ABSTRACT
In this review, I examine the contribution of social anthropology to the study of risk. I define social anthropology as the study of ‘other cultures’ and note that such studies have a long history, for example the Greeks and Romans were interested in exploring and understanding ‘barbarians’ and using such studies to reflect on their own society. However, in the early twentieth century, with the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits and Malinowski’s fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, the study of other cultures shifted from an assumption of western cultural superiority to respect for other cultures with anthropologists seeking to understand and explain the unique logic and rationality of different cultures. This new approach to other cultures tended to stress the universality of the challenges which societies face while documenting their unique responses. Thus, all societies have to cope with uncertainty, the essential unpredictability of the future and account for past misfortunes. In western societies, risk now plays a central role in making the future more predictable and manageable and enabling the forensic investigation of the past. For example, in the area of health, epidemiologists map the incidence of disease and their spatial, temporal and social distribution providing a way of predicting and preventing future incidence. In other cultures, various forms of divination and ritual activity perform the same function. For example, Malinowski identified the importance of dangerous long sea journeys for the Trobriand Islanders and examined the ways in which they sought to deal with these dangers through a combination of technical skill and magic. Douglas used historical and anthropological evidence to develop a cultural theory of risk. She argued that the nature of social relations in a group influenced which hazards that group chose to highlight and sought to counteract, and how they chose to do this. Although it is possible to identify issues of risk and uncertainty in anthropological studies, it has not been a central or major theme and the contribution of anthropology to risk studies has been more limited than the contribution of disciplines such as sociology and psychology. Part of the problem relates to globalisation. The development of anthropology as a mature discipline at the end of the nineteenth century, one which respected other cultures, coincided with the peak of European colonisation. While social anthropologists wanted to explore and understand ‘pristine’ pre-modern cultures, the reality was that these cultures were already being reshaped by European institutions such as hospitals and medicine. In terms of uncertainty, this means that pre-modern systems of predicting and managing the future, such as oracle and magic, coexist and compete with global systems such as risk-based medicine. It is possible to recover and reconstruct such pre-modern systems by using historical sources. However, most contemporary ethnographies must take into account competing systems and how individuals choose and move between them.
