Emotional and Material Landscapes of Life

Abstract

Risks are usually perceived as something to be avoided, however there can also be positive outcomes from risk — to gain the ‘best’ or most ‘fulfilling’ outcome can require taking risks. Lyng (1990; 2005a; 2005b) examines this other side of risk negotiation in his analysis of ‘voluntary risk taking’. Voluntary risk taking, as Lyng defines it, encapsulates actions that people voluntarily engage in, that carry inherent ‘risk’ and, crucially, involve negotiating at the ‘edge’ of normative, ‘responsible’, behaviour. These actions include extreme sports, such as skydiving; sexual activities such as promiscuity or sado-masochism; or behaviour such as excessive drug or alcohol use. Lyng argues that engaging in such actions, that carry clear risk (the risk of death, pain, unconsciousness, insanity, for example) can be understood as ways to exercise individuality and freedom within an increasingly rationalised, disenchanted, modernised society. In a time of uncertainty, underpinned by a changing structural context (the landscape of precariousness outlined in the previous chapter) these actions are also a way of facing up to risk, of evidencing ontologically that the individual is indeed master of their own destiny, by facing up to and individually overcoming risk.