Dangers, Experience And Luck
Living With Uncertainty In The Andes

Studies on risk in economic anthropology have concentrated on the question of how rural communities of the non-Western world ensure their subsistence in highly unpredictable environments. Two different approaches to the phenomenon of risk have been used: decision theory and moral economy. The models from decision theory, which in part are influenced by evolutionary ecology and cultural ecology, emphasise the adaptive advantages of individual strategies that take security aspects into account (see for example Barlett 1980; Browman 1987a; 1987b; Cashdan 1990; de Garine and Harrison 1988; Halstead and O'Shea 1989; Ortiz 1980). The contribution of both approaches is that they have attracted attention to the complex problems connected with stochastically fluctuating ecological and socio-economic conditions and have elucidated structural features that buffer the impacts of the risks. Notwithstanding these achievements, risk studies in economic anthropology reveal an important shortcoming. They take neither indigenous conceptualisations of risk nor cultural meanings of coping strategies into account. And in spite of focusing on environmental risks, these studies do not consider local conceptualisations of nature. In my opinion, only such an extension of risk analysis would allow us to better understand how risk logics are produced and operate at the level of situated experience (see also Lupton 1999; Whyte 1999).