ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on a distinction between risk-taking behavior and risk-seeking behavior. In the former, there is a more or less conscious weighing of the value of that which can be gained against the harm that can be done by inaction. An arms race with weapons is rather an example of risk-seeking behavior, with its singular world view of the pervasiveness of evil and the necessity for its confrontation. The chapter argues that this confusion of conceptualization is a serious danger to rational efforts to maintain peace and to avoid the possibility of human extinction. Snake-handling cults from the Appalachian area of the southern United States, as described by Weston LaBarre and others, provide some insights into another aspect of risk-seeking behavior. Some anthropologists have suggested that such cult behavior has as its major genesis a drive for higher status, and it is clear, in the instance of the Zar cults of Ethiopia, that such is often the case.
