ABSTRACT
Ulrich Beck understands of ‘risk’ as immanent to social structure and Stephen Lyng’s concept of edgework, seem to equip sociological analysis with some useful analytical conceptual tools. Yet, both approaches were exposed for their limitations, prompting varied critiques that feed into the present study’s conceptual analysis of ‘heterology’, the discourse about what constitutes the other in social and cultural worlds. Simmel’s likening of sociological research to linguistics and mathematics grant conventional Foucaultian understandings of ‘discourse’ with a dual spatial and linguistic character. Sociological studies of mobility as tourism, migration or consumption practice usually draw on Bourdieusian conceptions of the ‘field’, even when they are critical of Bourdieu’s work. Such studies often consider a twenty-first-century mutation in traditional splits between highbrow and popular cultures along the lines of ‘univorous’ and ‘omnivorous’ audiences/consumers respectively. A broader matching pertains to conceptions of dark tourism as a peculiar emotional and physical engagement with sites of death.
