ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of risk and its role in contemporary society is one of the ques-
tions most avidly debated by sociologists and other social scientific scholars.
Three main theoretical perspectives in risk research emerged in the early
1980s and attained widespread acceptance in the 1990s. Anthropologist Mary
Douglas (1) is the leading proponent of the first perspective, the social construc-
tivist. In a nutshell, Douglas asserts that all perception of risk is culturally
informed. In adopting this perspective, one deflects the objectivist’s perspective
and can make a distinction between objective and subjective risks. In other
words, there is no objective risk to discover “out there” and all risks are socially
constructed.
