Medical culture in advanced technological societies is characterized by an abundance of warnings about health hazards, along with an equally abundant flow of prescriptive advice for protecting individuals against them. Knowledge of health hazards also defines living and working environments and has spawned a politics of regulatory control. These features of contemporary health consciousness and action, along with deepening insecurities in the larger body politic, precipitate a spiral of anxiety and control. The spiral disrupts the presumed security derived from medical knowledge and medically informed behaviors and threatens to erode the boundaries of sanctioned action for health protection. In the context of the volatile political economy of health, the spiral, with its excesses of anxiety and demands for unauthorized controls, elicits efforts to contain it. I explore the symbolic dimensions of risk, what I call ‘risk ritual’ - the prevailing form of managing this troublesome contradiction.
Armstrong, D. (1993). Public health spaces and the fabrication of identity . Sociology, 27(3), 393-410 .
2.
Balshem, M. (1993). Cancer in the community: Class and medical authority. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press .
3.
Barsky, A. (1988). Worried sick: Our troubled quest for wellness. Boston, MA: Little Brown .
4.
Bauman, Z. (1992). Mortality, immortality and other life strategies. Cambridge: Polity .
5.
Bauman, Z. (1999). In search of politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press .
6.
Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. Trans. R. Ritter. London: Sage Publications .
7.
Callahan, D. (1993). The troubled dream of life. New York: Simon & Schuster .
8.
Comaroff, J. (1981). Symbolic healing: Medicine as a socio-cultural system. Unpublished.
9.
Comaroff, J. (1982). Medicine: Symbol and ideology. In P. Wright and A. Treacher (Eds.), The problem of medical knowledge, pp. 49-68. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press .
10.
Crawford, R. (2000). The ritual of health promotion. In S. Williams , J. Gabe and M. Calnan (Eds.), Health, medicine and society: Key theories, future agendas, pp. 219-235. London: Routledge .
11.
Davison, C. , Davey-Smith, G. and Frankel, S. (1991). Lay epidemiology and the prevention paradox . Sociology of Health and Illness, 13, 1-19 .
12.
Davison, C. , Frankel, S. and Davey-Smith, G. (1992). ‘To hell with tomorrow’: Coronary heart disease risk and the ethnography of fatalism. In S. Scott , G. Willliams , S. Platt and H. Thomas (Eds.), Private risks and public dangers, pp. 95-111. Avebury: Adlershot .
13.
Douglas, M. and Wildavsky, A. (1983). Risk and culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press .
14.
Ewald, F. (1991). Insurance and risk. In G. Burchell , C. Gordon and P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality, pp. 197-210. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press .
15.
Ferudi, F. (1997). The culture of fear. London: Cassell .
16.
Forde, O.H. (1998). Is imposing risk awareness cultural imperialism?Social Science and Medicine, 47, 1155-1159 .
17.
Fox, R. (1980). The evolution of medical uncertainty . Health and Society, 58(1), 1-49 .
18.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity. Cambridge: Polity Press .
19.
Gifford, S. (1986). The meaning of lumps: A case study of the ambiguities of risk. In C. Janes , R. Stall and S. Gifford (Eds.), Anthropology and epidemiology, pp. 213-246. Dordrecht: Reidel .
20.
Glassner, B. (1999). The culture of fear. New York: Basic .
21.
Gray, G. and Ropeik, D. (2002). Dealing with the dangers of fear: The role of risk communication . Health Affairs, 21(6), 106-116 .
22.
Greco, M. (1993). Psychosomatic subjects and the ‘duty to be well’: Personal agency within medical rationality . Economy and Society, 22(3), 357-372 .
23.
Hacking, I. (1990). The taming of chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
24.
Ignatieff, M. (1988). Modern dying . The New Republic, 26 December: 28-33 .
25.
Illich, I. (1976). Medical nemesis: The expropriation of health. New York: Pantheon .
26.
Kolata, G. (1999). Experts unsure of effects of a type of contaminant . New York Times, 4 August, A16 .
27.
Kunreuther, H. and Slovic, P. , Eds. (1996). Challenges in risk assessment and risk management: Annals of the American academy of political and social science, 545 (May).
28.
Lupton, D. (1993). Risk as moral danger . International Journal of Health Services, 23, 425-435 .
29.
Lupton, D. (1999). Risk. London: Routledge .
30.
Lupton, D. (2003). Medicine as culture, 2nd edn.London: Sage Publications .
31.
Martin, E. (1994). Flexible bodies. Boston, MA: Beacon Press .
32.
Moynihan, R. , Heath, I. and Henry, D. (2002). Selling sickness: The pharmaceutical industry and disease mongering . British Medical Journal, 324, 886-892 .
33.
New York Times. (2002). 3 December. Claudia Dreyfus. The fear factor meets its match: A conversation with David Ropeik .
34.
Novas, C. and Rose, N. (2000). Genetic risk and the birth of the somatic individual . Economy and Society, 29(4), 485-513 .
35.
Robertson, A. (2000). Embodying risk, embodying political rationality: Women’s accounts of risks for breast cancer . Health, Risk and Society, 2(2), 219-235 .
36.
Robertson, A. (2001). Biotechnology, political rationality and discourses on health risk . Health, 5(3), 293-309 .
37.
Romanyshyn, R. (1989). Technology as symptom and dream. London: Routledge .
38.
Ropeik, D. (2002). Journalists can be seduced by aspects of risk: By understanding how and why people perceive risks, reporters and editors can cover risk-related issues with more caution and balance . Nieman Reports, 56(4), on-line, 1-5 .
39.
Ropeik, D. and Holmes, N. (2003). ‘Never bitten, twice shy’: The real dangers of summer . New York Times, Op. Ed., 9 August, A11 .
40.
Shickle, D. and Chadwick, R. (1994). The ethics of screening: Is ‘screeningitis’ an incurable disease?Journal of Medical Ethics, 20, 12-18 .
41.
Skolbekken, J.-A. (1995). The risk epidemic in medical journals . Social Science and Medicine, 40(3), 291-305 .
42.
Slovic, P. (1999). Trust, emotion, sex, politics, and science: Surveying the risk-assessment battlefield . Risk Analysis, 19(4), 689-701 .
43.
Sontag, S. (1978). Illness as metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux .
44.
Taussig, M. (1980). Reification and the consciousness of the patient . Social Science and Medicine, 14B, 3-13 .
45.
Tesh, S. (1988). Hidden arguments: Political ideology and disease prevention policy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press .
46.
Tulloch, J. and Lupton, D. (2003). Risk and everyday life. London: Sage Publications .
47.
Wilkinson, I. (2001). Anxiety in a risk society. London: Routledge .
48.
Wynne, B. (1996). May the sheep safely graze? A reflexive view of the expert-lay knowledge divide. In S. Lash , B. Szerszinski and B. Wynne (Eds.), Risk, environment and modernity: Towards a new ecology, pp. 44-83. London: Sage Publications .
