ABSTRACT

An American taxi driver in the Mid-West once asked what I did. When I said I was an anthropologist he asked some probing questions which I answered so lamely that I was driven to explain that I was an anthropologist working in the department of Religious Studies. He leapt on this information ‘You must be just the person we need in our Bible Group. There is a question we come against every week, and you will know the answer: Who came first, Adam and Eve, or the Dinosaur?’ Again I had to excuse myself, saying that it was a proper question for anthropology, but that I could not give much help as my main work was on risk. After a pause he came back hopefully saying that his brother-inlaw was a safety officer, and that it would be good to have a talk with me about safety regulations. This is something like the scope and conclusion of my first conversation with Professor Hood. To him, too, I had to explain why an anthropologist in a Department of Religion had come to be interested in risk. It was a matter of retrospection on the book I wrote about pollution a quarter of a century ago.