Risk Epistemologies and Aesthetic Reflexivity of a Disaster-Affected Community: Findings from Vietnam

Abstract

Scholars and policymakers often use their expert knowledge to define the risk that laypeople face. Nonetheless, they have frequently overlooked how laypeople describe and explain the risks they face on a daily basis. Moreover, an emphasis on individualisation and reflexivity in Western societies has led to little understanding of how a non-Western community constructs its shared risk culture and how this culture associates aesthetic reflexivity and risk epistemologies. The purpose of this research is to fill these gaps by exploring how Vietnamese farmers reflexively define risk in their everyday lives, which in turn informs their risk-taking attitude and action. Drawing on a case study of disaster-prone farmers in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, this research reveals a distinct set of farmers’ risk epistemologies through a process of hermeneutic reflexivity situated in their risk culture and a shared identity. They do not view risk as wholly negative but rather as an opportunity to attain the aim of surviving and profiting. They see cultivating a risky crop as a collective action of risking their lives, sharing with their community both the challenges and the opportunities that risk might offer. My article makes a case for sociological research into non-Western civilizations, where late modernity and reflexivity might not be accompanied by individualisation but rather with collectivism and tradition.