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Examines the diverse uses and abuses of risk by social actors across a wide range of cultural, ethnic, and geographical locales. The introductory chapter by the two co-editors analyzes and contextualizes current scholarly debates on the social, cultural, and political construction of risk. It is followed by an overview on the anthropology of harm reduction that outlines an innovative framework for culturally informed risk analysis. The remaining nine chapters are organized into three sections, The Cultivation of Fear, Perceptions of Health, Safety, and Hazard: Risk Makers and Risk Takers, and Regulating Risk and the Public's Health. The book aims to address a set of questions of theoretical and practical importance to anthropologists, sociologists, public health scholars and professionals, and public policy advocates, among others. These questions include: How do individuals conceptualize and respond to risk? Can risk be a tool of empowerment for individuals and communities who define themselves as at-risk? How has risk figured recently in the production of health inequality? Has the social contract to provide care in its broadest sense expanded or contracted around issues of risk? Are risk and the imperative to adhere to risk warnings used by experts as a means of social control?
The volume's contributors, medical anthropologists and sociologists, provide rich, grounded ethnographic case material on the processes at work in everyday social life around the globe, as individuals and groups struggle to make saense of the health risks and inequities in their lives and communities. Authors address an array of urgent health concerns, ranging from food safety to environment, new technologies to infectious disease, in such contrasting locales as the US, Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and North Africa, and across diverse ethnicities and social classes.
List of contents
Foreword: The Social Meanings of Risk by Dorothy Nelkin
Introduction and OverviewIntroduction: Health and the Social and Cultural Construction of Risk by Laury Oaks and Barbara Herr Harthorn
Harm Reduction: A Core Concern for Medical Anthropology by Mark Nichter
The Cultivation of FearAutonomy, Danger and Choice: The Moral Imperative of an "At Risk" Pregnancy for a Group of Low Income Latinas in Texas by Linda Hunt and Katherine de Voogd
The Risks of Testtube Babymaking in Egypt by Marcia C. Inhorn
The Politics of Health Risk Warnings: Social Movements and Controversy over the Link between Abortion and Breast Cancer by Laury Oaks
Perceptions of Health, Safety, and Hazard: Risk Makers and Risk TakersExporting Risk: The Cultural Politics of Regulating Traditional Medicine in Northeast Brazil by Jessica Jerome
Risk, Remediation, and the Stigma of a Technological Accident in and African-American Community by Theresa A. Satterfield
Safe Exposure? Perceptions of Health Risks from Agricultural Chemicals among California Farmworkers by Barbara Herr Harthorn
Regulating Risk and the Public's HealthGoverning Migrants' Sexual Behavior: Work, HIV/AIDS, and Condom Use Campaigns in Southeast Asia by Peter Chua
Genetically Modified Foods: Shared Risk and Global Action by Francesca Bray
Risk, Ethics and the Public Space: The Impact of BSE and Foot and Mouth Disease on Public Thinking by Jo Murphy-Lawless
About the author
BARBARA HERR HARTHORN is Associate Director, Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research, Co-Director, Center for Global Studies, and Assistant Research Anthropologist, at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
LAURY OAKS is Associate Professor, Women's Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara.
