Fragilities in life and death: Engaging in uncertainty in modern society

Abstract

In health research, the concept of risk is used in several domains. It features in epidemiology and health promotion as well as in the sociology and anthropology of health and illness. Important problems are embedded in risk as an analytic category, and some of these are widely discussed within the discipline. First, risk cuts out the experience of illness and replaces it with problematic objectifications. Second, there are a multitude of different meanings assigned to risk which make it problematic as an analytic category. Third, the question of uncertainty has, along with the discourse of risk, attained a solely normative meaning of threat, or has become a residual category in anthropology and social science. Fourth, the individualizing character of the concept of risk eclipses the collective, historical, social and political processes that contribute to the uncertainties of life. Departing from the methodological approach to ‘social suffering,’ this paper will argue through two ethnographic studies that normative and individualizing assumptions lead social studies to overlook the way that local actors, rather than narrowly controlling contingency, may engage in it and live with it as a normal experience of human life. Along with risk, there are variations in local attitudes to uncertainty and there are socially shared ways of accounting for and acting with it. A major challenge for social studies is to embrace the need for the development and implementation of a neutral, non-normative language of contingency. The paradigm of social suffering enables a broader perspective to be brought to bear upon the lived experience of affliction and illness so as to expose a greater variation in human responses to the distress of everyday life.