Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory

Risk and danger are culturally conditioned ideas. They’re shaped by pressures of social life and accepted notions of accountability. The danger analyses which can be more and more being utilised by politicians, aid programmes and business ignore the insights to be gained from social anthropology which will also be applied to up to date industrial society.
In this choice of contemporary essays, Mary Douglas develops a programme for studying risk and blame that follows from ideas firstly proposed in Purity and Danger. She suggests how political and cultural bias will also be incorporated into the study of risk perception and within the discussion of responsibility in public policy.