Catastrophe and precaution outside the risk society A study of the experience of risk in Afghanistan in 2011

Abstract

The study frames an approach to the sociology of risk grounded in the methodology of Pierre Bourdieu, involving a critical break with the risk society position of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. The study is empirically grounded in a case of conditions of risk, Afghanistan, also a case of a key contemporary risk, terrorism. The data of the study is derived from a month of field research in Kabul in 2011, and is composed primarily of interview responses, supplemented by a risk analysis of the conditions of the setting, and subsidiarily by participant observation. The study combines a critical sociology of knowledge approach, in the analysis of the risk society position, with a primarily qualitative mixed methods approach to the empirical case, following Bourdieu’s methods of analysis and research methodology. The position taken by the study, contra the risk society position, is that risk varies with social location, with differences in social location largely determining the individual experience of risk. The study explores differences in risk by social location by analysing the differences in the experience of risk of the different types of participant, and by analysing the strategies employed by different types of participant in responding to conditions of risk. The study brings together a re-construction of concepts from the sociology of risk, the risk society concepts of anticipation of catastrophe and staging, with Bourdieu’s theoretical model, through the concepts of strategy and the dispositions of habitus. In doing so the study frames a methodology for exploration of cases of risk, combining risk analysis of actual catastrophes with participant accounts of the experience of anticipation of catastrophe and strategies of response to catastrophes anticipated.