthens edgework theory and we can accept that habitus is implicated in all varieties of edgework, then it will be important to determine how risk-takers differentially located within the prevailing structures of privilege make the ‘unthought categories’ of habitus meaningful in ways that support their continued dedication to these dangerous pursuits. This inquiry will define another dimension of the situational logics that shape the risk-taking behaviour of a wide range of edgeworkers. We have seen the dramatically different situational logics involved in the narrative constructions of the risk experience among Bunn’s mountain climbers and the street criminals studied by Katz. While Bunn’s climbers possess capital resources that allow them to move in and out of the high-risk environment of dangerous vertical spaces, which supports a strategy of ‘distanced’ construction of the risks they confront in the immediacy of a climb, Katz’s street criminals do not have access to such capital resources and must rely on a different strategy to maintain an identity and lifestyle devoted to extreme risk-taking. For the latter,

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finding a distanced, safe space for reflection and contemplation is not an option, so they ‘double down’ on risk: they strive to bring more risk and danger into their lives in order to create a ‘provocation to manifest transcendent powers of control’ (1988, 220). As we have seen, the narrative construction that sustains their commitment to criminal risktaking is not the persona of a reflective, highly prepared and trained athlete, but rather the unreflective hardman who always sticks up for himself and imposes ‘a disciplined control through the force of [his] personality’ (1988, 225). In the same way that mountain climbers and criminal hardmen employ very different situational logics for conducting edgework, we should expect other edgework groups confronting unique structural contingencies related to gender, race and class to adopt distinctive strategies (cf. Rajah 2007; Laurendea 2008; Newmahr 2011; Olstead 2011; Tsang 2018). These strategies should be an important focus of future edgework research. Having reviewed Matthew Bunn’s study of mountain climbers, I will now respond in the same way to Julie Shackelford’s research on risktaking in the Syrian war. Following this review, I will direct attention to several overlapping conceptual themes in these two chapters and offer some concluding thoughts about the significance of the two studies for our understanding of voluntary risk-taking.

Shifting Conceptions of Risk: Movement Mobilisation in the Syrian Conflict As I noted at the beginning of the chapter, the two papers included in this section diverge significantly in terms of empirical content. While Bunn’s research deals with a celebrated sport that offers opportunities for extreme risk-taking in the leisure domain, Shackelford’s study focuses on the management of risks in the ongoing conflict between political protesters and government authorities in a country descending into a state of humanitarian and political crisis. The two papers also seem to differ substantially in analytical content. Bunn’s study addresses analytical problems that are more typical of sociological research on the topic of volitional risk-taking, while Shackelford’s analysis would appear to align

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more closely with the principal concerns of social movements theory. The bulk of her study is devoted to answering the central analytical question posed by most social movement theorists, which is, ‘how do social movements emerge and thrive when the prevailing tendency of social and political systems is to reproduce existing social institutions and structures of power and privilege?’ What is distinctive about Shackelford’s answer to this question in regard to the Syrian conflict is her decision to frame the problem in terms of the risk management strategies of protesters. Consequently, her analysis has more in common with Bunn’s study than is initially apparent. Relying on evidence drawn from her case studies of protest activities in several Syrian cities, Shackelford provides the details of a story of expanding resistance to the authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad among factions of the Syrian population. Like many collective actions, this movement developed as a seemingly unlikely consequence of a series of unexpected events, in particular, the rise of graffiti writing and social media as forms of resistance to the regime. Shackelford’s analytical goal is to demonstrate the opportunistic and creative ways that Syrian protesters managed to sustain their collective project, even when this project poses significant dangers to them. To achieve this goal, she devotes primary attention to ‘the shifting dynamics of risk’. As Shackelford points out, protestors faced unexpected challenges that forced them to be flexible in how they managed the dangers of the conflict. The empirical evidence reveals that the initial problem of breaking down ‘the barrier of fear’ was not enough in itself to keep the movement alive. It was also necessary to establish creative responses to the regime’s use of its extensive social control powers to undermine resources that protesters employed in the struggle. Thus, when security agents established an overwhelming presence in several mosques that served as initial staging areas for protest, activists had to create a new space in which to share information and construct a narrative of opposition. They did so by employing the virtual space created by social media as a domain for organising resistance to the regime, which allowed activists to mobilise people and resources to keep the movement growing. Similarly, when agents of the regime began infiltrating Facebook in order to identify protesters and make them ‘disappear’, activists

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responded with a new set of tactics and an alternative risk logic. Shackelford’s careful documentation of the various shifts in strategy and their paradoxical outcomes is effective in demonstrating the situated nature of emerging risk logics. Examining the role played by social media in the resistance campaign by Syrian protestors is an important contribution to our understanding of the complex interchange between protestors and authorities over the tactics employed by both sides. However, what I find most intriguing about Shackelford’s study is evidence from her research that relates to a different problem, one that is more directly relevant to the study of voluntary risk-taking. This evidence allows us to address an aspect of movement development rarely examined in social movement research— the fact that no organised protest actions are possible unless participants are able to transcend their initial fears of punishment by the regime’s social control apparatus. As both protesters and government officials fully understand, the most effective deterrent to political unrest is the threat of an overwhelming retaliatory response by the government in the form of widespread incarceration or violent repression of protesters. Consequently, a necessary condition of any protest action is the mobilisation of social-psychological resources for overcoming fear; or, in Shackelford’s words, ‘shattering of the barrier of fear’. Shackelford describes how the movement was sparked by the behaviour of a group of adolescent males. Their decision to engage in anti-regime graffiti writing on the walls of public buildings led to a series of actions and reactions between citizens and authorities that ultimately inspired the protest movement. While Shackelford offers a powerful analysis of the role of graffiti in fueling the movement, here I offer additional insights that can be derived from the evidence she presents in relation to the origin of the uprising. Consequently, I devote the rest of my commentary to discussing a complementary way to theoretically frame Shackelford’s empirical data on graffiti writers, an approach that reveals how the actions of the young graffiti writers produced crucial social-psychological resources for transcending the emotional barriers to movement participation. My analysis relies on Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘action’, which is explicated in his famous essay ‘Where the Action Is’ (1967). Goffman’s

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goal in introducing this concept and the related analytical framework was to provide a theoretical explanation of voluntary risk-taking. Defined as behaviour that is problematic (i.e. leading to uncertain outcomes), consequential and undertaken for what is felt to be its own sake (1967, 185), ‘action’ may initially appear to have little to do with the risk-taking involved in political protest since protesters take risks with specific goals in mind, in contrast to ‘risk taking for its own sake’. However, Shackelford’s data clearly show that the action of the adolescent graffiti writers was an important causal factor in the birth of the movement, which is reflected in their honorific designation as ‘icons of the revolution’. Thus, it is necessary to look more deeply into the complex dynamics of movement development and consider how action may be a part of the risk calculus that helps sustain protesters’ commitment to the movement. To fully appreciate the relevance of Goffman’s action framework for Shackelford’s case study, it is necessary to consider further details of the argument Goffman develops in his essay. One of the central pillars of his analytical framework is the connection between action and his unique conceptualisation of ‘character’. In Goffman’s usage, the term ‘character’ refers to a range of personal qualities displayed in fateful endeavours, the most obvious of which is the demonstration of courage—the capacity to proceed with a dangerous course of action even when one is fully aware of the dangers one confronts. The expression of courage is usually specific to the action undertaken, as when gamblers gracefully submit to the rules of a game even when they have much to lose (the quality of ‘gamble’) or when boxers demonstrate ‘gameness’ or ‘heart’ by giving their all to the fight in the face of almost certain defeat. Goffman also identifies more subtle personal traits exhibited in fateful situations, which he captures with terms like ‘integrity’, ‘gallantry’ and ‘composure’ (1967, 214–239). This conceptualisation of character is the key to Goffman’s distinctively sociological explanation of ‘risk taking for its own sake’. Rejecting the commonsense view of voluntary risk-taking as motivated by impulsiveness, irrationality, idiosyncratic personality characteristics, or other individual-level factors, Goffman emphasises sociological motives, asserting that the pursuit of action is when individuals demonstrate most clearly ‘what they are made of ’ (1967, 237): ‘It is during momentsof action that the individual has the risk and opportunity of displaying to

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himself and sometimes to others his style of conduct when the chips are down’. Thus, the quest for action is part of a social process involving the (re)creation of the self in character displays. In contrast to the commonsense conception of character as an intrinsic quality of an individual’s personality, we can now see it as a product of interaction—an attribute that is imputed to an individual by the social audience. In addition, character (and the action activities in which it is displayed) possesses a broader social value: Social organization everywhere has the problem of morale and continuity. Individuals must come to all their little situations with some enthusiasm and concern, for it is largely through such moments that social life occurs, and if a fresh effort were not put into each of them, society would surely suffer. … [I]f society is to persist, the same pattern must be sustained from one actual social occasion to the next. Here the need is for rules and conventionality. … Possibilities regarding character encourage us to renew our efforts at every moment of society’s activity we approach, especially its social ones; and it is precisely through these renewals that the old routines can be sustained. We are allowed to think there is something to be won in the moments we face so that society can face moments and defeat them. (1967, 238–239).

Thus, action offers an opportunity to reward strong character, i.e. personal traits that ensure people’s willingness to ‘renew [their] efforts at every moment of society’s activity’. In short, action-seekers model the qualities that all societal members must exhibit to some degree if the existing social order is to persist. It may not be immediately clear how this analysis relates to social movement development since Goffman’s goal here is to demonstrate how the action–character nexus helps to satisfy ‘the need for rules and conventionality’ thereby contributing to the maintenance of order in society. In shifting the analytical focus from a micro-level emphasis on the social construction of self in character displays to the macro-level concern with the societal requisites like ‘pattern maintenance’, Goffman takes a decidedly functionalist turn in his analysis. However, the fundamental issue he addresses in this analysis applies not only to pattern maintenance in existing social institutions, but also to the continuation and development

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of loosely organised collectivities that challenge the established order. This is the problem of sustaining ‘morale and continuity … enthusiasm and concern’ in the face of the existential uncertainties that permeate all human experience. Goffman’s awareness of this problem sets him apart from most other social theorists who have addressed the central sociological issue of order. Although he did not extend this insight to the study of collective behaviour and social movements, it is clear that developing a sensitivity to the emotional challenges of existential uncertainty is important for a thorough understanding of the kind of protest group actions that Shackelford examines in her study. Returning to the incident in Dera’a that sparked the protest movement, the action framework offers a nuanced interpretation of this event, allowing us to see why the actions of a group of adolescent graffiti writers, which would likely be regarded as inconsequential in any other context, would loom so large in the emergence and persistence of the movement; and, more importantly, why these boys would eventually be seen as the ‘icons of the revolution’. As Shackelford points out, the key significance of this event and the subsequent response of the government was that it ‘shattered the barrier of fear’—it generated emotional resources for dealing with the uncertainties that protesters faced. Like other action-seekers, the graffiti writers seemed to lack any clear goals that would justify their involvement in such a risky endeavour. As Shackelford reports, they described their own behaviour as ‘something silly’, ‘just playing around’ or ‘having fun’. In contrast to their own interpretations of their motivations, however, more distant observers (Goffman’s ‘audience’) saw evidence of courage, integrity and composure in their behaviour—elements of the strong character that anyone facing the uncertainties of a dangerous enterprise must access in order to maintain their involvement. Thus, the graffiti writers’ status as ‘icons of the revolution’ did not reflect any intrinsic qualities that they may have possessed; rather, it was an imputed designation that reflected the need by an audience of protesters for an inspiring model of strong character in the face of uncertainty. As the preceding analysis reveals, the behaviour of the young graffiti writers supplied much-needed emotional resources for overcoming fear of uncertainty among those who joined the protest. However, other

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unexpected challenges would force protesters to be flexible in how they managed the dangers of the conflict. The initial problem of breaking down the barrier of fear was not enough in itself to keep the movement alive. It was also necessary to establish creative responses to the regime’s use of its extensive social control powers to undermine resources that protesters employed in the struggle. Herein lies the significance of Shackelford’s focus on ‘the shifting dynamics of risk’.

Conclusions: Staying Alive in the Shadows of Blue Mountain Peaks and Urban War Zones The two studies included in this section could not be more dissimilar on one level: it is quite a distance from the pure air and expansive horizon of a mountain summit to the smoke-filled streets and bloody carnage of a bombed-out city. And yet, the individual research subjects occupying these very different environments share some common challenges and respond to these challenges in very similar ways. First, we can see that Bunn’s mountain climbers and Shackelford’s urban protesters ultimately confront a common problem as individuals involved in very dangerous enterprises: that is, they must develop the capability in their social actions and communications to convince themselves and their fellow risk-takers that their high-risk projects are reasonable and worthy undertakings. This involves finding ways to establish a sense of confidence in their ability to acquire and use requisite skills, a belief in their ability to control risks that may actually be uncontrollable, and the personal strength of character required to manage their fear in the face of extreme danger. Both authors succeeded in describing the unique ways that their subjects addressed these challenges. A second common theme in the two chapters relates specifically to the aforementioned problem of skill acquisition and use. Although the skills and strategies employed by mountain climbers and protesters are fundamentally different, both groups share an improvisational disposition towards these skills. In both cases, participants approach practical problems in their respective danger zones with a general skill orientation acquired through their interactions with colleagues, but their

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success in managing risks ultimately depends on the ability to adjust their responses to the situational contingencies of the moment. Thus, the need to improvise or ‘ad hoc’ solutions to problems in both of these high-risk endeavours reflects ‘the situated nature of risk and its contextual embedding’ (Boholm 2015, 11). Consequently, whether one’s risk-taking project consists of ‘crack climbing’ in the thin air of vertical terrain or organising street demonstrations on Facebook in the Syrian police state, one must acquire the capacity to employ shifting strategies, tactics and modes of engagement. A third theme emerging in both chapters relates to the obvious importance of managing fear in the dangerous circumstances described by these two authors. Bunn’s term ‘emotional callusing’ seems appropriate for both cases and refers to a key resource for meeting a central challenge in all risk-taking projects—the problem of sustaining one’s commitment to the project. The extraordinary space of a mountain ‘death zone’ can be treated as an ordinary place for human beings to occupy (Krakauer 1999) only if climbers find ways to control their rationally based fears of entering this space. As we have seen, the same general point applies to protest movements: they cannot be sustained in the face of overwhelming repression by the regime unless protesters can overcome their fears of death, serious injury or imprisonment. What is achieved by these two chapters is another illustration of situated logics that can be employed for meeting this challenge—the development of an alternative embodiment of fear in the case of Bunn’s climbers and the vicarious consumption of ‘character’ by Shackelford’s protesters. Both of these studies flesh out in rich ethnographic detail the organising concept of this volume—the notion of the ordinary extraordinary. In an age when the collective efforts of human actors to manage uncertainty have been colonised by rational models of reality and the interventions of scientific and managerial experts, it is not surprising that lifeworld practices involved in interpreting and dealing with uncertainty and danger are often pathologised or devalued. However, as Bunn’s and Shackelford’s research reveals, ‘ordinary’ people are capable of creating extensive collective resources for managing ‘extraordinary’ environments, allowing ordinary people to explore zones of risk and danger in search of extraordinary ways to reconstruct themselves and their humanity.

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Note 1. Katz’s work on crime predated the introduction of the edgework concept and he chose to use Erving Goffman’s notion of ‘action’ in his analytical framework. However, subsequent research inspired by Katz’s theory of crime has relied more heavily on the edgework concept (see Garot 2010).

References Banks, James. 2013. Edging Your Bets: Advantage Play, Gambling, Crime, and Victimization. Crime, Media, Culture 9 (2): 171–187. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Boholm, Asa. 2015. Anthropology and Risk. London: Routledge. Bunn, Matthew. 2016. Habitus and Disposition in High-Risk Mountain Climbing. Body and Society 22 (1): 92–114. ———. 2017a. A Disposition of Risk: Climbing Practice, Reflexive Modernity and the Habitus. Journal of Sociology 53 (1): 3–17. ———. 2017b. Defining the Edge: Choice, Mastery and Necessity in Edgework Practice. Sport in Society Online First: 1–14. Ferrell, Jeff. 1996. Crimes of Style. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Garot, Robert. 2010. Who You Claim. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2015. Gang-Banging as Edgework. Dialectical Anthropology 39 (2): 151–163. Goffman, Erving. 1967. Where the Action Is. In Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Hesketh, Robert Francis. 2019. Joining Gangs: Living on the Edge? Journal of Criminological Research, Policy and Practice 5 (4): 280–294. Katz, Jack. 1988. The Seductions of Crime. New York: Basic Books Inc. Krakauer, Jon. 1999. Into Thin Air. New York: Anchor Books. Landry, Deborah. 2013. Are We Human? Edgework in Defiance of the Mundane and Measurable. Critical Criminology 21 (1): 1–14.

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Laurendea, Jason. 2008. Gendered Risk Regimes: A Theoretical Consideration of Edgework and Gender. Sociology of Sport Journal 25 (3): 293–309. Lyng, Stephen. 1990. Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking. American Journal of Sociology 95 (4): 851–886. Newmahr, Staci. 2011. Chaos, Order, and Collaboration: Toward a Feminist Conceptualization of Edgework. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40 (6): 678–708. Olstead, Riley. 2011. Gender, Space and Fear: A Study of Women’s Edgework. Emotion, Space and Society 4 (2): 86–94. Rajah, Valli. 2007. Resistance as Edgework in Violent Intimate Relationships of Drug Involved Women. British Journal of Criminology 47: 196–213. Tsang, Eileen Yuk-ha. 2018. Selling Sex as Edgework: Risk Taking and Thrills in China’s Commercial Sex Industry. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 63 (8): 1306–1329.

Part III Environmental Threat and Cultural Possibility: Risk and the Contemporary City

9 ‘Asılmak Tehlikeli Ve Yasaktır’: Unintelligible Mobility and Uncertain Manhood in Istanbul’s Old City Janine Su

No sooner had I spoken the words ‘my little friend’ than did Kaan (a pseudonym) correct me: ‘I used to be your little friend. Now that I finished my askerlik (military service) I’m your big friend’. Kaan equates manhood with respect, and is therefore eager to assume the mantle, blaming youth (gençlik) for his lack of autonomy over his ‘masculine trajectory’ (Ghannam 2013). By appropriating the successful completion of his military service—a rite of passage commonly believed to instil the

The tableau of children hitching a free ride down the high street of Istanbul’s contemporary city centre on the backs of ‘nostalgic’ red trolley cars is iconic among Istanbulites. In reaction, the transportation authority stencils the warning Asılmak tehlikeli ve yasaktır (Hanging on is hazardous and prohibited) onto the cars, but it is a feeble deterrent. The relationship between ‘hanging on’ and ‘hazards’ up to and including legal sanction makes a compelling metaphor for the topic at hand.

J. Su (B) Department of Anthropology, University College London, London, UK

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 ´ B. Switek et al. (eds.), Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83962-8_9

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necessary qualities of manhood (Sinclair-Webb 2000)—he attempts to manipulate the category of ‘man’ to his benefit: I was always a real man [emphasis verbalized]. The difference between a boy and a man is responsibilities, so I didn’t have a childhood. I was always trying to be older than my age, and sometimes this caused problems in my life. I’m an impatient person. Actually, the best thing I learned in the army was patience. You’re waiting all the time. You have no choice. I learned that time goes by very fast so we shouldn’t waste it, am I right?

That Kaan tries to project his self-image onto the ‘consensus definition’ (Parsons 1991/1951) of manhood is a source of dissonance with others in the touristic district of Sultanahmet, where he has been based since his arrival in Istanbul. Opinions vary about the twentytwo-year old. Some are disposed towards brotherly advice, thinking him merely immature, while others dismiss him with epithets like ¸serefsiz (lit. ‘without honour’). All agree he makes rash decisions and often ends up burning his bridges around the neighbourhood. Although Kaan is currently unemployed, he is selective about the type of work he is willing to accept, and most opportunities within his reach are too peripheral and thankless for his tastes. Tourism-related jobs in Sultanahmet, on the other hand, feel more compatible with the life of travel and adventure he has envisioned for himself. Strict visa regulations limit Turkish citizens’ international freedom of movement, however, which for the informants of this study is an obstacle with trajectory-shaping power. Kaan’s stated goal is to become ‘a citizen of the European Union’, onto which citizenship he has grafted his ideals of freedom of movement and cosmopolitanism. This would make a literal European passport his figurative passport as well, to a life in which he can be a man on his own terms rather than those dictated by normative sociability. At the time of our conversation, he has two serious girlfriends who are natives of EU countries, both of whom he met when they visited Turkey as tourists and one of whom he now lives with,1 while with the other he maintains their years-long relationship mostly long distance. He also keeps in touch with various other foreign women he has befriended or had flings with over the years, some of whom have come to see him

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again—even since he and his Istanbul-based girlfriend moved in together. On one such occasion, he told her he was going to visit his mother in his home town (a few hours outside Istanbul by bus) but actually remained in the city, staying with the visiting woman in her accommodation. Even without a job, Kaan has a sum equivalent to several months’ wages in the bank. Perhaps conflicted, he deflected my enquiries about where the money had come from for months before eventually admitting that his long-distance girlfriend had wired it as part of a plan for him to join her. But Kaan has a deportation on his record stemming from an earlier incident and is not confident about his chances of being issued a visa, so instead of putting this money towards application and attorney’s fees, he has been using it to pay his share of the rent, as well as the two or three mobile phones he juggles to prevent various girlfriends and associates from finding out about one another. Having exhausted other options in previous attempts to leave Turkey, he believes marriage to be his only remaining route across international borders. He describes his actions as ‘pragmatic’ and received the label ‘opportunist’ without offence when I asked whether he thought it applied to him. The profile above is one of many collected over eighteen months of fieldwork spent primarily in Sultanahmet, but which included comparative fieldwork at other touristic sites in Turkey, as well as visits to informants’ home towns and to countries they moved to. The ethnographic ‘community’2 is made up of (usually) young men who might be identifiable to outsiders as ‘those guys who hassle tourists in Turkey’, since they are often seen approaching foreigners in the effort to socialize with them and/or sell them something (the line here is blurred). Many have ulterior motives up to and including eventually persuading women to marry them and sponsor their visa applications across international borders.3 But, as I will show over the course of the chapter, what drives their ‘pragmatic opportunism’ is not necessarily what observers expect. The expectation can be summed up in the words of a British interviewee for a television documentary titled ‘Our Turkish Toyboys’: They want money, sex, both. Does it go together? Does one bring the other? I think that’s what they think. They want a visa to a country where they think they’re going to get a better life. They come from the

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outbacks to a resort town because they know there’s money and sex freely available.4

The nebulous notion of ‘a better life’, as she phrased it, is a source of confusion because it absorbs all manner of projections by foreign visitors (and also by Istanbul residents of more distinguished socio-economic backgrounds), whose voices reach a wider audience of friends, family, social media followers, or television viewers abroad. These interpretations tend to be very much on-script Third Worldist and/or Orientalist tropes of poverty, desperation, and sexual repression (usually assigned to Islam). From their own subject positions, however, it might be more accurate to say that my informants are less interested in a better life than a different life, one built on the rather modernistic premise of selfcultivation (Sancar 2009; Hart 2011; Ozyegin 2015; see also Giddens 1991; Moore 2011). Most report having felt socially constrained by the normative conventions of manhood as modelled in their home towns and villages so, eager to broaden their ‘imaginative horizons’ (Crapanzano 2004), they left those homes behind, deploying ‘mobility’ as a strategy of personal autonomy. What I intend to show is that, while my informants channel their individual desires through social logics of mobility that have a deep history in Turkey, the loss of those logics within and indeed due to ‘modernity’ has rendered their subjectivities unintelligible to contemporary social discourse, which insists instead on these young men’s ordinariness. This very unintelligibility generates the uncertainty that is characteristic of their extraordinary masculine trajectories, but they are willing and even eager to engage with that uncertainty as a means of enacting their subjectivities in the face of that normative unintelligibility. This chapter’s demonstration of how uncertainty may be embraced as a means of selfdetermination (see also Williams and Baláž 2012) thus contrasts studies that explore migration risks and uncertainties as unwelcome corollaries of movement (e.g. Agustín 2007; Koser 2008), and shows how the performative skill required to negotiate the uncertainties related to moving in and out of the ordinary becomes a social value in itself.

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The present discussion explores the performative in my informants’ efforts to actualize their mobile subjectivities with respect to the precarious nature of manhood in Turkey. Their proactive engagement with the associated uncertainties and moral ambiguities recall the notion of ‘good risk’ (Douglas 1992), which ‘requires more than a positive assessment of its costs and benefits’, and has ‘consequences for individuals and communities’ (Carling and Schewel 2018: 1) whether or not they achieve socio-spatial mobility. Thomas Malaby (2003) pursued this line of reasoning in his ethnography of gambling in Crete, noting the insufficiency of a risk vs. reward calculation model in capturing his informants’ approach to life. Charles Piot (2010) also employed the notion of ‘gambling futures’ in discussion of his Togolese informants’ engagement with the apparatus of the US Greencard lottery. Similarly, my informants may be described as ‘gambling’ manhood-full-stop (as recognized by their communities and achievable by conforming to gender conventions) in favour of manhood-on-their-own-terms (seen as achievable outside the socio-spatial context of Turkey). ‘Hassling’ tourists, then, could be described from a functionalist perspective as the practice of curating one’s own networks of mobility towards this ambition. Performative skill and luck affect claims to manhood in this context, marking out what Michael Herzfeld famously described as the distinction between ‘being a good man’ and ‘being good at being a man’ (1985: 16, emphasis in original). In Sultanahmet, visiting foreign women become implicated in, yet are ancillary to, these young men’s aspirations. The central object of desire is instead, per their descriptions, ‘freedom’, which they largely interpret through freedom of movement. Mobility, as a result, becomes both means and end. This is a configuration found in Deleuze and Guattari (1987/1980), who developed the central figure of their ‘Treatise on Nomadology’ through a lack of moral absolutes, mobility being the source of its own morality.5 That is not to say, however, that my informants have no perspective on the moral ambiguities that mark their actions—we saw this in Kaan’s difficulty acknowledging that one of his foreign girlfriends had gifted him thousands of euros, and that he was not using the money as agreed. Moreover, as these young men are in the paradoxical position of being hyper-visible to the international public due to Sultanahmet’s popularity

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with tourists, while being decidedly peripheral in the domestic sociopolitical space, they also know their actions contribute to Turkish men’s bad reputation abroad. Indeed, they themselves refer disparagingly to the phenomenon of the so-called ‘Sultanahmet boy’, although few use the term to describe themselves. In the analysis that follows, I begin by drawing a distinction between the categories of ‘mobility’ and ‘migration’ for the Turkish case. This is in order to help isolate my informants as an ethnographic ‘community’, such as it is, relative to the actors who populate the expansive literature on Turkish migration. I argue for this distinction through the indigenous terms sıla, gurbet , and garip, which shape socio-spatial meanings of ‘home’ and feelings about absence from it. These concepts continue to resonate today, although they were superseded under the universalizing aegis of the ‘modern’ in the late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century transition from empire to nation-state.6 They now inform social life at the level of what Besim Can Zırh (2017) has characterized as the cultural geographies under national cartographies, which set the conceptual parameters for ‘migrant’ and thereby also make visible iterations of movement that are not migration. This chapter indexes one of these, and its historical antecedents, under the rubric of ‘mobility’. The second major theme is ‘manhood’—specifically ‘masculine trajectories’, a term used by Farha Ghannam to ‘[depart] from the “life cycle” concept, which assumes a fixed and repetitive socialization of individuals into clearly defined roles that support existing social structures’ (2013: 6–7). I argue that the logic behind mobility, as opposed to migration, directs my informants’ trajectories outside the limits of the ordinary towards what I term ‘manhood-via-mobility’. This differs from ‘migration-as-rite-of-passage’ (e.g. Osella and Osella 2000; Monsutti 2007; Mondain and Diagne 2013) in that the challenges faced according to the latter model are nevertheless institutionalized within ‘cultures of migration’ (e.g. Cohen and Sirkeci 2011), and are directed towards ‘channelling’ (Neyzi 2001) men back into the normative life cycle. In contrast, my informants operationalize mobility as a strategy to achieve manhood on their own terms. As a result, they are exposed without mitigation to the hazards of ‘the outside’ (dı¸sarı): none of the usual networks of support associated with migration are in place, and they do not even

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choose their destinations when they marry foreign women and follow them home, much less join an extant diaspora abroad. This networklessness is a source of uncertainty along their masculine trajectories and positions them as garip (both ‘strange’ and ‘stranger’). Yet, rather than acquiescing to their marginality or indeed making a virtue of it (Day et al. 1999), these young men seek access to the centre. As will be elaborated, my informants view themselves as part of the globalized landscape (Appadurai 1996; Ong 1999) while Istanbul’s urbanites view them with disdain as peasants, including all attendant stereotypes of ignorance and insularity. This slippage helps to explain why they gravitate to the imperial capital district of Sultanahmet, which is located simultaneously in the geographical (though notably not the socio-political) heart of Istanbul and at the global frontier by way of mass tourism, and which is typically avoided by Istanbulites. As will be explored later in the chapter, Sultanahmet’s own historical peculiarities also associate it with transience and placelessness, sparking a synergistic relationship between (strange) people and (non-)place. In a secondary argument, I also highlight the particular capacity of anthropology to identify otherwise unintelligible—where ‘intelligibility’ is defined as ‘readability in social space and time’ (Butler 2009: 10–11)—social structures, and to locate individual subjectivities along their contours.

Mobility and Migration: A Turkish Case Migration has been Istanbul’s defining demographic trend since the midtwentieth century, when a series of economic transformations (later also political developments) brought successive waves of migrants to Turkey’s major cities, mostly from the Anatolian countryside. Istanbul in particular has received such a volume of migrants that today only a small minority of residents can claim roots in the city prior to 1960. Settlement patterns reflect the persistence of what Sema Erder calls ‘relations of localism’ (1999: 166), such that many urban neighbourhoods function as satellites of towns and villages across the country. The persistence of home town attachments in the migration context can be illuminated through ‘the dichotomous terms gurbet and sıla

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[which] are popularly employed to portray socio-spatial dimensions of migration’ (Zırh 2012: 1760). Sıla circumscribes the meanings of ‘home’ as both a physical and relational place of communality, nurturing, and sanctuary. Gurbet most closely translates as ‘exile’ (Said 2000/1984) and signifies any place outside sıla. Like sıla, gurbet is both a place and an experiential assignation, described by Carol Delaney as an ‘unenviable condition’ (1991: 271) and characterized by a melancholic nostalgia for the past as a faraway place. In the collective socio-spatial imaginary, then, no one in their right mind would depart the embrace of sıla voluntarily, and ‘the journey towards gurbet [is] never thought of as being one way’ (Zırh 2012: 1760). The state of not being in one’s ‘right mind’ thereby informs the concept of mobility. This connection is embedded, for example, in the term delikanlı (crazy-blooded/one with crazy blood), which both demarcates a period and suggests a style of youth characterized by exploration, experimentation, and movement: Turkish society [acknowledges] a stage of potentially unruly behavior, particularly among young men, who are referred to as delikanlı... Single young men tended to circulate in Ottoman society as seasonal workers, apprentices, and students. Unlike householders, single young men (like roaming nomads) were viewed as a potential threat to organized society. Young men formed the backbone of revolts that broke out in Anatolia from the sixteenth century. Similarly, the prototypical bandit in Ottoman society was a young male. (Neyzi 2001: 415; see also Kandiyoti 1994)

In the Ottoman era, terms that linked movement to insanity proliferated; many of these, like deliba¸s (crazy head), ba¸sıbozuk (damaged head), and garip yi˘git (see below), originated as designations for irregular and/or mercenary forces before spreading into colloquial usage. Upon being decommissioned, these militia tended not to return to the peasantry, instead cutting ties to land and comprising the storied bandit cohorts of the Balkans and Anatolia. The cycles of war and peace could see a deterritorialized ex-peasant swapping allegiances for and against the state several times in a career: so it was in the state’s best interest to approach relations pragmatically (Barkey 1994). A few bandits even reached the

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highest levels of influence in the Ottoman state; indeed, ‘the concept of banditry itself is a product of statism’ (Herzfeld 1985: 29). In other words, spatial and social mobility were formally linked and could be exploited to transect the boundary between periphery and centre. Garip yi˘git in particular illuminates the condition of exposure to ‘the outside’, as well as the distinctiveness of my informants’ orientation towards it. Garip means ‘strange’ in both the senses of being ‘odd’ and of being a ‘stranger in a strange land’. Like gurbet , with which it shares an etymological root,7 this is negatively connoted—the lyrics of classic Turkish songs like Bir Garip Yolcu (A Strange Traveller) feature protagonists complaining self-pityingly of the hopelessness, emptiness, and disorientation of lives spent on the road. When paired with yi˘git (courageous, valiant/hero), on the other hand, the compound term connotes facing the perceived ills of ‘strangerhood’ with a certain swagger. Yet, in the era of national borders and the institutional mediation of movement, this sort of swashbuckling orientation among young people from peripheral backgrounds has no intelligible corollary. Selfgenerated impulses towards mobility for personal enrichment or pleasure have become conceived of as the domain of privileged classes. Others are understood as migrants, glossed as the culturally insular masses moving only in reluctant response to economic or political imperatives, and existing at the societal margins in a form of ‘exile’ (gurbet ). Indeed, the settlement patterns of migrants to Istanbul described at the beginning of this section seem to support this, suggesting a preoccupation with reproducing sıla in gurbet . In contrast, this chapter focuses on contemporary Turkey’s single young men from modest backgrounds who choose to roam the landscape outside their sıla in an effort to parlay cleverness and performative excellence (Herzfeld 1985) into lifestyles that socially and spatially exceed the usual limits associated with their peripheral origins. I label this ‘mobility’ and define an ethnographic community through it even though, with current paradigms of movement accommodating no middle ground or third way between ‘exile’ and ‘expat’, my informants find themselves lumped in with the deluge of migrants absorbed by Istanbul in recent decades. Framed according to Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad-sedentary model, though, mobility and migration differ fundamentally in that

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migrants are also ‘the sedentary’, only dis-placed (1987/1980: 380–387; see also Malkki 1992). In the next section, I approach these differences ethnographically, then proceed to explore how the peculiarities of Sultanahmet as a space make it a fitting host for the unintelligible.

Unintelligible Mobility My informants, as contemporary garip yi˘git ‘nomads’, are fixed on personal autonomy and determined not to be ‘channeled along tracks acceptable to adult society’ (Neyzi 2001: 415). This is made possible in the short term with transgression of the boundaries of sıla and its normative gaze. Generally speaking, the idea of single young men leaving home and exposing themselves to the vagaries of the world at large remains institutionalized today through delikanlı, which is consistent with the migration-as-rite-of-passage model. What is thereby overlooked by loved ones remaining in sıla is the possibility of non-return, so in the longer term, those in pursuit of manhood-via-mobility must negotiate new boundaries. Nevertheless, my informants would tell me that even as youngsters, they could not envision themselves living the lives that had been modelled for them. For example, they complained about the insular attitudes of those they grew up around, whom they found gallingly non-curious about the world. Small-town trappings including boredom, gossip, and antagonistic inter-personal jealousies were also frequently reported as contributing to a sense of claustrophobia that pushed them outwards (see also Schielke 2015 on the case of Egypt). Most vividly expressed, though, was an aversion to the limitations imposed by the ‘three moral imperatives’ of manhood around the Mediterranean: ‘first, impregnating one’s wife; second, provisioning dependents; third, protecting the family’ (Gilmore 1990: 48). In the words of an informant who was still unmarried at age thirty-three, ‘You know why I don’t want to marry a Turkish girl or Kurdish girl [read: a woman from Turkey]? Because if [even] one day I don’t bring home bread then I’m not a man’. Sentiments favouring non-normative models of manhood and marriage were sometimes expressed through the vocabulary of reflexive

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modern selfhood (Beck 1992/1986; Giddens 1991): ‘I can’t find a woman who understands me’, one informant complained to explain why he had decided to distance himself from the home community as he saw his siblings and cousins start to get married and understood his turn was coming (see also Beck 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995/1990). Turkey’s neoliberal transformation has also influenced an increasing culture of ‘individualization’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002) that has ‘created alternative notions of self and new social ties’ (Ozyegin 2015: 25) among those who have come of age since 1980. In this case, the sociospatial distance that my informant put between himself and conventional social institutions brought with it a set of opportunities and risks that mirror those associated with manhood-via-mobility relative to migrationas-rite-of-passage. It may also be tempting to assign such complaints to ‘the usual’ adolescent angst, and that does play a role; indeed, it is often the imperatives of ‘crazy blood’ (per the reference above to delikanlı) that kickstart journeys of personal discovery. Still, as Mary Douglas put it, ‘individuals transfer their decision-making to the institutions in which they live’ (1992: 78), so if migration-as-rite-of-passage is not the explanatory institution, what is? Here anthropology distinguishes itself among social science disciplines. Without ‘thinking about culture in a way that draws the social environment systematically into the picture of individual choices’ (Douglas 1992: xi; see also Caplan 2000;Douglas and Wildavsky 1983; Lupton 2013/1999; Olofsson and Zinn 2019)—here, without considering these young men’s positionality relative to categories like sıla, gurbet , and garip—this aggregate of young men might exist only as some errant ‘exceptions’ to the rule. This is opposed to being representative of another rule with its own structurally codified, if out-of-the-ordinary, trajectories that push outwards at the socio-spatial edges of normative masculinity. The upshot is that my informants are peripheralized alongside migrants in domestic discourse for their unintelligibility. Even within the context of this study, the distinctiveness of their trajectories was initially recorded only in their own assertions, and then corroborated with the identification of ‘mobility’ through a semiotic investigation of indigenous concepts relating to place and movement. This approach ‘rejects the artificial distinction between symbolic discourse and objective data,

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and instead treats the ethnographic text—which is no less empirical as a result—as a construction resulting from the fusion of the ethnographer’s conceptual framework with that of local informants (Herzfeld 1985: 46; see also Herzfeld 1983). As a means of addressing unintelligibility, on the one hand, it is fair to acknowledge there are no sociologically quantifiable markers that differentiate these young men from Istanbul’s majority migrant population: on the other, what becomes tricky about methods that lean heavily on demographic data is that the nature of ‘the masses’ in particular tends to be taken as a known quantity, an unintended violence that precludes the extraordinary. What, then, does this relationship between subjectivity and structure add to the above portrayal of my informants’ desire to exceed the limitations of normative manhood? We can say I’m in gurbet because I left the village but I don’t feel so. Usually in gurbet people are missing their homes and always dream of going back. (Informant from Gaziantep, in southeastern Turkey; living in Istanbul at the time of interview) Do I feel in gurbet ?... For me gurbet is missing your city and... foods and blah blah. I was never a fan of my own traditional things. I don’t mean I never liked these things, I just don’t feel that way. (Informant from Balıkesir, in northwestern Turkey; living abroad at the time of interview)

Here, two young men hailing from divergent parts of the country— but who have in common self-described poor backgrounds and middleschool educations—are seen also to share a disassociation with the term gurbet that reinforces the contention that they are not ‘displaced’ (Malkki 1992) in the exilic sense associated with the normative construction of the migrant experience.8 Notably, the second quoted informant actually articulated this disposition during a conversation largely dedicated to his complaints about having difficulty finding satisfying work and making lasting friendships after nearly three years of residence in the EU, yet this had done nothing to coax his personal trajectory back in the direction of sıla. In any case, for the reasons outlined above, no one else sees them the way they see themselves, and they chafe at both the socially stifling conventions back in sıla and the perpetually low expectations of

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Istanbulites. I argue that this slippage between my informants’ aspirational subjectivities and the weight of public judgement feeds a desire to create distance between themselves and Turkish sociability in general. This, in turn, becomes part of the attraction of Sultanahmet, whose own unintelligibility arises from its peculiar history.

Unintelligible Sultanahmet The district today called Sultanahmet had been the city’s epicentre over much of its Byzantine and Ottoman history, but lost its political and later social clout in the transition from empire to modern nation-state (Keyder 2008; Boyar and Fleet 2010). By the mid-twentieth century, it was a largely forgotten backwater housing incongruously grand monuments like the Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosque, and Topkapı Palace. The district’s disused residential properties were then repurposed by new migrants while they scouted other areas for permanent settlement with family and co-villagers. By the late 1960s, Sultanahmet had also become a point of convergence on the ‘hippie trail’ (the overland journey from Europe to South Asia popular through the 1970s), from whence evolved mass tourism and the district’s gradual museumification. Those same residential properties were subsequently converted into hotels, restaurants, and gift shops. The combination of these processes served to associate the area with transience rather than place, place-making, and place identity (see Mandel 1996; Mills 2008). Meanwhile, the nation-building project in Turkey had encouraged abandonment of its imperial past, which drained the symbolic power of Sultanahmet’s monuments and obfuscated the district on Istanbulites’ mental maps (Çelik 1986; Gür 2002). Sultanahmet’s unintelligibility runs parallel to that of my informants, generating a paradoxical-sounding ‘non-place identity’ (building Augé 1995/1992) that positions them as non-peripheral (i.e. highly visible) through the district’s physical centrality, while simultaneously outside the purview of normative sociability and its mechanisms of hierarchy (see Fig. 9.1). Visiting foreigners often interpret this high profile in what they misidentify as the city centre due to the grandeur of its monuments—combined with Sultanahmet

Fig. 9.1 Satellite image of Istanbul. Sultanahmet is located at the tip of the Old City peninsula, whose boundaries correspond to those of Byzantine-era Constantinople. The city’s unique geography concentrated around three converging peninsulas helps make the phenomenon of ‘centres’ that do not interact with each other plausible. Image adapted by author from Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0276337.28.9719445.24163m/data=!3m1!1e3 (Imagery ©2015 DigitalGlobe, Data SIO, NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, GEBCO, TerraMetrics. Map data ©2015 Basarsoft, Google [Retrieved 29 August 2015])

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boys’ passable-to-good English—as indicators that they must be representative of the typical, acceptably bred urbanite by Turkish standards, in stark contrast to Istanbulites’ perception of them as peasant ‘transplants’ (Malkki 1992). This rebalancing of the social equation between foreign guests and their Sultanahmet hosts (Smith 1989) opens the door to interactions that may of course be exploitative, but to be fair also include warm platonic friendships with men and women alike. As my informants experience it, their interactions with foreign visitors—who are free of domestic cultural baggage—permit them a measure of psycho-social, if not also spatio-temporal, freedom. After all, these encounters represent the outside world coming to them since they cannot go to it without a visa, as their Ottoman-era counterparts might have done. These interactions can also have the opposite effect, however, reminding Sultanahmet boys of what they are missing. I once asked Kaan why he was in such a hurry to leave when he was already living in an exciting world-class city. After a moment’s silent contemplation he replied, ‘I can understand Istanbul is a great city because the tourists always tell me so. But I want to learn it myself ’. A similar ‘hunger’ (Herzfeld 1985) to see the world with one’s own eyes was shared by most informants who, after so many evenings spent on the rooftop terrace bars chatting with travellers and hearing stories about the fabulous places they had visited, would ask themselves, ‘Why not me too?’ Their dilemma is one in which a generalized desire for freedom—Kaan once described ‘freedom’ to me as ‘my love’ (words he notably had not used to describe his girlfriends)—and personal autonomy contains dimensions of longing for societal and even geopolitical parity.

‘Hassling’ and Uncertainty The subject positions of mobile young men in Sultanahmet are a starting point, but where thoughts and feelings are translated into action, risk and uncertainty follow. And unlike migration-as-rite-of-passage, my informants face the challenges of unintelligible mobility without familiar networks of support. This is true both in the institutionalized ‘cultures

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of migration’ sense and in the lived sense of not having family in the city, and helps to further finesse the identification of my primary informant cluster from the broader category of Sultanahmet boys through the lens of subjectivity vs. systems. That is, although I also had many informants who were born in Istanbul—birthplace does not determine disposition, after all—over the longer term many of these eventually married local women, often succumbing to direct or indirect family pressure. Conversely, even if my informants who were born elsewhere preferred to marry Istanbul-based women, they lacked the necessary relationships of trust and mutual obligation among social networks in the city to be readily approved of as potential partners by local families. This makes birth outside the city and independent travel to it (rather than as part of a village cohort or via chain migration) defining characteristics, and also reinforces the semantic connection with garip yi˘git. The absence of familial networks in Istanbul both presents and restricts opportunities, and where it restricts them the moral ambiguities of pragmatic opportunism are propagated. For example, among Turkish citizens of modest means, applying even for a tourist visa to another country can be an elaborate collective effort that involves corralling financial contributions from several extended family members. Marshalling the necessary funds usually works best when these family members live in the same city and can hold the visa applicant accountable for their investment. As a pragmatic adaptation to the limited menu of legal pathways set out in international visa schemes, the practice of ‘hassling’ visiting foreign women can be viewed as a strategy to cultivate one’s own social and familial networks towards the goal of freedom of movement. Indeed, ‘hassle’ is my informants’ quasi-English expression, derived from the similar-sounding Turkish verb asıl- (infinitive: asılmak), which means ‘to hang on’ or ‘to cling’, as well as ‘to hit on’ or ‘to accost’. ‘Hassling’ in the sense of asıl-ing, then, is the process by which a Sultanahmet boy hitches his proverbial wagon to a visiting foreign woman towards the goal of improving his socio-spatial relationship to the category of ‘man’ according to non-normative standards. This goal is pursued opportunistically—yet not necessarily as a con—over the hazardous emotional terrain of intimate interpersonal relationships,

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and has the far-reaching potential to set in motion the machinery of international institutions. Perhaps ironically, the standard English definition of ‘to harass’ or ‘to pester’ better describes how hassling is experienced by the majority of tourists, who include touting and other idiosyncrasies of street life on their spectrum of such interactions. And although an uncomfortably (for me as a bystander) high percentage of passersby either ignore them or react negatively, those who do stop to interact create opportunities for network cultivation that my informants seize upon with fervour. On this point, my framing of Sultanahmet boys’ desires as being focused more explicitly on freedom of movement than on money and sex per se— though both are obviously welcome—is also found in Sofka Zinovieff ’s ethnographic work on kamaki (1990, 1991).9 The term refers to ‘a harpoon for spearing fish’ but became a euphemism for ‘the act of a Greek man pursuing a foreign woman with the intention of having sex [involving] an implied use of cunning’ (Zinovieff 1991: 203). Based on fieldwork conducted during the late 1980s in the former capital city of Nafplio, Zinovieff ’s analysis also explored the themes of male competition, geopolitical dissonance, and ‘the desire of many kamakia to change their lives’ (1991: 203). However, one stark difference between the Greek and Turkish cases resides in public perception. Kamaki is a source of national humour, whereas its equivalent across the Aegean elicits ire and embarrassment. As with the romanticization of bandit exploits, the morally dubious acts of the past are easier to forgive—and indeed to appreciate the boldness of—than those of the present, and the passing of kamaki into legend was notably contemporaneous with the 1995 adoption of the Schengen Agreement and its 1999 incorporation into European Union law. Thanks to Greece’s member-state status, outwardly oriented young Greeks of all backgrounds who would like to go out and see the world may now simply go. This recalls Kaan’s expressed desire ‘to become a citizen of the European Union’. He had chosen his words with precision: while analysis of the dynamic between Turkey and Europe is so often hijacked by Europeanization or Westernization discourses, Kaan’s subjectivity was not driven by a civilizational project. Ultimately, my informants hassle tourists because they feel there is nothing to be lost in the effort. The greater risk would be to remain

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in Turkey and live out the role of man as prescribed by normative sociability (see also Piot 2010; Hernández-Carretero and Carling 2012). They are inclined to articulate their relationship with risk through idioms like ‘I’ll try my ¸sans’—¸sans was adapted long ago from the French chance (luck). Even in the often fleeting and fruitless encounters with tourists, Sultanahmet boys engage vigorously with the uncertainties surrounding their circumstances, as exemplified in Kaan’s juggling of multiple mobile phones and other investments to keep various and overlapping projects of mobility in the air. This is where the aforementioned idea of ‘good risk’ becomes relevant. Once neutral or at least variable in connotation, Douglas (1992) observed that the concept of risk evolved during the nineteenth century to become more or less synonymous with danger. Risk analysis, then, rather than being a neutral exercise, is highly ideological in its assumption that risk aversion is universally desirable or even relevant. Good risk, in turn, is a marked category that reaggregates the neutral and positive associations of rising to meet challenges towards potential gain. Malaby built on Douglas in his ethnography of games of chance in Crete, arguing that, rather than being useful as a metaphor for life, ‘gambling in Chania is gambling one’s life’ (2003: 148, emphasis added): this is in contrast to the common framing that risk in the context of migration refers to risk to livelihood (Massey et al. 1993). Similarly, I contend that ¸sans, understood as a positive motivator for risk, propels my informants ‘heroically’ (Herzfeld 1985) along their mobile trajectories; in other words, rather than managing uncertainty, they embrace it as a means of enacting manhood-via-mobility.

Conclusion: Uncertain Manhood In the above, I have outlined the features of manhood-via-mobility in Turkey, and attempted to make it intelligible to contemporary audiences by exposing a cultural geography of mobility that persists under the national cartography (Zırh 2017) of migration. Three factors, I argue, make the trajectories of the mobile qualitatively different from the paths taken by migrants: first, the egocentrism that underwrites the decision to leave ‘home’ (sıla) in that they are driven by personal desire rather than

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an economic, political, or familial obligation—reminiscent of Herzfeld’s performative ‘celebration of the self ’ (1985: 11); second, the high risk of failure relative to the still-difficult-yet-institutionalized journeys of migrants; and third, the lack of reincorporation among those who eventually marry foreign women and leave Turkey into communities that grant them full social and political rights of membership. As a result, my informants’ mobile trajectories are marked by uncertainty and ambiguity, towards which they unapologetically adopt a pose of pragmatic opportunism. Here, encounters with visiting foreign women become the site of opportunity to push their performative skill up against the limits of their luck (¸sans) towards the aim of self-actualization as men. Money, sex, and visas are symptomatic but not diagnostic of the visiting foreign woman’s allure: instead, ‘freedom’ is their mantra-like expressed central desire. If settlement abroad constitutes a success of manhood-via-mobility (the emotional nuances of which I do not unpack here), outcomes are more fluid among those who remain in Turkey. One possibility is that a Sultanahmet boy will accrue enough funds (also sometimes by dubious means) to open his own tourism-driven enterprise. As a business owner, he becomes a more plausible candidate for tourist visas according to the consular requirement of demonstrating assets and ties to the home country. This is a success insofar as it constitutes achieving freedom of international movement. He also becomes a more plausible candidate for marriage with an Istanbul-raised woman, if he so desires. Another outcome is that a Sultanahmet boy eventually decides he has grown bored of his playboy lifestyle and returns to his home town to join a family business or trade, then marries locally. This could be considered a failure of manhood-via-mobility by observers in Sultanahmet but would go unnoticed as migration-as-rite-of-passage to those back in sıla, and would have been personally rationalized by the subject as maturity. True failure is ultimately in the eyes of one’s peers, and occurs when others perceive him as having remained in liminal Sultanahmet too long without one outcome or another. This may be due to a dearth of performative skill and luck, or because he is deemed too old to not have grown bored with hassling visiting foreign women yet—though there is no set age for ‘too old’, nor set duration for ‘too long’ spent in Sultanahmet.

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The former is pitied and the latter becomes the butt of jokes. Both are labelled bo¸s adam (empty man). Manhood in Turkey is a fraught category requiring continual negotiation under even the best of circumstances. When he elects to transgress the normative structures of manhood, a ‘modern garip yi˘git ’ steps beyond the ordinary and makes his own trajectory even more precarious, since these structures usually play a mitigating role between fortune and skill. Not all Sultanahmet boys are equipped with the necessary performative arsenal to navigate the extraordinary terrain of manhood-via-mobility, but the greatest social value within the performative framework is derived from demonstrations of readiness to meet uncertainties as they arise. Acknowledgements The study from which this chapter has been derived would not have been possible without the support of the British Institute at Ankara and the University College London Department of Anthropology. With sincere appreciation to dear friends and colleagues from these two institutions, as well as the Middle East Technical University Department of Sociology. I also owe a debt of gratitude to several individuals, especially Allen Abramson, Lut Vandeput, Gülgün Girdivan, Ruth Mandel, Besim Can Zırh, Magda Cr˘aciun, ´ Salim Aykut Öztürk, and Beata Switek. And finally, I thank all my informants—they know who they are but should remain unnamed—for letting me into their lives.

Notes 1. The flat was in the contemporary city centre, a few hundred metres from Taksim Square. It was cramped, dated, and in a general state of disrepair, but the rent was correspondingly low. Among single men from outside Istanbul working in unskilled or low-wage positions it is unusual to have a flat of any kind. Rather, they typically bunk in staff quarters or bekâr evleri (rooming houses; lit. ‘singles’ homes’). For her part, the free-spirited EU-citizen girlfriend—also in her early twenties—took no issue with the condition of their flat, prioritizing location and financial freedom. 2. They do not formally identify themselves as a community.

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3. This chapter’s focus on manhood and mobility means that my informants’ romantic collocutors are women. There are two reasons for this: as pathway to masculine prestige, romantic or sexual approaches are competitive and inherently public; one is considered performatively successful when selected by a woman in view of his peers. Secondly, where holiday romances deepen and international institutions become involved, homosexual relationships are for all intents and purposes excluded since at the time of fieldwork only a handful of countries worldwide recognized same-sex marriage. Marriage is also distinguished from civil partnership in this sense, as in many cases the latter does not include the right of the foreign partner to a family reunification visa. On homosexual relations between tourists and locals in the Mediterranean, see instead Borneman (2007) on his own homosexual encounters in Syria, and McCormick (2011) on organized gay sex tour packages to Syria and Lebanon. 4. ‘Our Turkish Toyboys’ was Episode 2 of a three-part series called Man Hunters: Sex Trips for Girls, which aired in the UK on Channel 4 in December 2008. The forty-something woman quoted here had reportedly travelled to the Aegean town of Ku¸sadası over twenty times in the past seven years for flings with younger men. The dynamic between tourists and locals in Istanbul differs markedly from those in resort towns but her assessment of local men’s motivations remains comparable to those of tourists I spoke with in the field. See also Tucker (2003) for the case of Cappadocia, in central Turkey. 5. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘nomad’ was contrasted against ‘the sedentary’, for whom morality was ‘making the absolute appear in a particular place... in order to establish a solid and stable center for the global’ (1987/1980: 382). Meanwhile, ‘for the nomad... locality is not delimited; the absolute, then... is achieved not in a centered, oriented globalization or universalization but in an infinite succession of local operations’ (p. 383). 6. The Republic of Turkey was established in 1923 out of the post-WWI wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, but the transition to modern state power as recognizable through Foucault (1995/1975) arguably began with the Tanzimât ‘Reorganization’ of the Ottoman government in 1839.

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7. Both garip and gurbet descend from the Arabic garb, which means ‘west’. The reference is to the setting of the sun and the sense of malaise and misfortune associated with trying to find one’s way in the dark (Sayad 2000: 167). That said, this imagery does not directly inform the Turkish-language usage, as the word for ‘west’ is batı. 8. In a parallel analysis based on an incident wherein a young Albanian labourer in Greece was killed by police sniper fire after hijacking a public bus, Penelope Papailias observed that the perpetrator was romanticized around much of the Balkans as a ‘hero of kurbet ’ (the Albanian variant of gurbet ) for ‘[speaking] back to the Greek people, lifting the mantle of speechlessness that usually cloaks migrants’ marginal experience in Greece [and thus] turning the humdrum, often miserable experience of migration into the stuff of history’ (Papailias 2003: 1064, 1065–1066). 9. See also Glenn Bowman (1989), whose Jerusalem-based analysis focused more explicitly (in both senses) on the event of sexual encounter between local men and visiting foreign women than on contextualizing such encounters diachronically along individual ‘masculine trajectories’.

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10 Ordinary Life in the Shadow of Vesuvius: Surviving the Announced Catastrophe Giovanni Gugg

Vesuvius, “Europe’s Ticking Time Bomb” More than a symbol of wild nature, Mount Vesuvius, a volcano in the south of Italy is a cultural product. Its silhouette represents a longstanding1 town emblem which, from Plinius to Andy Warhol, has seen its iconic charisma grow over the centuries. Vesuvius has been the symbol of the town of Naples at least since its devastating eruption in 1631 that caused 4,000 deaths and extensive damage. At that time, Italy was a major destination of the “Grand Tour”2 whereby artists and intellectuals would come from all over Europe to admire the classical art at the archaeological sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum, two settlements in the foothills of Vesuvius. The accounts of these visitors who described the G. Gugg (B) Department of Civil, Building and Environmental Engineering, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 ´ B. Switek et al. (eds.), Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83962-8_10

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eruption as violent but spectacular (e.g. Goethe 1992, 272) contributed to turning Vesuvius into a symbol of horror and drama but also of wonder and discovery in the European imaginary. The polysemy of the Vesuvian image endures today. It is widely used as a logo of shops, restaurants, and associations, while the volcano itself is the location of choice for novels, films, comic books, and TV-broadcasts. Apart from its success in popular culture, the Vesuvius also became the first volcano to be investigated by the scientific community. The descriptions of the 1631 eruption are the earliest study carried out on the volcano. These eruptions were then further analysed during the eighteenth century and ultimately led to the opening of the first volcanic observatory in the world in 1848 on Vesuvius’ summit. Nowadays, the volcano attracts substantial media attention as it remains at the centre of many scientific debates that try to assess the possible consequences of a future eruption. In particular, the extraordinary population growth experienced by the area surrounding the volcano has been at the core of many controversies. Thus, the 24 municipalities of the current “red zone”, i.e. the area classified as the most endangered in case of eruption, counted 200,000 inhabitants in 1910, 400,000 in 1945, and reached 700,000 in the 2010s (Rossi 2014).3 Consequently, it is predicted that due to the high population density in the area even a minor volcanic event could result in a very large number of victims. Reflecting these predictions, Vesuvius has been labelled as “one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world” and “Europe’s ticking time bomb” (Nature 2011).4 A question thus arises about how 700,000 people, or more, can live, apparently carelessly in a region exposed to a high volcanic risk. In this chapter, to understand the local point of view, I investigate two sets of relationships. Firstly, I look at the relationship between the inhabitants of the Vesuvius area and their political and scientific institutions. I am guided here by Mary Douglas’ proposition that “individuals always transfer the relevant part of their decision-making to the institutions in which they live” (Douglas 1992, 55). Secondly, I consider the relationship people have to the places where they live and to the local memory of eruptions. In this regard, I base my work on the principle that “people are always located and at the same time, places of human life are always subjectivated” (Signorelli 2008, 43–44).

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I also propose that to account for the local understandings of lives unfolding in the shadow of Vesuvius, we are well served conceptually by what I call here scotomization, that is a mechanism that allows for distancing oneself from an anxiogenic element. I take scotomization to be a socially determined process that is continuously evolving. It is related to the construction of space and to a plurality of daily times as well as to the interpretation of scientific knowledge by population and media. The word “scotoma”—from ancient Greek σκ´oτωμα, “obscuration”—is related to the vision and psychological contexts where it indicates “a reduced sensitivity to the light in the visual field” and an ability to “unconsciously eliminate from the perception and in turn from the memory, all unpleasant and sorrowful events” (Fayek 2011, 221–222). The term scotomization was introduced by French psychoanalysts Edouard Pichon and René Laforgue in 1926 “as a process of psychic depreciation, by means of which the individual attempts to deny everything which conflicts with his ego” (Pichon and Laforgue 1926, 473). According to Alan Bass, in a more recent perspective, it means “the creation of a blind spot” (Bass 2000, 179), whose function is “to avert from oneself [the thought of ] one’s own death” (Anders 2010, 263; see also Becker 1973). In this chapter I use scotomization as a concept helpful in grasping the common denominator of social and mental processes that make it possible to live at the foot of Vesuvius. While these processes are not uniform and represent a “polyphony” of mechanisms (as I will show below), they all allow for the awareness of risk to be semiconsciously experienced with a “reduced sensitivity” as people go about their daily lives and imagine their own, as well as communal, futures. Consequently, the category of scotomization helps us understand mental processes of an individual and collective nature that appear illogical from the outside, but make sense in their spatial, historical, social, and cultural context. Through a specific “knowledge of experience” (Jedlowski 1994) in these contexts, the scotomized subject takes possession of disturbing experience and synthesizes it, offering a social shield against the possibility of a collective trauma, and thus contributing to a never-ending construction of palatable common sense and local identity (Loriol 2014, 160–161).

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“We Are Stronger Than the Volcano” Among the 24 villages included in the Vesuvius red zone, SanSebastiano-al-Vesuvio is a particularly interesting case. After it was half-destroyed by the most recent eruption in 1944, it underwent a dramatic change when its inhabitants rebuilt it in the same place but in a completely new way: a small village was turned into a town renowned for its high quality of life. However, the traces of the 1944 disaster have not been hidden and remain very much visible in the town centre until today. It is by virtue of this transformation and the apparent dichotomy between “wellness” and “risk” that I have chosen San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio as a case study of the dynamics by which risk is socially elaborated (Gugg 2013). I base this chapter on data collected during fieldwork conducted between the fall of 2010 and summer 2011, when I lived in SanSebastiano-al-Vesuvio to mix with people and take part in local life, and during several shorter visits that followed. During these additional visits, I organized several targeted meetings with the representatives of local scientific, governmental institutions and citizen associations. I recorded 40 interviews, some while walking with my informants around town. These interviews elicited attitudes and knowledge people have with respect to their surroundings. As Tim Ingold and Jo Lee suggested, observing, and describing a place through a walk, “are processes of lived and embodied experience in which the environment shifts and imprints onto the body and is at the same time affected by it” (Lee and Ingold 2006, 73). Thus, as I walked with my informants their simultaneous interaction with the environment triggered responses that might otherwise not have emerged. In selecting people with whom to talk I was guided by an interpretation of risk elaboration as the result of a “cultural debate” (or even “fight”), where the voices of some parties are more influential than others. There exist, in other words, people recognized as “qualified informers”, whose opinion is perceived by the local community as particularly trustworthy. This group consists of “local experts” (see also: Giddens 2006, 27), such as the bearers of memory (for example, elderly people who witnessed the events) and the opinion leaders (for example, civil

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or religious authorities, journalists, historians, activists in humanitarian associations). I thus identified those members of the San-Sebastianoal-Vesuvio community whose opinions had resonance in the collective construction of risk and focussed on them. However, even such authoritative knowledge is locally re-elaborated and subjected to a process that leads to a hybridization of local categories of risk (Gugg 2013, 12). In San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio, experts, politicians, and ordinary people share the same value system but historicize differently the meaning ascribed to various risk events. Thus, scientific concepts are constantly reformulated in a new stratification of knowledge. This reworking is one of the crucial points in the current historicization and spatialization of risk and, as I will show in the following pages, in the consequent process of scotomization. The 1944 Vesuvius eruptionclosed the eruptive cycle that started in 1631. This last eruption occurred in March during the occupation of the Allies in the Neapolitan region. Many different accounts of the phenomenon are thus available: reports by soldiers who were in the area (Lewis 2005), novels (Malaparte 2010) or parts of them, photographs as well as videos (the so-called combat films). Some of the eyewitnesses can be interviewed even today, many years after the disaster. Although from a volcanology point of view (Fulignati et al. 1996), the 1944 eruption was a moderate one, it killed 26 people, destroyed two villages (San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio and Massa-di-Somma), triggered the evacuation of thousands of people, and paralysed surrounding agriculture for almost three years, something that had huge economic consequences for the area (Ricciardi 2009, 835–57). Unlike the previous explosions, this one did not cause mudflows or particularly lethal phenomena such as the pyroclastic flows (very fast-moving currents of hot gases, lava, and volcanic ashes). The most spectacular traces of that eruption are probably those left by the lava flow that reached villages and devastated the area, traces that are still visible in today’s town centres. The lava reaching village centres stood out, in the eyewitnesses’ accounts, as the only event that really mattered. To use the words of one of the witnesses: I remember a man who watched the collapse of his house, devoured by the lava: he was silent, impassive, but when his home disappeared under

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the lava, he shouted angrily: “You took my home, now also take the keys!” And he threw the keys of his house into the lava. (Man, 70 years old, Catholic priest)

In 1944, the slowness of the lava, within certain limits, allowed the inhabitants of San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio and Massa-di-Somma to get ready for its arrival and even to escape it. It is this peculiarity of the lava phenomenon that, after the initial visual and acoustic shock, makes it possible to look for solutions that can contain the gravity of the disaster while it was still unfolding. This was explained by one of the interviewed in the following way: [My father’s] family took all their furniture and charged it on small carts to go to their relatives … some went to Ercolano, others to Cercola … in a word, they moved. In any way, they did not run. They had the time to find a place to go and to leave with no rush. They did not make a mess; the lava took days to flow down. (Woman, 50 years old, municipal officer)

After a natural disaster, communities try to cope with consequences of the events by establishing rational “local responses” (Signorelli 1992). In the case of volcanoes, local responses depend on the different phases of the eruption and continue after the immediate emergency has passed (Gugg 2018). In San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio, these responses consisted in expedient means to defend the devastated village both symbolically and materially. After two-thirds of San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio were destroyed by the lava in 1944, the village suffered from a massive outflow of people that put it on the verge of losing autonomy and being merged with a nearby municipality.5 Several young politicians at the time, however, organized protests and demonstrations that ultimately resulted in SanSebastiano-al-Vesuvio maintaining its independence. As recalled in 1972 by the then Mayor Raffaele Capasso: The 1943-1953 was undoubtedly the darkest and most dramatic decade in the history of San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio: the ravages of war and the crisis that ensued; the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed almost the entire urban agglomeration; the autonomy granted to the Volla hamlet

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in 1953; the numerous floods that between 1945 and 1952 gave the final blow to the already catastrophic situation. In these tragic circumstances, with a territory of 260 hectares largely covered by magma and with a despondent population, discouraged and free of all its property, the municipality of San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio, that with the population of Volla counted 8,000 inhabitants, after it [Volla] gained independence, became a village with only 1,500 inhabitants: the poorest province of Naples. Struck in its vital structures, social, economic, and administrative, San-Sebastiano had only two alternatives: to reconstruct the entire village or resign to become a hamlet. Only the inhabitants could decide to sign or not the town’s death certificate. (Quoted in Capasso 1994, 34)

In San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio, the lava flow wiped out the world as people knew it together with all its spatial references and forced the inhabitants to recreate the space. It was a catastrophe that “transforms the topological type of a function and it appears in a new form, with a solution and continuity” (Pomian 1977, 789). In San-Sebastiano-alVesuvio, the moral message handed down was that inhabitants managed to survive, reconstruct, and stay in the same place where they would also continue living even after the next eruption. “We are stronger than the volcano” declares a commemorative tablet in the town’s main square. In 1944, the eruption survivors decided to stay in the places they felt they belonged to and to promote a re-birth of the village in its original location: To choose to live around the Vesuvius, in a condition of risk, is part of “vesuvianity”, which is not the normal sense of belonging to a territory, but it is a way of being that involves risk-taking. [...] So, the Civil Defence says: “Go away from Vesuvius”, but this is not the only solution. It is a solution, but it is not the only one. (Man, 50 years old, Mayor)

After the catastrophe, the inhabitants endeavoured to reactivate a connection between the past, the present, and the future, and to encourage and develop the continuity despite the rupture.6 In this sense, an apparently irrational behaviour—the obstinacy of living in a territory exposed to a volcanic risk and the rebuilding in the disaster area,—gained the status of a cultural answer to the natural

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catastrophe that, as argued by Amalia Signorelli, follows a logic aiming at “recreating the disappeared human and historical space and at reconstructing one’s own past life right in the middle of the ruins” (Signorelli 1992, 151). Additionally, the high vulnerability of the region today is primarily caused by the often poorly planned, and sometimes illegal urbanization that took place between the 1950s and the 1960s (De Lucia 1992). As described by one of the interviewed, San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio’s posteruption transformation was such that it caused immigration from the surrounding towns: In Naples there were no more possibilities of finding a place or purchasing an apartment […], while, here in San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio there was plenty of space, and a decent and nice town was being built. (Woman, 52 years old, officer of the National Park of Vesuvius)

After the 1944 eruption and under the influence of a charismatic, long-serving Mayor, Raffaele Capasso, who administrated the town from 1955 until his death in 1990, the reconstruction of San-Sebastianoal-Vesuvio represented the opportunity for a deep transformation. The original small rural village was transformed into a residential zone made up of small single-family houses, each one with a private garden, that later became prestigious residences for the middle and upper classes of nearby Naples. The present town is locally recognized to be as nice and quiet as “a small Switzerland” (Gugg 2015). Despite this evolution, the traces of the last eruption have not been removed and in the town centre some of the new buildings have been erected on the hardened lava rock from 1944. This simultaneous existence as an “oasis of wellness” in the middle of the chaotic Neapolitan hinterland, and as a place aware of its exposure to the volcanic eruption displaying the relics of the past disaster, makes San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio a paradigm of a complex relationship with volcanic risk.

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Beyond Fatalism: Between Repression, Denial, and Coping In 2013 the national Head Chief of the Civil Defence department (Protezione Civile) for the Neapolitan region, Franco Gabrielli, declared: “there is an excessive lack of awareness about the hazard among the inhabitants of this zone. […] Unfortunately, this often leads to an inadequate attitude towards the institutions that, conversely, have the duty to make the citizens as receptive to the problem as possible” (quoted in Arachi 2013). The media often perpetuate this fatalistic stereotype of the Neapolitan people who are represented as those who only “stare at the volcano, sigh and shrug” (Stella 2012). However, in contrast to this common perception of people living near Vesuvius as “inert” in the face of the danger they are exposed to, there in fact take place multiple local initiatives and proposals that show the collective interest that exists in participating in the decision-making process regarding the future of the area and emergency management. Many local meetings take place to discuss the possible adjustments and alternatives to the present emergency plan set up by the central government. As we were walking around town during interviews, none of my informants ignored the lava remains or denied the fact that they were produced by the local volcano. In the interviews as well as in spontaneous descriptions of the surrounding landscape, my informants made it evident that they were aware of living in an area that has been cyclically ravaged by violent geological events. They did not hesitate to declare that they were conscious of the paradox of having rebuilt their town on the volcano and of living near the source of natural danger. Yet, at the same time, they would clarify that it would be impossible to live with the constant thought of such danger. To survive the anguish (De Martino 2008, 2011), they restricted conversations about the volcano to a few specific situations such as when partaking in the making of a television report about the Vesuvius, when a seismic event is recorded, or when pushed to discuss the issue by the anthropologist. They would say that the volcanic risk “is a subject not to be discussed often, because it would be distressing to talk about it every day” (Man, 78 years old, witness of the last eruption in 1944).

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How, then, can we explain the paradox of being conscious of a particular risk but living as if being unaware of it at the same time? Mary Douglas identifies three major attitudes towards the possibility of a disaster: optimism, pessimism, and fatalism. Optimists (or cornucopians) believe “in the unending lavish bounty of nature, and so could not get worried about rumours of resources drying up”; pessimists (or catastrophists) believe “that nature is fragile and unable to resist the crash that is just round the corner”; and fatalists believe “in the seriousness of problems […], but feel that we are totally impotent, we might just as well ignore the warnings, for there is nothing that we can do or could have ever done” (Douglas 1992, 259–60). Douglas herself acknowledged that this last category is difficult to understand: “I am always intrigued to know how they [the fatalists] manage to remain so detached” (Douglas 1992, 265). People in San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio seemed to be aware of having adopted a certain form of detachment: “We have to be a bit fatalist” (Woman, 50 years old, municipal officer). However, as I am going to show below, this attitude derived neither from ignoring the risk, from having forgotten it, nor from giving in to anything that might happen. Mary Douglas’ tripartite schema offers a first level of analysis, so that the three groups should be considered as a first attempt at systematization, and not as if they were characterized by some a priori species essence. Those three types of attitudes towards risks are macro-categories and emerge from the quality and shifts in public debate, so they can change over time, according to the actors involved. In effect, Douglas’ three attitudes must be interpreted as mobile and multi-faceted, resulting from frictions between powers and between representations, between generations and between knowledge. They are the result of tensions between centre and periphery that underlie social groups, manifesting in dialectical forms of structure and anti-structure, “fixed” to “floating” worlds. As Douglas notes in several of her works (1966, 147, 1992, 107, 1999, 218), such tensions are particularly evident in highly competitive social systems. The category of scotomization helps to understand this point of view, and although it may appear illogical from the outside, it can make sense if inserted in its spatial, historical, social, and cultural context. It is a form of knowledge gained from experience, at the same time individual and collective, and only partly conscious, in the sense that it depends on

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what is lived and the process through which the subject takes possession of the experience and synthesizes it. In fact, the term “fatalism”—“the belief in a lack of personal power or control over destiny or fate” (Drew and Schoenberg 2011, 164)— has now been reduced to a buzzword with a strong emotional charge that, due to its versatility, can take on a variety of meanings suited and adjusted to the intention of the user, and therefore lacks the precision needed to explain the various facets of people’s perceptions of risk. So, for this reason I propose to use the category of “scotomization” as an interpretative key, both because it does not attribute value judgments to the paradoxical attitude of “seeing and not seeing” the risk, and because— following Bourdieu—it specifies a conceptual instrument “that allows the construction of things that were not seen before” (Bourdieu 2009, 55).7 How does the concept of scotomization relate to familiar psychological and psychoanalytical notions? Both repression and denial “arise from a ‘basic drive’ to ward off unconscious danger” (Cohen 2008, 57) and, psychologically, can be ascribed to the category of coping strategies. The word “coping” has been introduced in psychology by Richard Lazarus in 1966 and refers to the ensemble of modalities defining the adaptation process that follows stress situations in which a discrepancy between need and resources available appears (Billings and Moos 1981, 142). Sigmund Freud himself identified various defence mechanisms he generically classified as “repression”, namely a defence mechanism that pushes out of awareness all painful information. Advanced studies on coping have highlighted many other defence mechanisms that can be unconsciously adopted in case of frustration or danger. These mechanisms include the shifting of emotions towards a less threatening object, attributing own feelings to another person, attempting to find a reassuring explanation of the events, or eventually reclassifying ill behaviours into socially acceptable ones.8 In social psychology, Cohen uses the term denial to indicate the ability with which “the psyche blocks off information that is literally unthinkable or unbearable” (Cohen 2008, 27). In denial the emphasis is placed on the unconscious, while with fatalism, conscious indifference towards the unthinkable is a consolatory illusion. In contrast to both conceptualizations, the scotomization mechanism cannot be ascribed

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to a state of mind comparable to the suppression of a background noise. Rather, it is a coping process that aims at “not seeing” a possible anxiogenic element by means of an automatic and involuntary concealment. Compared to denial, scotomization allows for world visions that, consciously, render some, but not all, elements of unthinkable danger invisible. With scotomization people select and prioritise risks choosing to see some elements, consciously blocking out others. This approach casts a different light on what has otherwise been represented as a fatalistic attitude: it emphasizes multiple facets and, above all, gives depth to a conduct that is anything but irrational. Resulting from “scotomization”, the behaviour too often superficially defined as “fatalism” then appears, in fact, to be the subjective effect of a dynamic historical process with multiple origins. We thus avoid the otherwise common homologising and essentializing of people living in places exposed to extraordinary potentialities. Lastly, it should be stressed that, although modalities of scotomization can be realized at the level of individual experience, scotomization can also have a strongly collective character. In the case at hand, the mechanism mediates a plurality of voices that socially articulate the risk posed by Vesuvius as they address the present dormancy of the volcano, the kind of prestigious courage of living in a famous place such as SanSebastiano-al-Vesuvio, and the influence exercised by scientific knowledge and media in contemporary society. In this context, differences in gender, age, and education tend to promote different patterns of scotomization: however, these differences do not undermine the social role of the participants to the common risk debate (Gugg 2016). In fact, the lack of an absolute objectivity in relation to the risks posed by Vesuvius, and the impossibility of having one, makes possible, as observed by Bourdieu (1997: 36), a negotiation between local agents acting within the same field and the confrontation among different powers, ultimately leading to the establishment of a predominant point of view. More than a reproduction of existing structures, never simple and univocal, always plural, dynamic, and eminently political this dominant point of view is an elaboration of the reality that can orient, determine, and modify the behaviours and the opinions about risk (Agamben 2006) and, indeed, shift the scotomized field of “not seeing”.

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A Polyphony of Vesuvius Scotomizations As studies on disasters in psychology and social sciences show, attitudes to risk can be very varied, spanning from uncertainty to hope, from denial to fatalism, from ambiguity to indecision (Möllering 2001; Hilhorst and Bankoff 2004; Zinn 2008; Aven 2013; van Voorst 2015; Uslaner 2017). In the case of Vesuvius residents, the future eruption has become an expected and frequently resurfacing aspect of the daily life and the residents have established cultural as well as individual coping mechanisms to deal with it. In this section, I explore different scotomization mechanisms around San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio and show how scotomization is not static, but an evolution of the environmental, geological, and political conditions that can dynamically modify local responses to risk.

Cognitive Invisibility When it was alive, I liked the Vesuvius, but now it is a regular mountain. When it was alive, the Vesuvius was beautiful, it spit fire in the air up to almost 100 m height: it made fireworks that could be seen from Naples. But now it is just an abandoned mountain. […] However, at that time, the Vesuvius was frightening, today it is no longer scary. The Vesuvius is dead. We should have been worried if it was keeping on smoking, but it is not. They say that here below [underground] … but who knows what the truth is. (Man, 84 years old, witness of the last eruption in 1944)

Scotomization can be connected, as I already mentioned, to a perceptual invisibility with which a cognitive invisibility (Ligi 2009, 61–64) is associated. In the Vesuvius case, its current dormancy, and the lack of visible signs of activity (such as the typical smoke plume seen in many pictorial representations) have led to its cognitive invisibility. The inhabitants know that there is an underground activity because scientific research makes them aware of it. But it is another step for them to fully realize what this means: not everything that is explainable is comprehensible. More than ignorance of physical phenomena or lack of

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adequate education, this can be interpreted as a “signification block-out” (Ligi 2009, 62). It is a feature identified also by Anthony Oliver-Smith, according to whom, “many natural hazards are not sufficiently frequent or do not produce consistently frequent disasters, so that they may often not be perceived as threats” (Oliver-Smith 2002, 42).

Risk Is Everywhere The second facet of scotomization that emerged from the interviews in San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio was the idea that a possible hazard could virtually be everywhere. This is a recurring theme that was very well expressed in the words of one of the people interviewed: But the danger is everywhere! Have you seen what is happening in Australia? [the Queensland floods of 2011]. I was in Florence once and a colleague who lived there asked me: “aren’t you afraid that one of these days the Vesuvius erupts?”. Shortly after, there was the Umbria earthquake [that also affected the Florence region]. He asked me about the Vesuvius, and there was the Umbria earthquake instead! (Man, 53 years old, educator at the Catholic parish)

This interviewee knew about the intrinsically dangerous nature of the territory they lived in. However, both personal experience and media accounts led people to believe that the dangers even more insidious or unexpected than the volcanic ones are present also in places apparently safe from them. In other words, the inhabitants of San-Sebastiano-alVesuvio seemed to suggest that no matter how far from the Vesuvius one goes, the reality is that a calamity can always reach you wherever you are.

Scotomization and Temporalities As argued by Bankoff (2004, 35), “time should be regarded […] an important factor in the consideration of vulnerability”, because it contributes to how disasters are created as much as politics, society, economy, culture, and environment. In this sense, risk can also be

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scotomized according to the existence of different nuances of time. Marc Augé defined the oubli de suspens (literally “oblivion of something that is in abeyance”) as a time conception aimed at “rediscovering the present, isolating this time from the past and the future, and, more precisely, forgetting the future as much as this coincides with a revival of the past” (Augé 2010, 77).9 For the oubli de suspens to be possible and lasting, there is a need for what Joel Candau defined as the “real present”, that is, the ensemble of all the different temporalities constituting the everyday time of each society (Candau 2002, 104), the daily routine and instants “all like one another” that keep the mind occupied and allow pushing disturbing thoughts conveniently out of sight. However, Stanley Cohen stressed that something always leaks through this barrier, so that people are in the situation of “knowing and not-knowing at the same time” (Cohen 2008, 61). As a 30-year-old environmental activist told me: To be honest, I understand that this is rationally inconceivable. Yet, tomorrow morning I wake up, go to my greenhouse, and concentrate on my plants. And I do not really think of the Vesuvius.

The future risk creates uncertainty about tomorrow (Brown et al. 2015), but the present is traversed by tensions that determine a particular form of scotomization. More precisely, tensions exist between the present time in which one perseveres and stays in each place, and between the (possible) future in which the same place becomes the scene of a catastrophe. This opposition between different times (present vs unknown future) is present in the words of an unemployed woman in her late 20s who is a coordinator in a local humanitarian association: Vesuvius’ risk does not worry me, it does not affect me. I have a hard present time to live, so I do not have time to think about the Vesuvius.

Two other temporalities, a scientific “deep time” and a symbolic “eternal time”, also play an important role in the processes of scotomization. The former refers to geological time that determines the length of time between destructive events. The event can be so rare, that it is possible only in a very distant future beyond the lifespan of an individual

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human being (from this perspective, one might not even speak of risk in the strict sense; see: Aven 2013). A 71-year-old parish priest referred to this temporality of volcanic eruptions in the following way: Yes, I am afraid of the Vesuvius, but I do not think about it that much. Who isn’t worried at the idea of the next eruption? However, I had a brother, who is dead now, and he was very scared of the Vesuvius. But he died when he was still young while the Vesuvius is still there not yet erupting.

What I refer to here as the symbolic eternal time, is the perception that ascribes eternal continuity to, for example, one’s own house as a place that beside being a shelter and a refuge is also a representation of one is self and an “original shell” (Bachelard 1994, 4–510 ) which, even though it can be turned into a mortal trap during a disaster, has an eternal existence. In words of Gaston Bachelard, a “house is a world in itself ” (Bachelard 1994, 4). One of the interviewed recounted his dream: [If the volcano erupts], I will send my family in a safe place, but I will stay here. We are already two of us: me and a geologist, we will enjoy the show. I often dream about the Vesuvius eruption, but in my dream, I am not afraid of it. I dream that the lavas are flowing down, but at some point, they deviate! And the same for the pyroclastic flows: they deviate too! And I enjoy the show from above the roof. There is just me on my house roof and the lava splits into two flows just in front of me. (Man, 42 years old, local journalist and environmental activist)

In the dream of this San-Sebastiano inhabitant the house appears as an “extra-territorial place” (Pasquinelli 2009, 63) in the sense that its structure is not affected by the territory in which it stands. In the dream, the house continues to exist despite the lava swallowing everything around it. In this sense the house has “something eternal” (MerleauPonty 1996, 69) that provides a shelter and “allows us to dream in peace” (Merleau-Ponty 1996, 34).

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Science and Media: Scaremongering and Reassurance Joffe (1999, 2) has dubbed the media the “church of change” to stress the crucial role they play in heightening awareness and/or anxiety about various risks. In the case of Vesuvius, the risk of potential eruption is particularly convenient as it allows the media to produce news even in the absence of an event. The danger that might occur provides the drama, as do the controversies and breakthroughs within the scientific community. Consequently, the message sent by the media tends to be ambiguous. The media has described Vesuvius as “a sleeping monster” (Repubblica, November 13th, 2009), “a tinderbox” (Repubblica, June 30th, 1998), “our biggest problem” (Corriere della Sera, April 28th, 2010). Even if in some cases, the main text or subheading has a more moderate tone, many headlines in popular media present scientific results pertaining to Vesuvius in very sensational ways. An elderly woman, a witness of the last eruption, was worried by the language and the images of Vesuvius broadcast on television: [G.G.:] Do you like Vesuvius? [Answer:] Ehm, I do not know if I like it... Do you know that when I see it on TV, I cannot stand its view? I feel sick when I see it on TV, I do not know, I think about its next eruption. (Woman, 92 years old)

At the same time, however, the very same media outlets focussed also on the scientific progress that made it possible to foresee eruptions increasingly further in advance. In this way, the Vesuvius, although portrayed as dangerous and potentially devastating, was simultaneously described as the “world’s most surveyed” (Chianese 2010) and, in turn, “most controlled volcano” (Il Giornale del Sud , April 29th, 1998). This issue became particularly important in Italy after the trial against the Great Risks Commission for having communicated in an unjustifiably reassuring way before the earthquake of 6 April 2009 in L’Aquila. In that case, a scientist was sentenced to two years in prison, because he had minimized the risk of a strong shock, causing dozens of people to lower their attention threshold (Ciccozzi 2013). In the confusion of messages,

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people react by freezing, uncertain about what to do and, therefore, are particularly vulnerable (Lucini 2014; Cerase 2017).

Risk Selection According to Bankoff (2004, 12), “risks are different for everyone even in the face of the same hazard”. This is because they depend on the capacity of each community and its individual members to absorb the potential impact of the foreseen hazard. In this sense, risk is a socio-cultural construct derived from a complex political and institutional process, in which recognizing the presence of a hazard means not only having experience of it but, overall, being part of a community who knows it, who believes in its existence and who tries to cast a light on its consequences and causes (Henwood et al. 2008). In this way, the hazard becomes real, visible, tangible, credible, and urgent for the community. Geological hazards belong to a time scale much longer than human life and are supposed to be under the constant surveillance of instruments and experts. Accordingly, other threats in a daily routine appear as more immediate and play a crucial role in the mechanism of scotomization in relation to, for example, a volcanic risk. Although they are not expected to be as apocalyptic in their consequences as a possible future eruption, at least two other immediate hazards are considered to pose serious and extremely urgent threats to towns on the foothills of Vesuvius. In San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio one of these hazards is said to be people trying to tamper with the town’s sense of order. The 50-year-old Mayor of San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio had this to say about his town: It is a victim of continuous and constant acts of vandalism from those who come here, find everything clean and nice, and leave a sign as if to say: “Why don’t you conform to the rest of us?”. The risk of a social disorder in the context of the Neapolitan area and its well-known high crime rates, was looming over San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio threatening to turn it from the “small Switzerland” into a degraded and violent suburb.

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Another hazard was the pollution, represented primarily by illegal dumps that were feared to be harmful to the environment and the people living in the area: They used to dump everything here before and they did not mind, because there were no rules about the garbage dumps and the waste. (Man, 38 years old, local historian and cultural activist)

In other words, what was outside the town’s borders was chaotic, it represented a danger and the frightening idea that just around the corner there might be something potentially contagious and always ready to invade the world San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio’s inhabitants lived in (La Cecla 1988, 98). This definition and selection process involved prioritization, giving greater urgency to one risk over another (the volcano) based on a complex articulation of elements and conditionings at different levels: cognitive, media, economic, political, and historical. Therefore, risk is a living condition, but individual dangers are perceived differently—they assume different importance—according to the public discourse that develops around them and, above all, according to their urgency: when a danger is imminent, it becomes a priority over others.

Conclusions The inhabitants of San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio never seemed to deny the risk of their town being once again destroyed by a volcanic eruption. On the contrary, they never refused to talk about it and, when asked to elaborate on the topic, they did at length. Contrary to the perception of the supposed fatalistic stagnation of those who live on the Vesuvius, during my stay in San-Sebastiano-al-Vesuvio, the local public debate on risk was constant and, without any doubt, more frequent than assumed from the outside. The hierarchical structure, the plurality of knowledge, and the internal differences within any complex social system lead to tensions which, in turn, favour the elaboration of various social responses to risk: as Mary

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Douglas notes, members of social groups spend a lot of energy intellectualizing their commitment and, in parallel, politicizing the forces of nature (Douglas 1992, 104). Therefore, ideas about risk always result in frictions, but this result changes constantly and rapidly, reflecting the changing state of public and political debate. The inhabitants of Vesuvius know that there will be an eruption in the future and that it will probably be quite strong, but at the same time they believe that it is a distant event or, at most, one that can be dealt with thanks to scientific monitoring, which will make it possible to evacuate well in advance. This is probably a tragic illusion, but in the meantime, they subjectively accommodate dispositions to both know and not to know the volcanic risk. So they constantly defer any telling assessment and postpone the assumption of real responsibility, deploying various coping strategies to ward off thoughts of an ending. It is not a trick with which they conveniently decide to avoid a reality they are aware of. It is more of a form of scepticism that, as Cohen says, consists in being “vaguely aware of choosing not to look at the facts, but not quite conscious of just what it is we are evading” (Cohen 2008, 27). In this sense, knowing about the existence of the risk is not enough to push people to action. The reasons for this mechanism can be summarized with the words of Jean-Pierre Dupuy, according to whom “we do not believe in what we know, because we cannot imagine the consequences of what we know” (Dupuy 2006, 22). In other words, in the presence of an announced catastrophe, we are in the situation of “not believing our own eyes”, of victims who say, “it can’t be happening to me”. Nevertheless, in a scotomization mechanism there is not a denial or a refusal to engage in any dialogue about risk, but—on the contrary— there is a dynamic process that is highly sensitive to external conditions. In this regard (in principle at least), it lends itself easier to a public debate on potential hazards, the risks involved, and the possibility of action. From a risk reduction perspective, this suggests that to mitigate the Vesuvius risk, it is important to consider not only technical issues of safety and prevention, but also to consider the economic model that led to the present urbanization, the relationship that the community has with the area, its environment and the ecosystem, the ways cities are built and lived in, and the functioning of institutions (Storr et al. 2015;

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Gugg 2016). In other words, as a methodological approach, scotomization allows us to grasp just how much the public discourse on risk continuously oscillates between two opposing and irreconcilable adaptive strategies: knowing when it is time to be afraid, because we would die without any comprehension of terror; and forgetting that kind of fear in everyday life, because we could not live constantly in terror (Ciccozzi 2013, 134). Scotomization, therefore, helps us to identify forces put in place to establish certain individual and collective readings of the announced catastrophe. The area “at risk” is therefore an area of tensions (Brown et al. 2015), an “arena” (Olivier de Sardan 1995: 194) constantly renegotiated and reproduced by social actors, influenced by different forces that make the social processing of risk a performative field in perpetual mutation.

Notes 1. The oldest European image of Naples painted by Georg Hoefnagel in 1578 portrays it with the Vesuvius in the background (Ricciardi 2009, 180). 2. The Grand Tour was the traditional trip through France and Italy— in search of art, culture, and the roots of Western civilization— undertaken by mainly upper-class European young men of means, or those of humbler origin who could find a sponsor. The custom flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transport in the 1840s and was associated with a standard itinerary. It served as an educational rite of passage. 3. The red zone has been defined in 1995 and updated in 2013. It designates the area that will be affected by the most rapid and deadly events accompanying the eruption (earthquakes, flows of destructive pyroclastic material, poisonous gases, lava, and so on) and it corresponds to the area that will be completely evacuated in case of alert. The actual number of its inhabitants depends on the assumed eruptive scenario: nowadays, the one considered most probable predicts a so-called “subplinian eruption” like the one of 1631. However, other

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estimations predict more violent events that would concern a much larger area. Barnes, Katherine. 2011. Europe’s Ticking Time Bomb. Nature 473, May 12, 140–141. The village was totally evacuated, but once the immediate danger had passed, only one half of the inhabitants came back, because the others had their houses devastated by the lava. The village was fully reconstructed and expanded only a few years later. The mechanism of selecting and softening the memory of a painful event has already been identified by Halbwacks (1925), Todorov (2001) and Candau (2002) in their studies of collective memory where they discuss community cohesion in face of the fracture caused by the disaster. In the Italian anthropological literature researchers use this term with different shades of meaning: Signorelli (1992) for methodological matters (where the researcher falls into the error of excluding a part of the reality that she intends to investigate), Clemente (1999) in museology (against the rationalist anthropological museology that only in recent years has realized the importance of communication of emotion), and Miranda (2002) as interpretational category (to explain the phenomenon of unauthorized construction in hazardous areas). In this text I provide an interpretation in the frame of coping strategies against disasters as historical, social, and political product. For an inventory of defence mechanisms and coping strategies, see (Diehl et al. 1996, 130). The other two forms of neglect identified by Augé are the return (retour ) and the start (commencement or re-commencement ). Bachelard’s “original shell” is the intimate size of the house, which is both “our corner of the world” and “our first universe”. The “original shell” contains the daily times because they happen from day to day, but it is also what keeps all past experiences and future projections together as “through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days” (Bachelard 1994, 4–5).

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11 Keeping Disasters Under Control: Anticipation, Cyclones and Responses to Uncertainty Hannah Swee

One morning in early 2013, just a few months after I had first begun my fieldwork, I was sitting in a car with my informants, Ronnie and Madelin,1 driving down one of the winding roads along the Far North Queensland coast. Ronnie had brought a copy of the day’s newspaper and she sat reading through its pages in the front seat. As I was sitting behind her in the back, a headline suddenly caught my eye through the glare of the morning sun. The words “Cyclone Alert”, written in large, bold letters, appeared at the top of the page for a few fleeting seconds before Ronnie proceeded to turn the page again without a single acknowledgement of the words that had lain right in front of her. Several questions ran through my mind at that moment: Had Ronnie read the headline at all? Did a cyclone alert mean something to her? Did she feel a sense of panic from the alert but had chosen not to acknowledge it? H. Swee (B) Independent Researcher, Copenhagen, Denmark

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 ´ B. Switek et al. (eds.), Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83962-8_11

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So I asked her, “Did you see that headline on the previous page, the one about the cyclone alert?” Without hesitating she replied, “Yes, of course. But that’s normal for this time of the year”. Curious about her response, and as this was the first time I had seen a cyclone alert announced, I asked her “Do you think we should start preparing then?” After several seconds of laughter from both her and Madelin, Ronnie finally exclaimed, “Oh god no, there’s no need to start panicking about it yet!”. ∗ ∗ ∗ Every year Far North Queensland (FNQ), a region in the north-east of Australia, experiences a cyclone season between November and April, which is part of its annual cycle of weather. With each season approximately four cyclones are expected to form in the Coral Sea off its coast, and one or two of these are anticipated to make landfall. For the people who inhabit this region, who I refer to as “locals”, cyclones are experienced as regular, seasonal events that are associated with specific times of the year. As a result of this regularity, locals have a distinct sense of what “normal weather” entails and exactly what kind of weather is to be expected and anticipated at any one point in the year. The conversation above with Ronnie and Madelin reflects this anticipation and is just one of many conversations that I was involved in, where cyclones were referred to as “normal”. Taking this perception of the weather as my starting point, this chapter investigates how cyclones are anticipated in FNQ amidst these ideas of what “normal weather” entails. Through this discussion we shall see how a natural hazard can be both a specific event that disrupts the flow of life, yet also an event that occurs with a degree of frequency, providing a dependable and predictable pattern of seasonality to life (cf. Strauss and Orlove 2003). I use the term “anticipation” here to frame this chapter because it links and encompasses the variety of ways in which people referred to the kind of weather they expected in the future. As Kirsten Hastrup argues, “anticipation implies day-to-day forecasting of practical possibilities on the one hand, and a concern with more distant futures and possible scenarios on the other” (Hastrup 2013, 22). The discussion that ensues follows this

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definition by not only describing the central role that signs and observations in the natural environment play in influencing how people forecast and anticipate cyclones but also showing how anticipation is engaged within the temporal frames of short-term weather and long-term climate. The concept of anticipation, however, has been defined and discussed in other disciplines in the social sciences in a variety of different ways. For example, scholars in psychology (Poli 2014; Seligman et al. 2013) have focused on definitions of anticipation, arguing that it is shaped around a focus on the future, rather than being influenced or impacted by the past. Geographers (e.g. Hulme 2013) have also provided a wide range of insights on anticipation, particularly through studies that have explored the role of anticipation in climate modelling and the use of models and imagery in predicting climate change in the future. In the context of Australia, Neale’s (2016) work on bushfires describes the role of anticipation in climate modelling to calculate the risk of bushfire threats. In this chapter, my discussion on anticipation brings a complementary perspective to these other studies. As we shall see, anticipation will emerge as neither a social concept that is shaped solely by a focus on the future nor as a part of predicting the future through the production of models and images of climate change. Instead, my aim here is to provide an understanding of anticipation as it is experienced by those who live with the recurring threat of cyclones. This ethnographic approach is grounded in long-term fieldwork, a point which I will soon return to. The processes of anticipating cyclones and establishing an idea of what normal weather entails are crucial factors in the production of both a sense of certainty as well as uncertainty. As the term “uncertainty” is “vague and slippery” (Whyte 2005, 247), it is important to define it from the outset. I focus specifically on uncertainties that are outcomes of the anticipation of cyclones, and I follow Boholm’s contention that “uncertainty has to do with what is unpredicted in life” (Boholm 2003, 167), it “concerns the future, which might be a future that an individual can expect to experience personally … or a more distant one to be experienced by coming generations or by other living creatures in times to come” (ibid.). Living with this uncertainty and being constantly exposed to it demands response and action, and as we shall see, the people in this study

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asserted their agency in order to make the most of a bad situation. To elucidate this point, I build upon the body of literature concerned with responses to uncertainty (e.g. Dewey 1929; Giddens 1991; Jenkins et al. 2005; Whyte 1997). As Susan Whyte (1997) has suggested, anthropologists should not only focus on describing the experience of uncertainty but must also seek to understand how people proceed with their lives. She poses the following questions that should drive such anthropological enquiry: “How does undergoing (an affliction) become undertaking (a response)? What can you do to hedge uncertainty, to try to ensure a good outcome?” (Whyte 1997, 3). The aim of this chapter is thus not only to investigate how uncertainty develops in light of the anticipation of cyclones but also to show that people respond to this uncertainty in a highly pragmatic way. To investigate these facets of certainty and uncertainty, this chapter draws on findings from 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in FNQ, involving conversations, semi-structured interviews and participant observation with both men and women of varying ages, ethnicities, occupations, education and income levels. Informants were recruited in a wide variety of different ways: some lived in the close vicinity of where I was based during my fieldwork, others were part of community-based clubs or groups that I frequented, others I met through interactions sitting in cafes or at the local markets. None were recruited based on their interest in the weather, nor through any weather-related interest group. In fact, every individual who I knew in FNQ had something to say about the weather and cyclones regardless of their background, and in this chapter, it will become clear that the weather, cyclones and the subsequent seasonality of disaster threats are significant local experiences that are shared by all who live in this region. Fieldwork was conducted in Cairns, the semi-urban regional centre of FNQ, as well as Innisfail, Port Douglas, Yarrabah, Silkwood and Tully, which are all coastal dwelling communities in close proximity to Cairns. Long-term ethnographic fieldwork was central to the generation of data as well as to formulating the findings outlined in this chapter, providing a unique mode of access to the nuances of daily life. This access was particularly important, as the weather and cyclones are themes that were conveyed in conversations and activities that occurred throughout the

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year and were embedded in the daily practices of life in this region. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork, a range of insights could be generated, which shed light on how natural hazards and disasters are experienced as both “ordinary” and “extraordinary” by those who live with cyclones, and the creative methods that are utilised to respond to uncertainty and maintain a sense of control.

Shaping Anticipation: A Normal Year of Weather It was a morning in March, and I had woken to find that my face was covered in what appeared to be 100s of itchy, red bumps: an aggressive heat rash brought on by the sweltering heat of the night that had just passed. At the time, I was staying with Peg, a local in her 60s, and as I walked out to the kitchen for breakfast she took one look at my face and exclaimed, “Sweetheart, go out there in the rain and cover your face in that goodness!” Although I was a little sceptical, I decided to follow Peg’s advice and quickly dashed out into the garden. The rain was pelting down, and I was drenched within seconds. When I was back inside the house, Peg gave me strict instructions not to touch my face in order to allow the rain to dry naturally and be absorbed into my skin. This, she explained, was pivotal to allow my skin to fully obtain the healing benefits of the rain. Although she could not explain why or how rain had the ability to heal, it always seemed to help relieve her skin issues.2 Peg’s faith in the healing powers of the rain was just one of many ways in which she, like many others in FNQ, expressed and enacted their close relationship with the weather. Active engagements with the weather were seamlessly woven into daily practices. For example, I was struck by how common it was to keep a domestic rain gauge in the garden to track patterns of rainfall. For Peg, checking her rain gauge was a daily activity carried out after breakfast, and she explained that tracking rainfall patterns was something that she enjoyed doing for her own amusement. Some mornings, after a night of heavy rain, Peg’s practice of going out to the back garden to check her rain gauge was carried out with a degree of excitement and curiosity. During these mornings, as

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we ate breakfast together, Peg would explain to me that it felt like a lot of rain had fallen. She would give me her predictions on the amount and explicitly expressed her eagerness to find out whether they were correct. They always turned out to be approximately accurate, or close enough for Peg to feel reassured of her prediction skills. As the morning passed, Peg would either make her way to one of the multitude of community groups that she was involved in, or to morning tea meetings with friends, and if she was not going out, she would spend many more hours tending to her garden. It was while she was engaged in these activities that Peg would also take part in conversations with friends, neighbours or passers-by, whom she usually greeted when she was in the front garden of her home. During these conversations she would inevitably recount her findings from earlier in the day and evaluate them against findings from others who had also carried out the same activity. The discussion could ensue even if the other person did not have a rain gauge, since everyone had an opinion about the weather. Although Peg never kept a written record of her observations from her rain gauge, I knew of several other locals who were more meticulous in keeping track of their observations. For instance, Seb, a local in his forties, kept a weather diary in which he wrote the amounts of rain he observed in his rain gauge, a practice he proudly told me he had done for the past 25 years or more. Others, such as Niels, a local in his 60s, recorded observations from his rain gauge in a spreadsheet on his computer so that he could easily see and compare amounts of rainfall in days, months and years. While checking rain gauges and recording observations were never figured with any notion of seriousness, and were always explained as being enjoyable activities, the daily routine of tracking combined with the sheer frequency of discussions about the weather and observations about rainfall indicated that weather patterns were in fact also significant for locals in other ways. The weather, including cyclones and rainfall, universally affected everyone in this region, albeit to varying degrees. Everybody had an opinion about it, it framed conversations and, as we shall see in the ethnographic descriptions below, it shaped the activities of daily life. Indeed, the weather with its seasonality created a pattern that gave order to life. This is akin to Frida Hastrup’s (2011) findings in

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relation to the process of recovery after the 2004 Asian tsunami in Tamil Nadu, India. In her ethnography, Hastrup describes how the locality of a fishing village is produced through engagements with the weather and how the seasons create a pattern that gives order to life, both of which play central roles in the recovery process. As she argues, “the shifting weather conditions … played an important role in conditioning people’s orientation and activities in the local world. There is thus much point in paying attention to how the weather in pervasive ways defines the experience and practice of space” (Hastrup 2011, 63). While Hastrup’s focus on a single disaster event is different from that of this chapter, her analysis provides valuable insights into the role of the weather in shaping people’s lives in light of disasters. Drawing on this connection between the weather and disasters, I suggest that the reactions and behaviours associated with either the recovery from single disaster events or the response to living with multiple disaster threats are premised on pre-existing relationships to the weather. In FNQ, the recurring threat of cyclones and the way they are understood and spoken of by the people who live with them are absorbed into conversations and daily observations about the weather. Indeed, all aspects of the weather contained meanings that extended beyond the context of daily activities or a topic of “chitchat” or “small talk” (Fine 2007, ix; Golinski 2003, 17; Harley 2003, 103). Although what I have described above may not initially appear to be related to anticipation, understanding the way that everyday life is shaped by the weather is pivotal to the discussions that follow. It was within the conversations about the weather, that locals such as Peg discussed climatic trends, and the seemingly mundane morning observations from a rain gauge in the garden were endued with greater meanings. Within these daily conversations, a sense of what was considered normal weather, and what was expected to occur at certain times in the year, was established and debated. Elsewhere, I have discussed in greater detail how local observations in the environment are assembled together with other forms of information from a wide range of other sources, such as meteorological agencies, to form an individual’s knowledge of the weather and cyclones (Swee 2017). This is particularly important to note here as the use of

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rain gauges and conversations with others, should not be taken to indicate that locals did not trust the information provided to them by the authorities, but rather, that these activities were amongst many different modes through which information was sourced. FNQ has a tropical climate with only two seasons: a wet season that coincides with the cyclone season and a dry season. In the wet season, heavy rain is expected with average temperatures that hover around 31°C. Days are hot and humid, and nights are usually oppressive and sticky. The dry season, from May to October, offers a welcome respite with milder weather, sparse rainfall and less humidity. Nights are cool and days are pleasant, warm, sunny and an average temperature of 26°C is expected. In the wet season, large amounts of rain as well as cyclones are expected and anticipated. Cyclones are also always accompanied by an ensuing monsoon through, which brings heavy rainfall and often results in wide-spread flooding. Thus, amounts of rainfall could be concerning or reassuring depending on the amount and time of the year in which it occurs. Low amounts of rainfall in the wet season or monsoonal rain in the dry season were cause for concern, and the timing of the seasons could cause anxiety. Questions arose such as: When would the wet season begin? When would it end? Why is the wet season starting so late? Why is it starting so early? In response to these questions, locals such as Seb and Niels would rely upon their daily records to establish what they thought was normal, and also to assure themselves of the consistency of the weather by comparing seasons and years. As Seb explained, You go through a wet season and people sort of think, well we didn’t get much rain this season. But then I look back on my charts and find that it’s very much the same as other years anyway so it really balances out. I can’t remember exactly what it was last year but it’s always around the 2 metre mark. We’ve had up to 2.4 metres one year, and in a drought year, I think 2002, we had a very dry year … I think that year we only had 1.2 metres.

These perceptions of rainfall recall Strauss and Orlove’s assertion that “the regular sequence of the seasons often serves as an image for the

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steadiness of time’s passage and the permanence of the fundamental parameters of human existence” (Strauss and Orlove 2003, 3). In FNQ, the wet and dry seasons and the occurrence of rainfall and cyclones also constitute a specific pattern of weather events that are anticipated and associated with a specific time in the year. Thus, we can also understand them as markers of time that occur with dependable regularity. Yet, it is not only the changes in the weather that are indicators of the passing of time: the weather, through the anticipation of rainfall and cyclones, dictates and influences the timing of significant activities and events in the annual trajectories of individuals and communities. These activities and events include community festivals and weddings, which were usually planned to be held in the dry season when there was a much smaller chance of heavy rain and cyclones. Holiday plans were also influenced by the seasons. Susan, for example, a local in her 50s who had lived in Innisfail for more than 30 years, was originally from Singapore. Every year she would travel with her husband to Singapore for a holiday. However, they always planned their trip in order to be back in Innisfail before Christmas so they could be home just in case a cyclone hit. According to her, “It is hard to be away from home during the cyclone season just in case one hits and causes a lot of damage, then you can’t be around to sort it out or clear up. You might not even know if anything has happened to your home”. What Susan touches upon is a common consideration amongst locals, who anticipate the likelihood of cyclones making landfall during the wet season. Being at home was essential in order to prepare for and immediately address any damage that these events inflicted on their properties. Susan’s comments also reflect how cyclones are anticipated to occur only at certain points in time. Even though the cyclone season is between November and April, locals never considered that cyclones would actually make landfall until January. And while explanations as to why this was the case were never considered, the geoscientists whom I knew had explained to me that from January to April, the water in the Coral Sea is at its warmest, which provides more ideal conditions for cyclones to develop.

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Making Sense of Climate Change Such explanations by geoscientists and meteorologists, however, were not always in line with local understandings of cyclonic activity. Meteorologists and other geoscientists have noted that there is a trend in the development of cyclones in the Coral Sea that suggests a decrease in the frequency of cyclones but an increase in their strength due to the rising temperature of the sea.3 Studies in the geomorphology of the FNQ coast provide findings that back up this trend, indicating that climate change is occurring. But the conclusions that they make are also a “lived reality” (Crate and Nuttall 2009, 9) for residents in this region. Over the past ten years, four severe Category 4 or 5 cyclones have made landfall in the region—Yasi, Larry, Ita and Nathan—which is unprecedented in Western meteorological records. The geoscientists that I knew expressed a significant degree of concern over these cyclonic trends. However, I was surprised that such concern was never evident in my conversations with other locals, and that there was no mention of a change in the pattern of cyclonic activity, not even from those who had been through all four severe cyclones. Curious about why this should be the case, I began to ask people whether they associated the increased frequency of maximum-strength cyclones with climate change. The majority replied that cyclones were by their nature unpredictable and that they were used to the idea that some years would incur a greater number of severe cyclones than others. Another popular response was that “it’s just nature doing its cycle”. Thus, the changes linked by scientists to climate change were seen as simply part of the ebb and flow of natural cyclonic activity. FNQ as a region covers an expansive area, and the four severe cyclones in question did not make landfall in the exact same place. Nevertheless, all the locals that I knew had either gone through the uncertainty of a severe cyclone making a direct path towards their town, the feeling of narrowly missing a direct landfall, the actual experience of a cyclone making direct landfall on their homes, or they had a close friend or relative who had been affected by these cyclones. Even Madelin, a local in her 40s who was extremely ecologically conscious and a self-proclaimed environmental activist, was hesitant to describe the increased intensity

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of cyclones as climate change. She did acknowledge the broader issue of climate change, but she saw its scope as more global, affecting the world “out there” but not “here”. Climate change as a topic of concern has been heavily present in national and local media in FNQ. In Australia, other scholars have identified the centrality of climate change as one of national significance, with concerns that have ranged from diminishing snow cover to extended droughts (Anderson 2014; Gorman-Murray 2010). In 2013, a national election was held in Australia whereby the elected government had openly campaigned against the validity of climate change. Hence, climate change was a heated debate in the lead-up to the election,4 and discussions on climate change abounded as it became a hot topic in the public sphere. However, as Madelin’s case indicates, for locals it was still considered a problem that affected the outside world instead of the more intimate spaces of their local lives. For instance, locals would talk and express their concern about climate change in relation to floods in other Australian cities such as Brisbane, or bushfires in South Australia, describing what was happening in these places as “strange” and “scary”. Such reactions to climate change bring to mind sociologist Kari Norgaard’s (2011) study that investigates the ways in which a community in Western Norway understood climate change in relation to rising temperatures and delayed snowfall. In this community, Norgaard found that residents did not seem to be concerned about the effect of the climate change that they were experiencing directly even though they could acknowledge that climate change on a global scale was occurring. For locals in FNQ, the frequency of severe cyclones was attributed to the unpredictability and natural ebb and flow of cyclonic behaviour, rather than to a change that might affect the way they anticipate cyclones in the long-term future. These explanations employed by locals to explain the changes in cyclonic activity can also be considered mechanisms for grasping some kind of control as a response to the uncertainty of changing weather patterns. Interestingly, Rubow (2013) also observes this in her work on cyclones and climate change in the Cook Islands. She argues that people would say that they would “wait and see” what would happen since the

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action of waiting to see was within reach, whereas trying to comprehend an uncertain future with cyclones was not (Rubow 2013, 61). In FNQ, then, responding to the uncertainty of a future with more severe cyclones required explanations that made what was happening appear normal. The unpredictability of cyclones was something that locals knew and could relate to, and it meant that there was a chance that in the following ten years no severe cyclones would make landfall. However, climate change presented a new and unknown concept, which would mean accepting this increased frequency of severe cyclones as normal. Furthermore, these responses could also be seen as ways through which locals could create a sense of “ontological security” (Giddens 1991) as a mechanism of survival in a region where they are exposed to such changes in cyclonic activity. These responses provided a feeling of safety that was essential to continue living in this region, and that allowed locals to exercise their ability to be reflexive and actively negotiate the uncertainty of living with this changing climate of cyclones, because in their minds the uncertainty simply did not exist. Undoubtedly, it could also be inferred that the elected government’s stance against climate change may have also promoted a sense of scepticism towards it as a vague and highly debated concept. Yet, while people never expressed any scepticism towards climate change or described their explanations as ways of creating a sense of security or safety, it emerged clearly in their candid offhand comments about how accepting the frequency of severe cyclones would make it extremely difficult to continue living in FNQ. As Terry a local in his 30s had once told me, “if you never live in hope, then you can never live here. If you’re going to keep thinking that these Cat 5 cyclones are going to be the normal, then you wouldn’t be able to live here”.

Cyclone Absences While local reactions to climate change illustrated the way that anticipation effects uncertainty in relation to the increased frequency of severe cyclones, the anticipated occurrence of cyclones every year was also central in establishing a sense of certainty. The cyclone season in FNQ

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was approached and perceived as being a regular part of the annual weather cycle, a consequence of living in the tropics, and something that locals were used to. While it was often acknowledged that they could be destructive, the integration of the cyclones as an annual part of life gave way to perceptions of them as being “necessary”, “natural” and “good for the environment”. As many locals would describe it, the destruction was necessary for reconstruction that makes everything stronger.5 While four cyclones are predicted to develop each year in the Coral Sea, only one or two are expected to make landfall. Despite this regularity, there are also times when the anticipated number of landfalls per season is not met, and locals react in very distinct ways to these cyclone absences. This was particularly the case during my fieldwork in 2013. The cyclone season was soon coming to an end, and only two cyclones had developed so far with neither coming close to making landfall. One morning around the start of April, I had set off on my bicycle to a community craft group that I attended twice a week. The journey from my home close to the town centre to where the group met would usually take me no more than ten minutes on the flat, quiet roads of Cairns, and it would only be interrupted by, at most, a single traffic light. Despite the short commute, I always arrived at my destination either sweaty or drenched with rain. On this day, I was the former, and my skin shone from a thick layer of sweat and sunscreen. The group met in a building that resembled a large shed. It was a single room with three walls enclosed by a set of doors that were always kept open during the day. Several tables were scattered in the middle of the room, where the members of the group, all women, would sit and do various crafts. After saying hello to the women who were already there, I sought out one of the few large fans that were placed in the different corners of the room, and stood with my face in front of it to cool down and find some relief from the heat. Several minutes passed, and I started to feel a little more comfortable, so I left the cool breeze of the fan to join a few of the women at a table as they were enjoying coffee and biscuits. Referring to my previous few moments in front of the fan, the women began to talk about the heat, which they too admitted had been particularly unbearable that week—a fact that they attributed to the low amounts of rainfall experienced so far in the wet season and the lack

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of cyclones. Although it was common for the women to make such comments, on this day they took their comments a step further. In agreement, the women discussed the absence of cyclones and the lack of rainfall, expressing their concern about these absences with comments such as, “I kind of wish a cyclone would happen, just a small one of course, so, you know, we’d get a bit more rain” and “This season has been such a quiet, uneventful wet season, so dry, hopefully we get some heavy rain soon, maybe even a late cyclone. Yasi happened late in the season so there’s still a possibility for it. I wouldn’t want a Category 5 though, but Category 1 or 2 would be nice”. These categories refer to the magnitude of the cyclone at any given time6 based on maximum wind speed. Cyclones come in different strengths from a Category 1, which is often described as a big storm, to a Category 5, which is considered severe and extremely destructive. During my fieldwork, people would refer to cyclones Yasi, Larry, Ita and Nathan, which were all Category 4 or 5 cyclones that caused significant damage in the region. While I never heard of anyone expressing a desire for a Category 5 cyclone, I noticed that the sense of concern that the women above highlighted appeared more frequently as the month of April progressed, and a general feeling of unease seemed to grow amongst all the locals I knew as the days went by. Then, as May began, a cyclone alert was announced and a heightened state of excitement emerged as everyone was eagerly anticipating whether this alert would indeed develop into a landfall incident. Through these responses from locals, FNQ presents an interesting way of framing a hazard or potential disaster threat. Instead of being out of the ordinary (e.g. Adams 2013; Simpson 2013), it is the absence of cyclones that is considered abnormal. This point can be understood in relation to the way that other anthropologists have approached the concept of absence and the power that such absences may have (e.g. Bille et al. 2010a; Engelke 2007). As Bille et al. (2010b) state, “the power of absence … consists in the ability of such absences to imply and direct attention towards presence. Thus, phenomena may have a powerful presence in people’s lives precisely because of their absence” (Bille et al. 2010b, 4). Drawing on this notion of absence, I argue that in the context of cyclones in FNQ, the power of absence exists not only

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within this paradox of presence but also in relation to the anticipation of what is normal. In other words, the power of this absence stems from the locals’ pre-existing ideas of what a normal amount of cyclonic activity entails. Despite being destructive agents and environmental hazards, cyclones are considered part of the expected weather pattern for the year. Thus, I suggest the anticipation that one or two cyclones would make landfall became the benchmark of “normal”, and anything less or more was considered abnormal. Hence, as I argued earlier, the regularity of the seasons and the anticipated occurrence of a certain number of cyclones gives order and certainty to life, and by analysing these absences, we begin to see uncertainty emerge through the concern that people express when actual cyclonic activity is different from what is anticipated.

Conclusion Through the ethnographic cases presented, this chapter has traced the variety of ways in which cyclones are anticipated in Far North Queensland. Central to the discussion has been an understanding of what normal weather entails at different points in the year, from anticipating the weather on a daily basis by reading the amounts of rainfall in a household rain gauge, to the expectation of one or two cyclones making landfall every year. What has emerged through the different modes of anticipation is the sense of normality and stability that the weather provides, which is in contrast to the more common understanding of forecasting being characterised by uncertainty (Petersen and Broad 2009). Indeed, in FNQ hazards and disaster threats occur so regularly that they provide a sense of certainty in their recurrence, and as we have seen through the locals in this study, exposure to the cyclone season has resulted in a context where the absence of cyclones can conjure feelings of uncertainty as these absences are considered abnormal. This uncertainty was not only apparent in a particular cyclone season but also extended to the much longer term prospect of anticipating cyclones in a changing climate. While local people certainly understood the concept of climate change, and in the majority of cases agreed on its occurrence,

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this was only in relation to places other than FNQ. In other words, it was happening but just not where they lived. This, I have argued, is a response to the uncertainty that climate change conjures, and is a pragmatic response to the reality of living with cyclones and being exposed to frequent hazards and disaster threats. Through such pragmatic responses, the local people in this chapter demonstrate how the anticipation of disaster can be woven into the fabric of everyday life, mediating between the ordinary and the extraordinary events that cyclones pose. Along the way, we have seen how the expectation of cyclones has been normalised. However, this normalisation does not imply a desensitisation to the high-level of risk regularly confronted by FNQ communities. Rather, what has normalised is the recognition of the inevitable intrusiveness of cyclones and the cultural productivity engendered by this inevitability.

Notes 1. All names as they appear in this chapter are pseudonyms. 2. The power of rain has also been identified by Young (2005) in her study in the Western Desert of Australia, where, for the Aboriginal communities who inhabit this region, rain produces a distinct odour when it comes into contact with the dry ground, and it is this odour that signals greenness and growth. Such interactions with rain also recall Low and Hsu’s (2007) account of interactions with wind. 3. These changes have also been observed in the Atlantic Ocean with incidences of hurricanes. Hurricanes are the same phenomena as cyclones, however they occur in the Northern Hemisphere as opposed to cyclones which occur in the Southern Hemisphere. 4. Campaigning for a national election in Australia begins many months prior to the actual election day. 5. This refers to the rebuilding of infrastructure (for example, better roads and stronger buildings), as well as the regeneration and growth of native flora as cyclones are also effective in removing various species of weeds.

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6. The category of a cyclone often changes many times throughout its existence.

References Adams, V. 2013. Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Anderson, D. 2014. Endurance: Australian Stories of Drought. Collingwood: CSIRO Publishing. Bille, M., F. Hastrup, and T. Soerensen, eds. 2010a. An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss. New York: Springer. ———. 2010b. Introduction: An Anthropology of Absence. In An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss, ed. M. Bille, F. Hastrup, and T. Soerensen, 3–22. New York: Springer. Boholm, Å. 2003. The Cultural Nature of Risk: Can There Be an Anthropology of Uncertainty? Ethnos 68 (2): 159–178. Crate, S., and M. Nuttall. 2009. Introduction: Anthropology and Climate Change. In Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions, eds. S. Crate and M. Nuttall, 9–36. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Dewey, J. 1929. The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relations of Knowledge and Action. New York: Minton, Balch and Company. Engelke, M. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fine, G.A. 2007. Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Golinski, J. 2003. Time, Talk, and the Weather in Eighteenth-Century Britain. In Weather, Climate, Culture, eds. S. Strauss and B. Orlove, 17–38. Oxford: Berg. Gorman-Murray, A. 2010. An Australian Feeling for Snow: Towards Understanding Cultural and Emotional Dimensions of Climate Change. Cultural Studies Review 16 (1): 60–81.

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Harley, T. 2003. Nice Weather for the Time of Year: The British Obsession with the Weather. In Weather, Climate, Culture, eds. S. Strauss and B. Orlove, 103–118. Oxford: Berg. Hastrup, F. 2011. Weathering the World: Recovery in the Wake of the Tsunami in a Tamil Fishing Village. New York: Berghahn Books. Hastrup, K. 2013. Anticipating Nature: The Productive Uncertainty of Climate Models. In The Social Life of Climate Change Models: Anticipating Nature, eds. K. Hastrup and M. Skrydstrup, 1–29. New York: Routledge. Hulme, M. 2013. How Climate Models Gain and Exercise Authority. In The Social Life of Climate Change Models: Anticipating Nature, eds. K. Hastrup and M. Skrydstrup, 30–44. New York: Routledge. Jenkins, R., H. Jessen, and V. Steffen, eds. 2005. Managing Uncertainty: Ethnographic Studies of Illness, Risk and the Struggles for Control . Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Low, C., and E. Hsu. 2007. Introduction. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (S1): 1–17. Neale, T. 2016. Burning Anticipation: Wildfire, Risk Mitigation and Simulation Modelling in Victoria, Australia. Environment and Planning A 48 (10): 2026–2045. Norgaard, K.M. 2011. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. Cambridge: MIT Press. Peterson, N., and K. Broad. 2009. Climate and Weather Discourse in Anthropology: From Determinism to Uncertain Futures. In Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions, eds. S. Crate and M. Nuttall, 70–86. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Poli, R. 2014. Anticipation: A New Thread for the Human and Social Sciences? Cadmus 2 (3): 23–36. Rubow, C. 2013. Enacting Cyclones: The Mixed Response to Climate Change in the Cook Islands. In The Social Life of Climate Change Models: Anticipating Nature, eds. K. Hastrup and M. Skrydstrup, 57–76. New York: Routledge. Seligman, M.E.P., P. Railton, R.F. Baumeister, C. Sripada, and C. 2013. Navigating Into the Future or Driven by the Past. Perspectives on Psychological Science 8 (2): 119–141. Simpson, E. 2013. The Political Biography of an Earthquake: Aftermath and Amnesia in Gujarat, India. London: Hurst and Company. Strauss, S., and B. Orlove. 2003. Up in the Air: The Anthropology of Weather and Climate. In Weather, Climate, Culture, eds. S. Strauss and B. Orlove, 3–14. Oxford: Berg.

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Swee, H. 2017. Assembling Local Cyclone Knowledge in the Australian Tropics. Nature and Culture 12 (1). Whyte, S.R. 1997. Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. Uncertain Undertakings: Practicing Health Care in the Subjunctive Mood. In Managing Uncertainty: Ethnographic Studies of Illness, Risk and the Struggles for Control , eds. R. Jenkins, H. Jessen, and V. Steffen, 245–264. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Young, D. 2005. The Smell of Greenness: Cultural Synaesthesia in the Western Desert. Etnofoor 18 (1): 61–77.

12 Commentary: Interpretive Risk Ethnography as a Means of Understanding Risk Problems: Encounters with the Ordinary-Extraordinary and What Comes After? Karen Henwood

Introduction Risk study is a broad church spanning applied physical and natural sciences (especially engineering), different social science traditions and disciplines (psychology and economics, sociology and anthropology) and increasingly the arts and humanities (Welchman 2008). Running counter to this is a blindspot where, for some scientists, practitioners and scholars, there is a one-to-one mapping of the very idea of risk onto modernist assumptions and ideals about what constitutes scientific expertise as a skilled practice. The modern idea of risk—as something to be identified so that its damaging effects can be controlled has been described as the forensic approach to risk (Lupton 1999). It fits hand in glove with the modernist scientific paradigm that risk researchers K. Henwood (B) School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 ´ B. Switek et al. (eds.), Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83962-8_12

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quite commonly find themselves working within: a seemingly universal, standardised and calculative techno-scientific research approach leading to the high dependency it requires on utilising objective measurement, modelling and predictive techniques. As we are also reminded in the introduction to this volume, such modernist science has become heavily relied upon society-wide in the case of risk, when such formalistic methods of risk assessment and analysis are deemed to be essential to more applied work such as developing decision-making tools for policymaking, along with other procedures and techniques for assisting in risk management. There are now, however, some excellent accounts showing how risk can be understood and studied in ways that transcend overly rigid divisions between scientific formalism and more interpretive ways of approaching the idea of risk, its problem focus, forms of inquiry and modes of analysis (see, e.g. Fischhoff and Kaqdvary 2011). These accounts suggest that the persistence of the aforementioned blindspot is unhelpful. In decentring the representation of risk research as typically scientific in such a formalistic way, one way is to highlight, as in this volume, how it is indeed possible to demonstrate and, at times, elucidate—what can be so valuable about ethnographic case studies and analyses of risk that are more interpretive in style. Therefore, in this closing chapter-cum-commentary, before moving to the task proper (commenting on the three preceding chapters), I first briefly discuss the promise held by the knowledge-making methodology outlined in the introduction. The remaining part is then divided into four sections. In section I, I start with the work of one of the intellectual forebears (Mary Douglas) of the tradition of risk and anthropology research and of using a cultural approach as its analytical lens. The purpose of so doing is to highlight how she conjoins usually disparate themes: scientific formalism and cultural intelligibility1 as, respectively, the less and more characteristic elements of interpretive risk research and analysis. I see this as a useful entry point to thinking about possible ways of transcending such divisions, and because it offers a means of answering critiques of standalone qualitative risk projects. I believe that these critiques are important to address at a time when there is considerable momentum behind the popular assertion that mixed quantitative and qualitative methods are generally to be preferred.

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Next, in section II, I turn to more recent research on a highly contemporaneous, substantive risk topic: global environmental change, and the body of scientific evidence pertaining to it, that has made decarbonising the UK energy system (and indeed, national energy systems across the globe) into a priority matter in public policy. The recent interdisciplinary social scientific project I go on to highlight does not yet appear in scholarly monographs as a current exemplar of work in the risk and culture research tradition. But, as with Douglas, it represents itself in a non-binary way as both scientifically robust and richly interpretive. My reason for including this quite detailed and lengthy section is as an anchor point to the argument I wish to make about the importance of clarity in problem formation in empirical inquiries, noting that this is a significant characteristic of interdisciplinary risk research. A key reference point is how designing the study so that it enables the emergence along the way of intelligibility-focussed research activities (here opening up diverse public values for guiding reflection and decisionmaking) allows for insights to be built from the research team’s bespoke methodological approach. For this project, it is more important to meet the challenges involved in coming to see what is usually hidden when overarching narratives already configure where the problems lie. Rather than draw on Douglas’s formal model of culturally patterned group and institutional responses to risk, the team formally built in systematic reflections on uncertainties about how a set of core public values questioned assumptions about public acceptance of risk and change. In Section III, I move on to make specific comments on three chapters: by Janine Su, Hannah Swee and Giovanni Gugg showing how each one takes questions of intelligibility, of the kind that are practiced in interpretive ethnography, into a space where it is possible to further develop the study of risk problems. Consequently, I harness support for my claim that it is possible to conduct well-focussed, problem-oriented empirical inquiries, and how it involves being responsive to wider efforts that have been made to further methodological exploration and discussion of epistemic practices in risk research (see, e.g. Henwood 2019; Henwood et al. 2018; Olofsson and Zinn 2019). Finally, in section IV I seek to bring my commentary to a close-by re-contextualising discussion about how to navigate or bridge scientific

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formalism and cultural intelligibility within more critical commentaries about the kind of qualitative research and analytics that feature in the volume and pragmatic work in real-world risk study that I have introduced and that is more closely linked to a policymaking agenda.

On the Promise of Interpretive Research Methodologies I write this chapter-cum-commentary as a qualitative social scientist working in close association over a long period of time, with the Understanding Risk group at Cardiff University. Admittedly, the quantitative–qualitative debate can churn in unhelpful ways. Nonetheless, there is a durability and rigour to treatments of it that diverge from prescriptive, programmatic statements that are wedded to a predilection for grand theorising and, instead, go on to grapple with ways of building up a pragmatic research approach to pursuing empirical inquiries. I will show in this chapter how such treatments can be honed by clear, reflexive thinking about society-wide problems that have scientific, policy and/or popular currency but lack solutions. My main purpose, however, is to address how pragmatic approaches to social inquiries are channelled through careful interpretive work and welltargeted analysis. Taking such an approach differs from the standard text-book ways of teaching methods as recipes to be followed without regard for what qualitative inquiry and fieldwork teaches you to do: ´ think on your feet. More important than this, Switek and Abramson’s introduction to Ordinary Extraordinary provides some excellent ways of grasping what is at stake in generating qualitative understanding of risk using interpretive research methodologies, especially when their way of tackling studied life is enriched by ethnographic ways of working, and an interpretive approach is adopted that transcends overly rigid divisions between scientific formalism and cultural intelligibility. The approach the editors take in their introduction has a contemporary resonance among qualitative analysts working to bridge— or hyphenate—objectivist and subjectivist ways of bringing culture into science and vice versa. As well as stating that categorising and

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controlling as a means of establishing paradigms is insufficient for capturing knowledge-making, they elucidate how what they call their analytic springboard (Introduction, this volume) for knowledge-making considers reasoned judgements where there is no intention to deploy or critique unmediated truth claims, but neither are knowledge claims without warrant and legitimacy. This is particularly the case in the volume when analysed situations bring centre stage the challenges involved for study participants faced with the omnipresence (or ordinariness) of extraordinariness (counter-intuitiveness) of finding ways of living with risk while simply acting to maintain their life projects or expand them. Expanded forms of life-maintaining activity includes collective forms of identity making as members of local communities and civic organisations, and more or less emplaced or transient place-making projects. In broaching the question of how risks are faced in the course of such life- (and indeed world-) making projects, the editors suggest that they are not simply for enhancement of a normative sense of self. Rather they are experienced and understood, decisions are made and acted upon, in ways that take into account different moral codes and solutions to social, economic, political and environmental problems. As their analytic springboard proposes, modes of being that are ordinary (in the sense of being ever present) but extraordinary (in that they pose challenges to the fulfilment of ordinary desires, needs and wants) are construed according to various logics within a multiplicity of worlds, or social fields. The insistence that living out daily life and life projects is not a simple matter of enhancing the self in relation to norms brings the editors’ volume into a common discussion space with other sociological anthropological work that is keen to argue for the very idea of researching in a more contextual way shaped by an ethnographic imagination (Hammersley and Atkinson 2019). A “messy meshwork” (Introduction, this volume) of material conditions and semiotic processes influencing how it is possible to account for life’s conditions and experiences of difficulty is an often expressed idea. Moreover, it is one that is capable of capturing socio-historical processes and socio-cultural patterns at play in everyday interactions and conversations. Past experiences and knowledges (e.g. embodied memories) and imagined (expected/possible/desired) futures

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make these experiences part of extended social, spatial and temporal horizons (scapes and imaginaries). As immediate activities of living in present worlds are narratively performed or storied, it is possible to consider their potential consequential effects through close-up analysis, involving textual examination, of more surprising (ordinary-extraordinary) acts of voluntarism, intentionality or social cohesiveness. Ideas fostering techniques such as these help with forensically teasing apart the implications of different storylines. Another way to enter the social-material and socio-cultural worlds of experiencing subjects is to attend to how they are configured as physically emplaced and shaped in relations with human and non-human objects. Dicks, Henwood and Housley (2016) propose that there is room for expansively unpacking the idea of investigating messy meshworks in research spanning interpretive, analytic and cultural ethnography in their own editorial reflections on contributions since the first publication (in 2001) of the journal Qualitative Research. Ordinary Extraordinary’s analytic springboard provides a methodology for knowledge-making that does not aim in any simple way to reflect a pre-existing reality outside and beyond the worlds of everyday conduct, by formally (and momentarily) assessing them through objective measurements of the errors, biases and other hidden fragments of lived experience. This point of epistemic difference is commonly made in wider work embracing the ethnographic imagination. A more specific aim, made achievable by the analytical leverage of the approach taken in this volume, is to complicate and inform understanding of a variety of manifestations of everyday risk practices. An important complication, in this regard, concerns the now well-problematised, and indeed wellunderstood, neoliberal formations which reduce living with risk to a tool of self-enhancement and more emollient form of disciplinary power. Furthermore, notwithstanding its considerable analytical promise, the volume’s ambition is not ultimately to provide directly applicable futureshaping techniques in the form of models of what works in situ, as if any such practice can be used to forcefully solve problems of the day. At times, the volume does home in on explicit topics, such as risk, coping and resilience, that could have been approached in these ways: i.e. as problems of neoliberal subjectivation and forceful application of

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prototypical knowledge. However, the editorial refrains from going down either of these well-trodden paths.

Approaching Risk as Culture: Cultural Theory’s Formalism and the Interpretivist Knowledge Aesthetic Ordinary Extraordinary is an ethnographic excursion into risk in everyday life which most closely resembles studies that take up an anthropological perspective (Boholm 2015) and work in the tradition of investigating risk as culture (Douglas 2002). Excellent coverage already exists of the early and sustained intellectual provenance and developments of such work, extending to the start of the C21 (see, e.g. Caplan 2000). Caplan’s edited volume sets the scene by debating Douglas’s contributions along with those by other social theoreticians (mainly Beck and Giddens) who have written extensively about the implications of risk in late modernity as a means of understanding changing societies, while critiquing the relative lack of engagement by these prominent social scientists with Douglas’s work (see also Introduction). Where there has been some significant engagement with Douglas’s approach to studying risk from a cultural perspective, one commentary is that it has been overly captured by the popular, replicable way of classifying institutional modes of risk meaning-making around four explanatory cultural types— called the grid-group model (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982). In this work, risk as culture is “as much about method as theory, and cultural theory is itself a theory which she (Douglas) sees as both objective and predictive” (Caplan, op cit, 12). For Douglas and Wildavsky, adopting this approach is justifiable as a means of avoiding seemingly being forced into an unscientific posture given the policy requirements in this regard, and given how actuarial procedures of risk assessment do not help illuminate the value assumptions involved in all modes of assessment. Their alternative has been developed as a way of reasoning about risk not by insisting on using

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formal decision criteria to force agreement, but as a way of encouraging risk to be seen “as a point product of knowledge about the future and consent about desired prospects” (Douglas and Wildavsky, op cit, 5; Caplan, op cit, 8). In this regard, it is important to keep in mind how the grid-group model is a way of following through Douglas’s early preoccupation with risk and values that has been just as widely disseminated. This preoccupation is with how common values and fears—along with the choices made about how to live—are marked in many ways by a risk portfolio (Caplan 2000, 9). Indeed, this work could even be seen to be prescient in its support for current ideals for public policy and public engagement and the role of enhanced dialogue about public values for socially acceptable decision-making. Douglas made high-profile interventions as a stalwart of interpretive risk research within anthropology, which enabled her to follow her conviction that “risk taking and risk aversion, shared confidence and shared fears, are part of the dialogue on how best to organise social relations” (Douglas 1966, 8 quoted in Caplan, 9, italics added). Thus far, however, this aspect of Douglas’s work has not been taken up in a concerted way due, perhaps, to the weight of reactions against its perceived, inherent conservatism. Douglas’s work in and of itself has not had the effect of moving researchers who adopt the risk as culture approach towards her wider programmatic vision in favour of building a system of agreed moral standards for culture building. Subsequently, it is difficult to draw any conclusions as to whether, through such dialogue, cultural groups in society show “our capacity to cope resiliently with risk” (Douglas and Wildavsky, op cit, p.15, quoted in Caplan op cit, 8). Douglas’s work was first published and popularised as a social scientific approach to risk “supplying a social dimension to debates that have previously been dominated either by statisticians or psychologists, and the important insight that perceptions of risk correlate with forms of social organisation and control of social groups” (Fardon 1999,165–166; quoted by Caplan, op cit, 12, italics added). But, once again, this may be to undervalue the potentials offered to understanding risk problems in ways that are afforded by anthropological and cognate work. Is supplying a social dimension really best explained within academic debates and applied policy that utilise risk perception as an applied technique to

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indicate where social forms and groups can be used in service of prior institutional goals? The downside is that it may simply bolster the dependence on quantitative logics and practices of correlating variables X and Y for deriving objective knowledge and scientific prediction. It fails to engage with the significant challenge of understanding the interpretative processes of meaning creation by the many who are participants in social processes, and whose epistemic practices may also offer resources for understanding and responding to risk problems. In bringing this discussion of risk as culture to ahead, I wish to draw briefly on writing about anthropology and the study of everyday life. Such work is a feature of sociological debates over its ways of approaching the everyday as a key concept which pays sustained attention to understanding onto-epistemological issues and identifies some of the methodological questions arising from this. One key consideration in this regard is how “positive knowledge of the everyday must be constantly deferred” (Schilling 2009, 196). Here, there is a suggestion that there may be problems with the idea of creating positive knowledge. Could this get to the heart of the above discussions about the need to balance a concern for scientific formalism and cultural intelligibility in the interpretive study of risk problems? Positive knowledge is not simply what scientific work has always been about. Rather, setting it out as something that needs to be constantly deferred engages with the possibility that one might set out on poorly conceived pathways while seeking to produce warranted, legitimate, credible knowledge of the kind that is a matter of concern in Ordinary Extraordinary. Proposals for work to be done here include giving consideration to occasions where “new conditions require the re-evaluation of objects of study” (Schilling 2009, 195) and seeing potentials in knowledge-making that accommodates “concepts disappearing to their vanishing point” (Shilling, op cit, 196). What are these suggestions driving towards? Probably this is a situation where it is still necessary to realise that, while objectivity and prediction are undoubtedly powerful scientific signifiers, as formal scientific criteria these characteristics do not exhaust the possible, or most suitable, guide-points for qualitatively minded, empirical risk social scientific work. In the above discussion (and reflecting earlier influential work, see, e.g. Rayner 1990), I have questioned whether promoting the grid-group

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model as an alternative to actuarial risk decision-making offers sufficient understanding of ways of reasoning with moral values by social groups within everyday epistemic cultures. Accordingly, there is reason to doubt that it can support programmatic visions for values-based risk assessments or provide guidance for increasing the cultural intelligibility of institutional risk response. There is also the question of to what extent does it—or the concept of positive knowledge more generally—build on the strengths of a different kind of knowledge aesthetic deriving from anthropological, ethnographic and interpretive social scientific work.

The Programmatics and Pragmatics of Inquiry Objectives: Activities of Problematisation and Cultural Intelligibility One of my key concerns in the foregoing discussions has been with identifying and transcending unhelpfully rigid assumptions and divisions, such as between scientific formalism and cultural intelligibility practices; and also to remark on the importance of developing the contemporary portfolio of skilled pedagogy and practical inquiry methods of risk researchers. The former point is already long recognised by those working in the field of risk studies (Pidgeon et al. 1992). In particular, it has been taken up by researchers who are working on what are considered to be today’s grand societal challenges and investigating important realworld problems. Skilled pedagogy and investigative practice can involve, at their heart, promoting more reflexive understanding of the activity of problematising and how it is intrinsically linked to finding ways of tackling and remedying problems which—in the case of applied/policyled inquiry—will in all likelihood already have been clearly defined or framed (Butler et al. 2015). Simultaneously, generating understandings in the course of research (e.g. by deploying an emergent- as well as an anticipatory study design) is important to conducting investigations with a clearly defined problem framing. This can be a very worthwhile contribution of academic risk research, although efforts here can be constrained by disciplinary interest, styles and boundary-keeping.

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To start the processes of exemplifying the above points by thinking in a more detailed way, it is helpful to make use of a well-reported example (see references throughout this sub-section to Pidgeon, Butler et al’s inquiries) of how to work outside the constraints of narrow disciplinary blinkers and overcome the blindspot involved when research is represented in a binary way as either scientifically formalistic or richly interpretive. On the one hand, a policymaking agenda sets the framing for this UKRI funded/UKERC2 supported programme of research: the need to know what will be required of different stakeholders involved in making the move to decarbonise our economy and potentially transforming our society in quite fundamental ways along the way. A key question to answer from the policy perspective on this issue is: what will the public accept by way of new energy sources and infrastructure, and any subsequent changes to the way we fuel our homes, travel etc.? To elucidate some of the complexities of this issue, the Cardiff University research team brought centre stage the role played by deep-seated cultural values in shaping such public perceptions of risk associated with energy systems change and, as a corollary of this, how members of the public were able to come to judgements about the social acceptability of possible pathways to changing the energy system. The research team initially produced a synthesis of findings about how such culturally situated, interpretive resources were drawn upon to formulate a range of committed viewpoints. From this, they went on to discuss what would be beneficial for policymakers to understand about the indeterminacies and uncertainties involved, given what had been established about the points of view of members of the public who had been engaged and enlivened when confronted with a fuller than usual range of possible core values, rather than being presented with an exclusively scientific technological agenda for change. There is a lot to unpack about the arguments in this coherent line of work that also contains much nuance, regarding its multiple concerns about how to inquire into complex societal risk problems and which, in this exemplary case, are substantively associated with the need to move to a low carbon economy in response to scientific consensus about the ramifying consequences of environmental change and natural resource depletion. As is well-understood, the science case does not stand-alone:

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at stake is a wider nexus of societal and technical problems that needs to be approached in spatially distributed, socially equitable and recognisably just ways (Pidgeon et al. 2014; Jenkins et al. 2016). Accordingly, it is important to home in on some of the seemingly intractable challenges involved. In the case of the chosen study exemplar, this is done by combining into one lens a focus on cultural values and public acceptability of risk to deal with systems level challenges in ways that enables policymakers and energy practitioners working on energy transition pathways to take steps towards a less technocratic style of decisionmaking about the mix of energy sources. A strength of the approach lies in showing a way to somehow align academic research with the responsibilities bearing down on policymakers to maintain energy security, affordability and sustainability. Running alongside, as a parallel development with this work on social acceptability and public values for wider systems change, investigations have also been conducted into the dynamics of systems change at more micro-levels of everyday life, where the focus of the activity of problematisation shifts to the intensification of mundane energy use and demand. Here, significant understanding has developed of the everyday entanglements between energy use practices, societal norms and common-sense ideals about how to live a good life that also make moving to lower intensity carbon usage more difficult society-wide (Henwood et al. 2016). Taken together, these studies of the low carbon energy transition pose questions about a complex, wide-ranging set of concerns spanning macro and micro-levels, which continue to be high in contemporary relevance. Indeed, while variously focussed, all these concerns could warrant being placed even more firmly centre stage in view of social and political questions arising in the context of debating the climate emergency, in particular, declarations about the efforts that need to be made to “make change happen – and quickly”.

On a More Methodological Footing … I propose to return to some of these issues later in this commentary but, for now, move onto a more specific methodological footing. The public

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values and energy systems change study explicitly stated its methodological priorities and made further observations about its approach and methods as follows. Overall, it sets out to conduct a “synthesis analysis … in order to reveal the core (cultural) values that underlie public values and perspectives on energy system transformation” (Butler et al. 2015 citing Parkhill et al. 2013). As an intellectual approach, it argues for countering knowledge practices associated with conventional expertled approaches in governance research and/or applied research for policy by flagging up the programmatic stance advanced by scholars in the social study of science and technology. Science and technology studies can (indeed some might say typically) prioritise prototypical knowledgemaking, and I will have more to say about issues arising from an apparent shift to forceful prototype thinking in knowledge-making later. However, the public values and energy systems change research shaped its own relation to this particular cross-disciplinary sphere of work (spanning society, science and technology) in a number of ways. It did this by developing understanding of deeper cultural values, not only in terms of their involvement in problem framing but as a means of augmenting how a public lens could be used in support of the practice of generating “alternatives to energy policy framings for understanding and decisionmaking” and the goal of helping to “anticipate outcomes and build resilience to uncertainty” (Butler et al. 2015, 666). It also made explicit a contrast between “statistical and modelling base approaches, which generally focus on quantification of uncertainty” and “typologies and definitions that lend themselves more to qualitative analysis” (Butler et al. 2015, 666). Using the taxonomies it identified for conceptualising uncertainty gave depth to understanding what the public involved in the study perceived as contestable and/or as opportunities for achieving a societally normative form of acceptable or desired future. Interestingly, none of these points about methodological approach, knowledge-making technique, and use of quantitative versus qualitative methods tap into ones that have been important among qualitative researchers taking up a cultural analysis lens (Shotter 1993) as a means of establishing their inquiry objectives’ and addressing their ontological and epistemological intelligibility. Adopting a cultural lens, or entering a

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cultural discussion space, is a way of shaping a researcher’s (or collaborative research team’s) activity of problematisation, selection of focal issues, conceptualisation of phenomena and so on, by providing an overriding diagnosis of why things matter. Moreover, it provides a cohesive thread running through the highly popularised synthesis of published literature on qualitative social science research with antecedents in, and that is explicitly inclusive of, current versions of interpretive ethnography (Denzin and Lincoln 2011). Shotter’s idea about researching culture concerns the importance of how this affords a “third way” of knowing: i.e. one that takes the form of showing respect for who we are, locating ourselves in relation to those around us, and seeing this as a means of developing practical knowledge in ways that bring in the wider (physical and social) environment to our sensibilities towards all kinds of things. But both of these fields (social psychology of cultural politics in the case of Shotter) and interpretive sociology of lived experienced and everyday life (in the case of Denzin and Lincoln) can be unwieldy in their scope and style of argument in favour of methodological discussions. The lack of linkage is thus explicable between what I have set out as constituting exemplary inquiries into deep culture and public values in the context of social acceptable energy systems change and intriguing (Shotter) or influential/popular (Denzin and Lincoln) strands of work. It is important to avoid adopting epistemological and ontological arguments that give rise to poorly focussed methodologies for investigating particular substantive issues. Potentially, this can be a problem in the field of risk study where researchers can avail themselves of a diversity of specialist conceptual resources and its problem focus is shaped by interdisciplinarity. More notable, perhaps, is a lack of any direct engagement of the deep culture: public values study with socio-cultural risk research (e.g. Tulloch and Lupton 2003), ethnographic style work and commentary on risk within the social sciences (Horlick Jones et al. 2003), and interpretive risk research (for a succinct summary of the latter see Pidgeon et al. 2006, 102–104). In these risk fields, the flexible use of nuanced narrative framings and conceptual lenses is well advanced both as part of practicing reflexivity in social science investigations (Henwood 2008; Henwood et al. 2008; Henwood and Pidgeon 2003) and because such reflexivity is part and parcel of conducting interdisciplinary studies of locally

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experienced and institutional life. By implication, establishing intelligibility becomes important in a constantly turning, ground-shifting, ever-responsive landscape. One way of doing this is by paying particular attention to emergent socio-cultural dynamics that both the researcher and the researched have to navigate—something that is also highly characteristic of the traditions of longitudinal qualitative (Saldana 2003), socio-temporal (Mcleod and Thomson 2009) and Timescapes (Holland 2011) research. In such work, traversing, tracking or tracing movements in and through experiential details is prioritised as a means of making analytical gains and developing an appreciation of the bigger picture. In interpretive risk research much use is also made of the anthropological/ethnographic trope of considering emic-etic considerations. As well as being a means of bringing out interpretive plurality and complexity, the interplay of these considerations can help to apprehend what researchers are doing when they engage close-up and in a sustained way by participating in some way in the lives and times of people and communities in their empirical case site. Undertaking such intelligibility-focussed research activities allows for insights to be built from the methodological challenges involved in coming to see what is extraordinary about ordinary life or vice versa. What lies below the ordinary sense of what is going on before one’s eyes? What is hidden in plain sight? What kinds of eruptions disrupt a taken for granted sense of everyday normality? What is difficult to put into words? All these different yet overlapping common-sense phrases seek to capture the mysteriousness of knowing about life when it is experienced up close but at the same time must be set alongside the many other sorts of knowledges to which we wish to lay claim about. These other knowledges, about more distanced, intangible realities are equally part of culturally inflected interpretive risk analysis and enable the researcher to embrace problems of seeing/sensing and knowing. As a result, interpretive analysis can appear to be sometimes more challenging than scientific formalisms (Scott 1998). Nonetheless, it provides an entry point into potentially impactful, research nexus that sets out using a variety of intelligibility focussed techniques capable of making it possible to grapple with more complex questions about how everyday life is experienced, locally situated and interpreted behaviours, cultural ways of articulating beliefs and

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knowledge, and different linguistic/semiotic registers and modalities of meaning-making and valuing.

Interdisciplinarity and Interpretive Social Science So, in fact, despite the challenges involved (i.e. impediments to intelligibility), it is important to continue to pursue interpretive research and analytics as a characteristic feature of interdisciplinary risk studies. Ordinary Extraordinary puts together contributions from a range of disciplines. In so doing it shows some support for the widely held view that interdisciplinarity has brought, and continues to bring, appreciable benefits to risk social science, and to policy and practitioner research (see Pidgeon et al. 1992; Taylor Gooby and Zinn 2006). I have recently argued elsewhere (Henwood 2019) that the interdisciplinary character of much risk research can be seen in its insistence on conducting well-focussed, problem-oriented empirical inquiries, while also being responsive to wider efforts that have been made to further methodological exploration and discussion of epistemic practices (see, e.g. Henwood et al. 2018; see also Olofsson and Zinn 2019). Quantitatively formalised techniques and procedures of risk will likely always remain central to, and beneficial for, contemporary managerial problems solving approaches to risk assessment. But, at the same time, interpretive risk research has an important role to play by engaging with more reflexive social scientific questions about how to remain open to modes of exploration associated with other more qualitative and interpretive areas of inquiry—starting with its initial focus on everyday ways of living with risk (Pidgeon et al. 2006; Henwood et al. 2010; Henwood and Pidgeon 2016). Within this commentary, I have sought to pursue this interpretive position starting from a non-dichotomising position. One way in which this position has been developed is as a response to the individualisation theory of risk, which offers more specific ways of understanding the workings of neoliberal governance as it (apparently) empowers but (actually) limits everyday subjectivity. I recognise that much has been written about the governmentality approach, but this is a somewhat exclusive

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discussion space in terms of how it approaches problem formulation (Burchell et al. 1991; Furedi 2008).

Commentary on Three Chapters I have been asked to comment upon three chapters: by Janine Su, Hannah Swee and Giovanni Gugg. Each prioritises—in ethnographic fashion—more localised (i.e. emic) views/meanings/understandings through undertaking in-depth observation and careful and meaningful reflection. Each one shows the potentials offered by ethnographic forms of understanding that flow from its ways of theorising with data, a key discussion point that has also become a defining feature of qualitative social science (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Henwood and Pidgeon 1992). In addition to avoiding the imposition of prior theories on data, the three chapters show the researchers’ knowledge-making to be a reflexive practice. I try to do this in my own commentary too, recognising that beyond the three chapters there are further ways of engaging with ideas and practices of reflexivity in social science and as a cultural formation in late modernity. Reflexive research practice gives consideration to the ways in which the researcher and researched are situated in wider sets of social relations. In qualitative inquiries, researchers’ knowledge-making through researcher reflexivity also focusses in on personal and collective identities. For some, this moves into the space of narcissism and lack of objectivity. However, when carefully targeted it can help specify the ontological and epistemological issues at stake in ways that are productive of knowledge. This is something I have called epistemic subjectivity (Henwood 2008), and others have exemplified with significant insight (Griffin 2007; Scott 1998). In Su’s case, her reflexivity involved understanding how, by attending to how people speak from very particular subject positions, it is possible to understand the “felt” social significance of “nebulous notions” involving “on-script” interpretations, with more accuracy. This statement usefully specifies her epistemic practice. We can thus further consider how accuracy in these respects has implications for studying dynamics

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of affect within cultural discourse, i.e. as a feature of wider cultural intelligibility (see, for example, Henwood et al. 2016). Swee works with thematised descriptions of lived experiences and perceptions of disruptive (cyclonic) events while, at the same time, investigating how highly situated and contextualised experiences and perceptions of risk are conveyed in conversation and embedded in the practices of participants’ daily life over time. Use of a thematic approach to the analysis and writing up qualitative data is fairly standard, recommended and commonplace both within the academy and in policy and practitioner research. Alternative practices also exist such as presenting qualitative longitudinal and narrative case studies (Henderson et al. 2012). But Swee’s approach does provide a means of reflexively gaining nuanced insights into everyday, temporal modes of anticipation and its relationship to normality, stability and uncertainty. Accordingly, there is potential for further insights to be generated about how this was done in ways that deal with analytical challenges of studying risk through a range of temporal lenses. Conversations could be had, for example, with a cross-disciplinary project dedicated on this topic (Timescapes; http:// www.timescapes.leeds.ac.uk/), especially given that some of the original research involved the temporal study of risk. Specialist research on communicating risk is also characterised by well-targeted scholarship and presentational skills that are highly developed for working over periods of time and in collaboration with professional practitioners concerned with risk issues (Crichten et al. 2016). Gugg conducted a “walking kind of interviewing” (this volume), observed and described a place, and elicited participants’ attitudes and knowledge through their simultaneous embodied interactions with him and their local environment, all against the backdrop of historically produced narratives about material and symbolic community devastation. With this interpretive methods set, he considered how interpretations of environmental risk were elaborated by local actors, and how different voices could gain authority in cultural debate in a dialogic way. This brings together an important set of ideas and practices, some of which come quite close to those established by Shotter in his treatise on the Cultural Politics of Everyday life. Nonetheless, there is an intriguing gap between the two different approaches taken in terms of

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their ways of using theory in analysis, and as ways of strengthening not only the scientific research but also its cultural intelligibility. In the case of Shotter’s work its centrepiece is advancing a third way of knowing. It is a form of social constructionism that involves connecting theoretical topics (realism and foundations) with social concerns (rights, citizenship and access to public debate). Gugg’s approach sees potential in reformulating scientific concepts and knowledge stratification, and puts this into practice by working across theoretical concepts of fatalism, coping and scomatisation. It develops a particular concern with the latter’s potential for representing an instrument “that allows the construction of things that were not seen before” (Gugg, citing Bourdieu 2009). While both are theoretically reflexive accounts, there is a set of issues to be worked through here. An outstanding question to be answered is “where does the authority lie in each approach for working in and through the dialogics of culture?”. Reflexivity about such epistemological and ontological framings is important when studying emergent phenomena (Henwood et al. 2018; Henwood et al. forthcoming). It is especially gratifying to see how all three chapters show how a clear research focus can emerge as part of studying (what I gloss here as) localised phenomena in quite specific social settings. The chapters show how it is possible, in this way, to provide richly contextualised, highly textured, in-depth accounts capable of addressing either a wider social problem or providing insights into problems arising for science and society in respect of environmental risk issues. Su’s chapter addresses a wider social problem: the globalised landscape of contemporary movements of people, while the other two chapters relate to problems of environmental destruction and disruption (Swee) or natural hazards and social change (Gugg). In view of the way social and environmental problems are intertwined and involve questions and concerns about attenuation and amplification of society-wide dynamics and responsiveness (Pidgeon et al. 2003), it is quite common practice in risk research for a problem focus to be developed while considering how it is multiply framed and involves taking perspective. This works well as a means of paying attention to controversial matters arising in diverse social, technical and (natural) environmental fields. It also allows for diverse material and symbolic risks

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and uncertainties to come into play along with their inter-dependency on all sorts of social conditions and identity positionings. The chapters by Su, Swee and Gugg all show how these are matters that ethnographic and qualitative work studying everyday perceptions and experiences can help to elucidate. However, how to imbricate them all in the risk researcher’s social scientific account is in itself challenging. For these reasons, it might be possible to suggest some avenues for productive cross-fertilisation of areas of strength. Following in the sociocultural and linguistically framed traditions of interpretive/qualitative inquiry, the three chapters do this in ways that involve generating textual understanding of how local actors and community members live out their lives in ways that are meaningful to themselves. The textual turn in social scientific research has enabled more interpretive work to draw on theorising about social life from analytical perspectives advanced within linguistics and often associated with poststructuralism, and as a means of attending to cultural, material and semiotic forces that decentre power and authority. For extensive coverage of the background and scope of the textual turn in social research, including practices of reading and writing, see Denzin and Lincoln’s many times reprinted Sage Handbooks of Qualitative Research, see, e.g. 2011; for an explicit example of a recent textural analysis see Thomas et al. (2017). The three chapters are themselves textually insightful by bringing centre stage how questions of intelligibility need to be taken into account to understand the ways in which people live with risk in their daily lives. Questions of intelligibility take interpretive ethnography into a space where it is possible to further develop practices of problem-focussed risk study. In Ordinary Extraordinary this is done by explicitly accounting for significant shifts in a risk’s spatialised and temporalised meanings (see, e.g. Gugg and Su), the ways in which it is inherently morally and politically loaded (see, e.g. Swee and Su), and the implications of its omnipresence as an extraordinary-ordinary mode of being (the whole volume, including Su, Swee and Gugg). How issues of intelligibility become manifest in Ordinary Extraordinary is exemplified in one of my three focal chapters. The backdrop to Su’s work is the (contested) implications of collective socio-spatial imaginaries for forms of migration that are considered to be unintelligible. In

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past times in Turkey, migration across national boundaries was collectively explicable, given a perceived need to find solutions to war-time problems of geographical displacement. Su’s analysis also suggests that the idea of migration enjoyed greater legitimacy prior to the present day as a “self-generated impulse towards mobility for personal advancement or pleasure” (Su, this volume). In today’s altered collective socio-spatial imaginary, the conditions for sensing what is at stake and for whom has been displaced by the geo-politics of global labour and money flows. What, then, does a risk-focussed anthropologist make of the problem of understanding this nexus of impulses and drivers? Su makes the focus of her research the understanding of what drives the kind of pragmatic opportunism that her key informant (Kaan) lives his life by. Kaan, a young unemployed Turkish man living in touristic site in Isanbul’s Old City is hastling tourists for money and seeking marriage to a visiting foreigner, as a means of attaining mobility within the European Community. Much appears unusual about this way of “achieving manhood by mobility” to observers who label the young man as without honour and immature; but, as elucidated by Kaan himself, it is a positive or “good risk” strategy. Su explains how, in daring to take a chance, Kaan proactively engages with uncertainty and in so doing is able to navigate fraught categories of manhood and migration on his own terms. As a result, it is possible to understand how social value can arise from transgressing normative structures since, although making one’s life trajectory more precarious, such transgression meets the extraordinary challenges posed by ordinary longings (here for culturally generalised desires for autonomy and freedom). In the other two chapters, questions about the intelligibility of environmental risk problems posed to communities repeatedly affected by cyclones (Swee) and living in the shadow of a volcano (Gugg) do not engage with ideas about collective socio-spatial imaginaries specifically, but other wider contextual dependencies are considered. These take the form of the effects of anticipated disruption as an alternative futureoriented temporal frame (Swee), and socially elaborated and historically produced narratives engaging with ideas of risk and wellness (Gugg). The ordinary-extraordinary couplet works well in the three chapters I am remarking upon to explain how there is both a generality and a specificity to studied facets of risk that are covered in the volume as a

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whole. This is important in the context of contemporary criticism (see, e.g. Davies et al. 2017) of studies that rely on highly localised empirical analysis, for not being able to create the necessary leverage on strategic attempts to reorient societal risk responses at wider systems level. It is possible to take something different—that is nonetheless of equivalent value—from how the various chapters theorise, especially about the issue of pragmatism. In chapters by Swee (on pragmatic response) and Gugg (on pragmatic sense-making ) these two emergent ways of living with risk pose problem-relevant research foci in their own right, and in this way function similarly to Su’s pragmatic opportunism. For Swee, people’s anticipation as they face regular disruption to their lives from cyclones suggests that a sense of normalcy, and the stability and predictability it provides, is not merely a way of living with uncertainty but “turns what would otherwise be an affliction into a response (…) changing one thing into something else” (Swee, this volume). For Gugg, it is possible to understand the local point of view of apparently living carelessly in a place that involves risk taking—and that poses surprising problems of local governance (with the town’s attractiveness leading to growth)— as simply one where the conditions of living in a local place involve risk-taking. Yet this pragmatic form of sense-making that makes such a reckoning possible is far from simple, as it involves “reworking and reformulating processes of historicisation and spatialisation” (Gugg, this volume). Moreover, it brings to light a particular form of pragmatic sense-making, scomatisation (from a Greek work meaning obscuration), which, as Gugg suggests, captures the quality of a community-wide “response to a contemporary sense of risk perceived as a permanent condition of society” (Gugg, this volume). Risk’s intelligibility in these analyses of different manifestations of pragmatism cannot be attributed to the way it functions as a singular empirical truth claim, or how it works in ways that are backed by universal reason. But the analyses do illuminate something that risk researchers deem important—understanding the difficulties that are often masked when everyday ways of living with risk go unmeasured, unaccounted for, or are lost under the weight of theorisation. This raises the question of how specific theories of risk and culture, reflexive modernity, risk governance or otherwise can help capture ways of

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contributing to understanding risk problems in a well-focussed and well-contextualised way? The attempts at ethnographic risk research I have commented upon, as suggested in the editorial introduction to the volume, go some way to examining ways in which “the modern subject is caught up in an ever expanding network of predictive and proactive strategies for the management of risk” Welchman 2008, 9). They take into account the limits of a governmentality perspective by offering more targeted ethnographic research to understand strategies with risk as a tool of normalising power. The chapters I have commented upon do certainly avoid mechanically following a purely governmentality framing, and there is interpretive work to be done to explore more directly how pragmatic opportunism, response and sense-making may offer insights into ways in which risk constructions have a power holding logic that coexists with alternative logics that compete with a more dominant one. In all these ways, the three chapters stand out among other writings about “what our methods allow” (Fischhoff and Kaqdvary 2011, 138) as exemplars of how to practice the methodological orientation of localised, emic, interpretive ethnographic analysis. Especially when read alongside existing compositions of risk anthropology case studies (e.g., Boholm 2015), they make a serious contribution to existing efforts to promote understanding of ways of knowledge-making that is made possible by qualitative approaches and methods of interpretive research. All three chapters I read did what the volume editors describe as providing “something extra (…) beyond theoretical argument” (Tsing 2015 cited in Introduction, this volume), and that other ethnographic and qualitative methods scholars might designate as developing analytical strategies, perspectives and insights (see, e.g. Delamont and Atkinson 2005). A cautionary note running through my further comments in this chapter concerns how interpretive social scientific work needs to avoid adopting epistemological and ontological arguments in ways that give rise to poorly focussed methodologies for investigating substantive issues. None of the three chapters fall short in this regard. To gain some overarching perspective to understand why, I draw particularly from the discussion of scomatisation in Gugg’s chapter. Scomatisation is not simply a formal concept but a categorical device that has potential to hold and enable ways of improving understanding by combining

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rigorous definition with empirical scrutiny of dynamic relations in a messy, uncertain world. It provides a less masterful (i.e. qualitative) knowledge aesthetic and provides a more reflexive account than is otherwise the case when taking advantage from the potentials afforded by the more formal practices of reformulating scientific concepts and critiquing knowledge stratification. I propose that such a knowledge aesthetic (if it can be so-called) may underpin the sustained analysis presented in Gugg’s chapter: to help elucidate the distancing responses of local residents living in an area close to the volcano Vesuvius, how they were able to survive the announced catastrophe, and how these responses do not amount to refusal to engage in public discussions of risk events.

Concluding Remarks Seen as a whole, the volume Ordinary Extraordinary is a timely exercise in the way it brings to light the importance of reflexivity in establishing legitimacy as a key element of research practice. This has implications for scientific work more generally. Pragmatism in how we approach activities of problematisation is part of this. So is allowing for the deferral of positive knowledge (Schilling 2009) and embracing problems of knowing (Scott 1998). As a consequence of these approaches, living with risk today need not be treated as a simple tool of self-enhancement, but as a commonplace variant of epistemic practice. As well as attending to how reasoned judgements involve confronting moral tensions and negotiating ethical grounds on which engagements with the world are shaped, this epistemic practice includes taking an interest in the impulses, levers and drivers of impulses for personal advancement and engaging with uncertainty (Su’s chapter)—even taking pleasure in it. Such engagement also has multiple temporal facets, one of which is captured in Swee’s focus on modes of anticipation. Over the last decade or so, there have been attempts to widen the context of methodologically instructive discussions and make arguments for a “post-qualitative” turn in social research (Lather 2013). Seen in this frame, ethnographic fieldwork and analytical practice could be judged to be overly restrictive, although still centrally part of social scientific

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ways of producing and working empirically with data in the form of talk and text. Coming out of this is the notion that practicing qualitative research in more textually nuanced ways need to be displaced somewhat by efforts to work texturally, drawing upon a fast expanding interest in multimodal methods (Dicks 2014). Another methods volume of Ordinary Extraordinary could attend to these issues. Also, it would need to reflect growing interest in the new materialisms. New materialist arguments involve the recent critique of qualitative methods for lacking the capacity to bring about a research focus on the very materiality of things. However, it has been established that there is much to value about ethnographic observation, reflexivity, talk and text methods, and variety in the sensory modalities of qualitative methods (Woodward 2015). We can thus draw further on the contributions to Ordinary Extraordinary by placing them in the contexts of such debates, and pointing out how to bridge the new divisions arising by exemplifying the practices of interpretive ethnography and interpretive risk research more generally. It could usefully raise awareness of how to shift from a conflictual to a complimentary understanding of cognate ideas about emergence, becoming, processual understanding, modalities of temporality, as started in the chapters I have focussed on here. These foci (and others) could be developed to offer further grist to the mill of the wider epistemological and ontological discussions. Another important, parallel set of discussions concerns practiceoriented accounts of the public’s involvement in the ordering and reproduction of environmental risk and social life. In commenting on these, Pellizzoni (2017) points to what needs to be retained through a focus on human interactions and communications, within the overarching context of the powerful knowing about new process ontology (or new materialisms). These discussions may be another good point of development in qualitative and anthropological risk research if we are to build a lingua franca capable of communicating analytical strategies in a way that is equivalent to the methodological portfolio offered by quantitative risk research. Pellizzoni’s conceptual language and framing of questions could be rich and fruitful. What are the enduring confirmations of problems and public elicitations for actualised or imagined publics? How to understand the growing role of indeterminacy as an

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element of governance and the material turn? Does it reintroduce the problem of imposing accounts of what is inevitable and desirable? What is now entering institutional, conceptual and cultural spaces as a constitutive and performative force? Do techno-scientific (i.e. risk) imaginaries lead to an expansion in production of prototypical truths, neoliberal imaginaries and changes from visions of latent processes to game changers? Pellizzoni’s work has as its focal point a new “landmark in neoliberal imagery, whereby future making is not about rational analysis of probabilities but forceful response to possibilities” (Pellizzoni 2017). Risk limits and exposure is similarly attentive to the kinds of lost foci Pellizzoni mentions, through its concern for such things as everyday doings (including values expression and verbalisation of feelings), institutionalised moral definitions and alternative imaginaries, experimental spheres of innovation and contention, and cultural practices of dominance, marginality and meaning-making. But it does so from a position that is more ethnographically grounded—and so less directly engaged with discussing materialist ontologies in and of themselves. Has Risk limits and exposure produced its own bespoke conceptual language for understanding risk as a creative force involved in future making? Taking the two publications together, as interventions in such debates about practices and material assemblages in the reproduction of social life, makes available resources to help methodologically engaged researchers who might wish to scope out, and problematise, future directions in the development of qualitative research’s interpretive ways of working in a hybrid space: one that conjoins performative and analytical social science.

Notes 1. The phrase “cultural intelligibility” is used repeatedly throughout as a cohesive thread to bring etic and emic knowledges into relation. It captures a thorough-going engagement with how questions about knowledges and their legitimacy are shaped in dynamic socio-cultural landscapes that are replete with durable and changing values.

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2. United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) operates across the UK: its remit is to use government funding to create the best possible environment for research and innovation to flourish. UKERC carries out interdisciplinary research into sustainable future energy systems, with researchers based in 20 different institutions throughout the UK.

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Index

A

action 5, 6, 10–12, 15, 16, 22, 24, 28, 29, 52, 78, 81, 95, 98, 120, 123, 128, 130, 133, 140, 145, 146, 148, 150, 154, 163, 165, 169, 170, 180, 182, 188, 190, 191, 196, 203, 208, 209, 211–216, 218, 225, 227, 228, 237, 268, 279, 288 adaptation 13, 54, 56, 131, 184, 194, 238, 259 agency 2, 12, 13, 15, 16, 28, 95, 97, 98, 101, 105, 108, 122, 129, 154, 167, 280 Agenzia Italiana del Farmaco (AIFA) 101 al-Assad, Bashar 141, 168, 170, 211 anticipation 189, 278–281, 283, 285, 288, 291, 292, 314, 318, 320

atmosphere 42, 51 Australia 30, 179, 186, 262, 278, 279, 287, 292

B

barrier of fear (hijaz al-khawf ) 140, 142 Beck, Ulrich 4, 20, 119, 233, 303 behaviour-moulding training 84 Belmont Report 94 Benjamin, Walter 156 Billig, Michael 142 body 14, 16, 22, 25, 29, 97, 103, 125, 127, 141, 183–189, 192, 194, 196, 197, 252, 280, 299. See also embodiment Boholm, Åsa 3, 7, 9, 40, 51, 52, 65, 132, 143, 178, 185, 217, 279, 303, 319

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022 ´ B. Switek et al. (eds.), Extraordinary Risks, Ordinary Lives, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83962-8

329

330

Index

Bolivia 6, 15–17, 28, 67, 68, 80, 85 boundary-work 106, 108, 109 Bourdieu, Pierre 142, 164, 177, 180, 194, 197, 205–207, 259, 260, 315 Brazil 40–42, 46–48, 53, 57, 67, 121

C

Candau, Joel 263, 270 Caplan, Pat 3, 4, 7, 65, 105, 233, 303, 304 CellTex 99–101 character displays 214 city 39, 46, 249. See also town civil defence 255, 257 climate change 22, 30, 279, 286–288, 291, 292 climbing 14, 25, 29, 177–179, 181–198, 207, 209 Cohen, Stanley 12, 259, 263, 268 conflict 55. See also war conversation 14, 28, 143–145, 148, 156, 157, 164–166, 185, 224, 234, 257, 278, 280, 282–284, 286, 301, 314 ‘conversation of mankind’ 166 cooperative mining 68, 82 coping strategy 259, 268, 270 crack 46, 47, 186–188 criminal ‘hardman’ 208 crisis 29, 54, 120, 123, 133, 156, 169, 210, 254 cultural capital 195, 207 cultural intelligibility 298, 300, 305, 306, 314, 315, 322 cultural values 307–309 culture and science 300

cyclones 12, 13, 17, 22, 30, 277–293, 317, 318

D

Dalai Lama 123, 126 Damascus 140, 141, 144–146, 148, 152, 154–156, 158, 162–164, 168, 169 ‘Damascus Bubble’ 155, 169 Debord, Guy 157 defiance 2, 15–17, 22, 28, 29, 121–123, 125, 133, 142, 149 Deleuze, Gilles 107, 133, 227, 231, 243 demonstration 142, 144, 145, 158, 162, 168, 213, 217, 226, 242, 254 Dera’a 140, 141, 144, 146, 147, 167, 215 détournement 157, 170 Dharamshala 121, 123, 126–130 disasters 2, 19, 24, 252–256, 258, 261, 262, 264, 270, 280, 281, 283, 290–292 disposition 8, 11, 14, 15, 27, 105, 133, 179, 180, 182, 187–189, 192, 193, 205–207, 216, 234, 238, 268 Douglas, Mary 3, 4, 6, 9, 19, 64, 79, 131, 227, 233, 240, 250, 258, 268, 298, 299, 303, 304 drug trafficking 43, 46 dynamite 14, 17, 63, 69, 73, 74, 77, 78, 82, 121, 131

Index

E

edgework 23–26, 28, 179, 196, 203, 205–210, 218 embodiment 149, 178–180, 184, 187, 188, 190, 217 embodied verstehen 205 emergency 13, 254, 257, 308 emergency plan 257 emergent phenomena 315 emotion 8–11, 189, 190, 206, 207, 259, 270 emotional callusing 179, 188–190, 193, 194, 196, 206, 207, 217 endurance 28, 45, 48, 54, 57, 121, 177, 185, 195 enhabitation 142, 164 environment 22, 23, 29, 80, 82, 84, 100, 121, 128–130, 140, 178, 183, 188–190, 208, 209, 216, 217, 233, 252, 262, 267, 268, 279, 283, 289, 310, 314, 323 environmental destruction 315 global environmental change 299 epistemology 23, 29, 93 epistemic cultures 306 eruption 249, 250, 253–257, 261, 264–269. See also Vesuvius; volcano ethics 91, 93–96, 99–101, 104–110, 112 ethnography 21, 27, 40, 45, 55, 65, 92, 129, 179, 190, 191, 197, 227, 240, 283, 302 ethnographic case studies 298 everyday interactions 301 everyday risk practices 302 expert 3–8, 15, 63, 65, 85, 99, 102, 111, 309 expert-lay divide 11

331

expertise 5–7, 12–14, 84, 157, 297 self-cultivated 12 sepratation of 18 extraordinary 2, 3, 4, 11, 14, 16, 18–27, 29, 40, 55, 56, 82–84, 93, 104, 106, 108, 110, 120, 122, 123, 128–134, 140–143, 146, 147, 152, 154, 157, 160–162, 164, 165, 178, 182, 186, 189, 194–196, 206, 217, 226, 234, 242, 250, 260, 281, 292, 301, 302, 311, 316, 317. See also non-ordinary

F

Facebook 21, 27, 158–161, 170, 211, 217. See also social media fatalism 258–261, 315 fear 3, 15–17, 29, 30, 51, 71, 120, 122, 131, 132, 140, 142, 144, 145, 149, 159, 179, 188–194, 206, 212, 215–217, 269 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 97–100, 112 forecasting 12, 278, 291 ‘Free Palmyra’ (Ahrar Tadmor ) 155 future 15, 17, 30, 56, 73, 75, 78, 79, 81, 119, 122, 126, 128–133, 144, 157, 161, 189, 204, 207, 210, 227, 250, 251, 255, 257, 261, 263, 266, 268, 270, 278, 279, 287, 288, 301, 302, 304, 309, 317, 322, 323

G

Giddens, Anthony 4, 20, 226, 233, 252, 280, 288, 303

332

Index

global market forces 65, 84 ‘God protects Syria’ (Suriyyah Allah Hamihah) 154, 156 Goffman, Erving 29, 154, 212–215, 218 gossip 47, 49, 56, 232 graffiti 21, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146–150, 152, 153, 155–157, 164, 169, 170, 211–213, 215 Great Mosque of the Umayyads 141, 144, 154, 164, 169 Guattari, Félix 227, 231, 243 GuChuSum Association 125 Gurbet 228–231, 233, 234, 244

insecurity 20, 28, 40, 45, 53, 54, 56, 132 institutional risk response 306. See also ethnography interpretive ethnography 299, 310, 316, 321 interpretive risk research 298, 304, 310–312, 321 Istanbul 15, 30, 224–226, 229, 231, 234, 236–238, 241–243 Italy 29, 30, 96, 101, 111, 249, 265, 269

K H

habitus 15, 16, 20, 29, 178–181, 188, 189, 194–197, 205–207, 209 Haraway, Donna 7, 10 hassling 227, 237–239, 241 hazards 18, 64, 66, 228, 257, 262, 266–268, 290–292 health and safety evaluations 78 Herzfeld, Michael 19, 227, 231, 234, 237, 240 Himachal Pradesh 123 hope 4, 8–10, 16, 17, 23, 27, 69, 75, 76, 93, 102, 104–106, 108–111, 127, 142, 261, 288 humour 45, 54, 56 hyper-vigilance 51

I

iconoclash 152 improvisation 109, 188, 195 India 123, 283

Kangra district 123 Katz, Jack 208, 209, 218 kayaking 16 Kelly, Tobias 40, 55, 56 knowledge local knowledge’s 7, 14 situated knowledge 10 seealso expertise, expert-lay divide; lived experiences

L

Latour, Bruno 7, 150, 152 lay 4–8, 12, 65, 93, 311 Lhasa 121, 124 life projects 82, 301 lived experiences 111, 302, 310, 314 logic, logics 2–5, 8, 10, 12, 13, 25, 27, 64, 78, 107, 120, 162, 178–180, 182, 194–196, 204, 205, 207, 209, 210, 212, 217, 226, 228, 256, 301, 305, 319

Index

Lyng, Stephen 3, 24, 25, 28, 29, 64, 140, 164, 178–180, 205, 206, 208

M

Malaby, Thomas 131, 227, 240 Manhood 223, 224, 226–228, 232–234, 240–243 manhood 317 masculine trajectories 223, 226, 228, 229, 244 material turn 322 medicine 17, 18, 22, 23, 27–29, 91–99, 101, 103–106, 108, 109, 129, 133 mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) 96, 97, 99, 101, 107 Meskell, Lynn 156 methodological exploration 299, 312 migration 30, 226, 228–233, 237, 238, 240, 241, 244, 316, 317. See also mobility mobility 30, 75, 121, 132, 226–228, 230–233, 237, 240–243, 317 international 227. See also migration modernity 7, 8, 20, 21, 226, 303, 313, 318 monsoon 284 mosque 21, 142–145, 147, 154–157, 161, 163, 167, 211 mountain climbing 191, 203, 204, 206–208 mukhabarat 141, 152, 160, 161, 170

333

N

Nader, Laura 7 Naples 249, 255, 256, 261, 269 natural hazards 262, 278, 281, 315 natural resource depletion 307 neoliberal governance 312 non-ordinary 3, 6, 24–26, 28, 29, 203. See also extraordinary Nuremberg trials 94, 111 Nussbaum, Martha 103

O

occupational health and safety (OHS) 6, 64–68, 71, 78–82, 84, 85 Oliver-Smith, Anthony 262 Omareen, Zaher 148, 157 onto-epistemological issues 305 ordinary 2, 3, 5, 6, 11–15, 18–27, 29, 40, 42, 52, 55–57, 81, 82, 84, 93, 104, 108, 120–123, 128–134, 140, 142, 143, 146, 152, 154, 160–162, 164, 165, 177, 178, 182, 186, 189, 190, 195, 196, 207, 217, 226, 228, 233, 242, 253, 281, 290, 292, 301, 302, 311, 316, 317. See also lay ordinary extraordinary 2, 3, 11, 23, 26–28, 300, 302, 303, 305, 312, 316, 320, 321 Ottoman Empire 243

P

Palmyra 147, 149, 150, 152–155, 164, 168, 169 participant observation 85, 204, 280

334

Index

performativity 109 place 29, 43, 50, 56, 70, 147, 158, 160, 167, 168, 178, 185, 188–190, 195, 196, 207, 217, 228–230, 233, 243, 252, 254–257, 260, 263, 264, 269, 286, 314, 318 place identity 235 place making 235, 286, 301 policy research 312, 314 political prisoners 123–131, 170 Pompeii 249 Potosí 15, 28, 64–71, 74, 75, 78, 80–82, 84, 85, 121, 122, 133 pragmatism 30, 318, 320 precariousness 19 prediction 250, 282, 305 problematisation 306, 308, 310, 320 problem formulation 313 protest 14, 21, 29, 139–143, 145, 147, 148, 156, 158, 160–164, 168, 211, 212, 215, 217, 254 anti-regime 145, 149, 153, 155, 160, 163 political 29, 157, 213 seealso demonstration

Q

qualitative data analysis 314 qualitative longitudinal study 314 qualitative research methods 300, 321, 322

R

rationality instrumental 10

rational and irrational divide 11, 109 rationalist orthodoxy 10 seealso logic Rayner, Steve 305 Recife 14, 28, 39–41, 44–48, 51–57 red zone 250, 252, 269 reflexivity 8, 310, 313, 315, 320, 321 Regenexx 96–99, 111 resignation 48 resistance 21, 24, 54, 122, 133, 146, 149, 157, 211, 212 leaderless resistance 143, 164, 165 risk ability to control 10, 208, 216 and culture 299, 318 everyday risk practices 302 good risk 227, 240, 317 materiality of risk 134 public acceptability of 308 risk assemblages 133 risk assessment 4, 6, 13–15, 24, 65, 78, 84, 91, 94, 95, 298, 303, 306, 312 risk choices 65, 84 risk consciousness 3, 11 risk emics 73 risk knowledge 65, 80, 81, 84 risk logics 27, 162, 212 risk management 5, 26, 64–66, 73, 81, 82, 84, 108, 178, 204, 211, 298 risk negotiations 63, 78, 84 risk perception 3, 22, 65, 66, 79, 80, 82, 84, 304 risk perception underestimation 78, 79 risk society 7, 9, 21, 25, 26

Index

risk-taking 3–5, 9–11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20, 24–27, 40, 56, 65, 66, 82, 84, 93, 145, 165, 203, 204, 206–210, 212, 213, 217, 255, 318 risky behaviours 78, 122, 132 Rorty, Richard 143, 144, 165, 166 routinization 2, 40, 54, 56

S

safety 5, 14, 15, 56, 63, 64, 66, 69, 70, 74, 75, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 95–97, 101–103, 122, 186, 191, 193, 207, 268, 288 dominant safety standards 66, 79, 80 Schacter, Rafael 147, 152, 153, 156, 169, 170 science 7, 8, 10, 12, 17, 23, 64, 65, 79, 106–109, 132, 233, 261, 279, 297, 298, 307, 309, 310, 312, 313, 322 peoples’ everyday science 84 science and society 315 scotomization 30, 251, 253, 258–263, 266, 268, 269 sense-making 2, 318, 319 Shotter, John 309, 310, 314, 315 Signorelli, Amalia 250, 254, 256, 270 slums 14, 41, 43, 57 social capital 180, 182 social change 315 social media 21, 143, 144, 157–162, 164, 165, 169, 211, 212, 226 social movements 211, 212, 214, 215 socio-cultural dynamics 311

335

socio-historical processes 301 spatial and temporal horizons 302 specialists 3, 5, 19, 20, 23, 99, 310, 314. See also expert; expertise; lay; ordinary Stamina 101, 102, 107, 111, 113, 185 stem-cell therapy 29, 92, 110–112 street crime 208 structural constraints 65 subjectivity 234, 238, 239, 312, 313 Sultanahmet 30, 224, 225, 227, 229, 232, 235–242 Syria 14, 22, 29, 139, 140, 143–148, 152, 154, 157, 159, 160, 162, 164–170, 243 Syrian war 210 systems change 307–310

T

tatakachu 74, 75, 81 temporality 56, 196, 264, 321 textual turn 316 theorising with data 313 Tibet 127 Tibetans 124–126, 128–130 torture 124–127, 140, 146, 147 objects of 134 tourism 224, 229, 235, 241 tourists 19, 125, 224, 225, 227, 228, 237–241, 243, 317 town 249, 252, 253, 256, 257, 266, 267, 286, 289. See also city Turkey 224–227, 229, 231–233, 235, 239–243, 317

336

Index

U

uncertainty/uncertainties 1, 3, 10, 11, 20, 30, 53, 64–66, 69, 71, 73, 78–82, 96, 120, 133, 142, 165, 215, 217, 226, 227, 229, 237, 240–242, 261, 263, 279–281, 286–288, 291, 292, 299, 307, 309, 314, 316–318, 320 unintelligibility 226, 233–235 United Kingdom (UK) 16, 22, 23, 243, 299, 323 urban renewal 46 USA 94, 96–98, 111, 126

eruption 250, 253. See also Vesuvius voluntary risk taking 165, 204, 210, 212, 213

W

walking 27, 42, 48–52, 56, 120, 121, 154, 156, 252, 257, 314 war 21, 29, 56, 57, 96, 140, 162, 164, 165, 216, 230, 254, 317 weather 12, 14, 30, 184, 278–285, 287, 289, 291 Wynne, Brian 7–9, 12, 65

V

verstehen 105 Vesuvius 12, 13, 30, 249–255, 257, 260–269, 320. See also volcano; eruption violence 55 chronic 39 normalisation of 48 ‘wave of violence’ 40, 43, 56 violent-ordinary 40, 48, 53–56 volcano 12, 30, 249, 250, 254, 255, 257, 260, 264, 265, 267, 317, 320

Y

YouTube 146, 158, 159, 161, 167. See also social media

Z

Zinn, Jens O. 2–4, 8–10, 40, 52, 56, 64, 65, 93, 105, 131, 233, 261, 299, 312 Zinovieff, Sofka 239