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Sarah E. H. Moore and Adam Burgess

Draft Copy Please do not cite with permission

Risk Rituals?

As a culturally meaningful concept, risk often has an elusive character that sets it apart from its
conception in scientific and actuarial terms. Risk concerns the probability that a particular
hazard will have a negative impact, making it less a given attribute and more a quality that is
acquired under specific social circumstances. Notions such as ‘phantom risk’ and ‘voodoo risk’
that concern the way in which a sense of risk can attach itself through the vagaries of the law or
the campaigning of individuals emphasise its conditional and often elusive quality (Foster,
Bernstein and Huber 1999; Park 2000). Irrespective of any ‘actual’ risk, behavior can then act in
anticipation, such as in the case of defensive medicine. Our research focuses on behaviour that
anticipates certain risks, practices that might be seen to constitute simple avoidance or
adaptation. A starting point is the need to situate risk behaviors and appreciate their form as well
as motivation. As Abt, Smith and McGurrin (1985) argue, an activity like gambling cannot be
understood exclusively in the psychological terms of personality and formal outcome of gain or
loss. For the leisure gambler it is the process of the game itself and the rituals and role
performances involved that are also important. We proceed, further, from the observation that
risk-avoiding behaviour can be detached from the risk to which it ostensibly answers, and can
develop a tokenistic, even totemistic character. Rather than scientific risk assessment, the
disciplines of sociology and anthropology provide the most useful tools to understand such
practices. For example, the risk assessment of university office spaces, a curious routine carried
out by administrative staff in the UK, is best understood from a sociological perspective.
Imagining possible hazards in secluded book-lined offices is, in one sense, merely the outcome
of a bureaucratic diktat related to working practices. But why managerial control should be
exercised through tokenistic risk exercises such as these is less clear, and requires ‘sociological
imagination’ (Mills 1959). Such ‘risk rituals’ are far from confined to this one example, and
setting them out as a phenomenon worthy of further reflection is the object of this article.

The article draws upon the observations and theoretical approach of Mary Douglas. Douglas
outlined a ‘cultural’ approach to risk that was to become highly influential within the social
sciences: certain risks are singled out not because they are, objectively-speaking, the most
significant threats, but because of the role they can play in codifying boundaries for the
individual, group, and society. One important way in which it has become such a “forensic
resource” (Douglas 1990) and helps account for the pervasive contemporary influence of the
language of risk is that it has partially filled a vacuum left by the declining purchase of clearly
moral language and assumption. Whilst: “The word ‘sin’ sufficed in the past to translate dangers
into moral and political issues, but sin, like danger, is becoming obsolete as a mobilizer of moral
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communities compared to the modern sanitized discourse of risk” (Ericson and Doyle 2003: 5).
Thus, Douglas sees the scientistic language of risk as comparable to a previously-resonant
language of sin; both produce a moral consensus concerning acceptable and unacceptable
behaviour, though they offer markedly different bases for acting a certain way. As she argues:
“The dialogue about risk plays the role equivalent to taboo or sin, but the slope is tilted…away
from protecting the community and in favor of protecting the individual” (Douglas 1990: 7). In
the defining sociological work on risk a shift towards the individual negotiation of uncertainty is
also central (Beck 1992, 2001).The public perception of risk, therefore, is symbolic of social
processes, dispositions, and structures and suggestive of the contemporary relationship between
the individual and society. Indeed, it’s become usual in the critical social sciences to highlight a
disproportionate sense of anxiety concerning such risks as child abduction , and that these
responses demonstrate that our ideas about risk are shaped by concerns beyond actual risk-
susceptibility. For Douglas and Wildavsky (1983), , it is the composition of a given society,
community, or social group – for example, its basis in market economics or hierarchalism – that
determines the acceptance of certain risks as legitimate. They suggest that the process whereby
particular threats assume the status of a risk is a complex one, involving, for example, the
consolidation of feelings of anxiety concerning marginal social groups and cultures, the
possibility for community consensus, and the perceived position of a society as a border-land.
What has been under-explored within the cultural paradigm, and risk research more generally, is
the way in which risk acculturation occurs at the individuallevel in terms of practice. Whilst
there is now a large body of research on the discrepancy between the public perception of risk
and the objective character of a threat there is far less exploration of any resultant behavioral
change. Whilst there has been considerable debate over whether the individual responds to risk
as a rational actor, there has been less empirically-informed reflection on the practices of
adaptation to perceived risk (Taylor-Gooby and Zinn 2006).

The article takes the insights of a cultural approach to risk as a starting point for understanding
individuals’ strategies for managing risk. Douglas and Wildavsky’s interest in sublimation,
selection, and bias are relevant here, but it is the way in which these processes are achieved
through individual behaviour that is of central concern. Beck’s work on individualization (2001)
is also useful. In his account we have become increasingly subject to a life of personal risk
management as the sweeping away of tradition and decline of structuring forces, such as social
class, has left the individual responsible for carving out their own identity and reflexively
managing a raft of personal choices. The consequence, Beck argues, is increased freedom to ‘do
it my way’ and, at the same time, a pervasive sense of uncertainty as to how one should chart
such a course without the moorings of tradition and convention. New opportunities are opened
up to us, but we concomitantly find ourselves with fewer ‘givens’ when it comes to social norms
and conduct. It is the latter condition that is most relevant here, and particularly the way in
which uncertainty concerning the proper status of and response to risk might influence
behavioral adaptations. We focus on one specific set of risk-related practices, what we describe
below as ‘risk rituals’.
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The aim of the article is to substantiate the concept of ‘risk ritual’. The argument draws upon a
range of illustrative examples, including research findings from a recent project carried out to
understand university students’ attitudes towards ‘binge-drinking’ and drug-facilitated sexual
assault (DFSA). Amongst our sample of university students from England and the Mid-Eastern
USA (n=534) there was a pronounced sense of risk-consciousness concerning DFSA but , in
contrast, a limited sense of risk-consciousness concerning alcohol consumption and its role in
sexual assault (Burgess, Donovan, and Moore, 2009). Interviews and focus groups revealed that
students had developed a set of rituals surrounding drink-spiking. In contrast, there were no such
rituals directed towards allaying the risks associated with excessive alcohol consumption even
though scientific evidence suggests that it is this factor, as opposed to the surreptitious spiking of
drinks, that constitutes the more important risk factor in sexual assault. In this respect, ‘risk
rituals’ can displace more salient risks and more effective preventative behaviour. The clearest
rhetorical example of this in our own research is an interviewee’s comment that she had started
drinking alcoholic beverages as quickly as possible so as to avoid having to return to an
unwatched drink that might have been spiked. There are parallels here with an example of
Douglas (1990): the strong adherence of the London Irish to Friday abstinence from meat,
constituting it as a mainstay of their belief and a core taboo that will bring misfortune if broken.
For the clergy, by contrast, it had become an empty ritual that detracts from the more personal
and committed form of religion to which they aspire. This is not to suggest that ‘risk rituals’ are,
by definition, a sophisticated avoidance technique for ‘bigger’ problems or commitments. As an
anthropologist, Douglas (1990: 1) railed against the ‘...widespread explicit rejection of rituals as
such’, and it is important that they are understood functionally rather than simply dismissed as
irrational. Certainly, risk rituals have a dynamic independent of the risks that they ostensibly
attenuate;behavioral adaptations to perceived risks or uncertainties that become unconsciously
embedded into social practice.. They are practices that are comfortably absorbed into everyday
routines, and, like habitual behaviour more generally, this often means that the efficacy of the
practice in allaying risk is unlikely to be the subject of reflection or scrutiny. It is therefore
unsurprising that they sometimes act as a substitute or barrier to the adoption of more effective,
if inconvenient, risk aversion strategies. We all negotiate a myriad of risks on a daily basis; it is
understandable that a process of selection and co-optation occurs, both in terms of which risks
we perceive to necessitate behavioral adaptation, and in terms of the precise nature of that
adaptation.Household waste recycling is an interesting example of ritualistic behaviour that has
attached to a risk. Eiser (2004:45) notes how “the challenge of personally doing something to
reduce future flood risk from climate change appears to be subsumed into a more general
category of ‘environmentally friendly’ life-styles and norms, without people necessarily
articulating a mental model of the links between energy use, climate change and flooding”. He
cites the example of recycling which, “in some countries…has the flavor of a moral imperative,
with neighbors quick to remind recalcitrant newcomers of their civic duty and the social costs of
not recycling start to outweigh the inconvenience of doing so” (ibid.). Yet there is a conspicuous
lack of discussion or knowledge about the environmental benefits of recycling, even though
other forms of waste disposal may be more energy-efficient: incineration, for example, produces
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‘energy from waste’ and leftover ash that can be used for construction. Some supporters of
recycling admit its conditional economic basis (Ackerman 1997) yet it continues to be carried
out without any clear knowledge of its effectiveness, even as an environmental good. Certainly,
there is evidence that much recycling is carried out voluntarily, even enthusiastically, and not
because of compulsion (Burnley and Parfitt 2000). It would appear to be mostly assumed by
those recycling that the emissions involved in the collection and processing of waste are
outweighed by the benefits. More broadly any knowledge appears subsumed by the ritualistic
practice, driven by a moral imperative to ‘do your bit’ for the environment.

In some societies the failure to recycle waste is punishable with fines whilst in others it remains,
at least formally, left to individual responsibility. More generally, there are both more and less
formalised risk rituals. The most systematic involve the extension of a regime of risk assessment
and management into social and professional life, from ‘risk assessment’ of one’s university
office by administrative staff to its requirement for organized activities involving children. An
important characteristic of the ‘risk society’ is the migration of risk assessment beyond the
confines of science, engineering, insurance, and other fields where its probabilistic and statistical
emphasis has real meaning. Thus, in UK universities, undergraduate research projects in the
social sciences are now commonly subject to risk assessment. The practice is ritualistic. Without
any record of harm experienced during undergraduate research in the UK, never mind evidence
of harm-avoidance on the basis of having carried out a risk assessment beforehand, this is a
curious activity, the purpose of which appears to be protection from hypothetical charges of
misconduct. The practice is indicative of what Power (1997) has described as the ‘audit society’,
central to which is a ‘ritual of verification’. The latter involves the creation of ‘paper trails’ that
serve as evidence that the outcomes and practices of public services and private organizations
have been made subject to objective measurement. Risk management in corporate life might be
seen as a response to genuine health and safety concerns – but its ritualistic quality suggests that
it is a formalized demonstration that the individual has performed his ‘duty’ and cannot therefore
be blamed, in an environment increasingly intolerant of any hazard. As with other ‘risk rituals’,
the ostensible and actual function of the activity are quite separate from one another.

Conceptualising ‘Risk Rituals’

In what ways can we distinguish what we might term a ‘risk ritual’ from what is merely a
particular form of repeated behaviour associated with a risk? This is necessary unless the term is
to have only the most general meaning. For example, it might reasonably be objected that ‘risk
rituals’ are simply a sub-category of ‘constrained behaviour’. The latter is a term used to refer to
the way in which individuals restrict their behaviour in response to a perceived risk. Studies
consistently demonstrate a relatively high level of fear of crime on college campuses that is at
odds with statistical likelihoods. Developing these studies, research has begun to isolate
particular behavioral changes or actions that individuals purposefully make with the intention of
reducing their risk of victimization. Examples include carrying keys in a defensive manner and
avoiding certain areas at night (;Turner and Torres 2006).
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‘Constrained behaviour’ signals that a risk has been assimilated to such a degree that it affects
someone’s day-to-day behaviour. Whilst ‘risk rituals’ operate in a similar fashion, they have
other distinctive characteristics. A central feature of the ‘risk ritual’ is that the function of a
practice as a preventative measure has become secondary to the form of the ritual. This is, in
contrast, not a necessary condition of ‘constrained behaviour’: avoiding certain areas at night
does not, for most people, involve such a formulaic response that behaviour becomes patterned
and mechanical.. In ‘risk rituals’ the behaviour is generally unconscious, and the risk itself is
often sublimated, whereas ‘constrained behaviour’ directly attends to the risk and is likely to be
adaptable and ad hoc. One might manage to avoid walking home alone in the dark by a range of
means (by avoiding unlit areas or calling a taxi); it is the fact of having limited one’s actions
according to the perceived risk of being a lone woman walking at night that makes such
behaviour ‘constrained’. In contrast, a ‘risk ritual’ involves a set of uniform actions performed in
a perfunctory manner such as risk assessment for any new work environment or watching your
drink whilst at a party..

Clarifying the concept of ‘risk ritual’, we suggest that these practices have the following
tendencies:

Risk rituals are intractable and unvarying

The most obvious characteristic of ‘risk rituals’ is that they are entrenched social practices that
are relatively impermeable to change. They are responses to social pressures, and are thus
distinct from personal rituals associated with pathological conditions. Nonetheless, they can be
understood in terms of individual behaviour, and their intractable nature is partly due to the way
in which they insinuate themselves at this level. ‘Risk rituals’ frequently involve repeated
checking and often reflect an unconscious attempt to enforce a sense of personal control. The
latter is often an unachievable goal, and ‘risk rituals’ often absorb or displace situations and
surroundings that are experienced as beyond control; they thereby sublimate a desire for personal
control, making the ritual unlikely to be subject to any cost-benefit analysis, and therefore
relatively insusceptible to change. The former lends itself to unreflexive ritualisation, the act of
checking becoming a good in and of itself, irrespective of the risk to which it ostensibly answers.
Indeed, Power (2004) suggests that the extension of the ‘audit culture’ into so many realms of
contemporary life is due not only to the increased pressure to quantify performance, but also
because checking, as a process, lends itself to ritualisation. It is thereby easily absorbed into
unconscious daily routines to become an unquestioned aspect of life.

In risk rituals, precautions aren’t assessed in terms of their efficacy for protecting against
certain threats: more obviously-efficient precautions are passed over for what might be,
objectively-speaking, less successful procedures

Though it may seem counter-intuitive, ‘risk rituals’ are not primarily selected because they
constitute the most effective means of guarding against a given threat. As very few risks we face
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are immediately life-threatening, we will generally take up risk aversion strategies that are most
convenient, both in terms of adopting the easiest course of action and ceding to the most self-
affirming or culturally-accredited risks. After all, many officially-acknowledged risks concern
‘everyday’ products and behaviors that are not easily abandoned. Drinking wine, for example, is
part of middle-class, western social interaction; that an indeterminably ‘excessive’ quantity can
cause liver failure has not halted alcohol consumption amongst this group. The mobile phone is
an indispensable part of contemporary human life the world over, even if its long-term effects
on human biology remain uncertain. Indeed, a number of risks concerning mobile phone use
have been mooted. Yet none have led to the abandonment of this technology. On other occasions
we make risk ‘trade-offs’ where we seek to minimize one risk at the same time as disavowing,
sublimating, or knowingly opening ourselves up to others. A middle-aged woman, for example,
may become teetotal to lower her risk of breast cancer but in the process knowingly increase the
probability of developing heart disease and other forms of cancer.

None of this is irrational behaviour. The above examples simply point to the adaptive techniques
people use to handle uncertainty in their everyday lives where the risk of, for example,
developing a certain illness, is just one problem that needs to be weighed against others . We
might see ‘risk rituals’ in the same way. Such rituals displace, absorb, or make manifest our
uncertainties about the world we inhabit and often emerge when the process of weighing-up
problems has become particularly difficult.This is often the latent function of the ritual, and this
is why the practices in question are often plainly unnecessary, unsuccessful, or inadequate in
mitigating a given risk. For example, Marks (1987) describes compulsive hand washing, up to
100 times a day among some people, as a ritual carried out in the knowledge that it has no direct
benefit.. Far from satisfying the desire for a risk-free environment, health rituals such as
incessant hand washing can heighten it; this is what Crawford (2004) describes as a ‘spiral of
anxiety’. Further, it is widely accepted that the eradication of all germs and bacteria is actually
counter-productive, as without any exposure we fail to develop immunity. Nonetheless,
advertising emphasizes the existence of dangerous microbes in our homes that are, ultimately,
impossible to completely eradicate. Given the dilemma this might produce – the desire, on the
one hand, to achieve cleanliness, and the background knowledge, on the other, that the
eradication of all impurities and microbes is impossible and undesirable – it is possible that
repeat hand-cleaning acts as a personal gate-keeping exercise. Setting ourselves an arbitrary cut-
off-point for hand-washing allows us to put aside our fears of poor hygiene and carry on with
other daily exercises; in anthropology such a practice is called a rite. In the context of thinking
about ‘risk rituals’, the gate-keeping practice of repeat hand-washing acts as a means of
absorbing our uncertainties about the world.

Other ‘risk rituals’ make manifest our uncertainties. Take the example of so-called health-
promoting behaviour. ‘Greater bodily awareness’ is often vaunted as a means of limiting the risk
of developing metastatic breast cancer. Charities advertise the importance of being ‘breast
aware’ and knowing one’s body. Yet it is difficult to know precisely how one might develop and
display this improved self-consciousness. It is in this context that the ritualistic donning of pink
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breast cancer awareness ribbons is particularly interesting. The practice does nothing to actually
decrease one’s risk of developing breast cancer, but it does – for some, at least – allow a
nebulous sense of self-awareness to be made manifest and the ribbon a talismanic symbol of
bodily awareness(Moore2008).. In other instances, ‘risk rituals’ displace uncertainty. Survey data
demonstrates that sexual assault is perceived by women to be the most significant threat to their
personal safety (CITE). Alcohol consumption is a significant risk factor in this crime, yet
‘binge-drinking’ amongst some young women continues to rise (Smith and Foxcroft, 2009).
Yetfemale university students’risk-aversion strategy centres on avoiding drink-spiking, a much
less significant risk factor in sexual assault. There are a set of rituals revolving around the idea
that drinks should be guarded at all times on social occasions such as never accepting a drink
from a stranger and never leaving drinks unattended. These tacit rules have come to inform a
new socializing “etiquette”, as one interviewee put it. The marketing of anti drink-spiking
products confirmsing that there is indeed an entrenched set of ‘risk rituals’ concerning the threat
of DFSA.

Yet, the scientific and police studies carried out to assess the risk of DFSA have found it to be a
very limited threat, and show that it is excessive alcohol consumption that poses the more
significant risk in terms of sexual assault (Slaughter 2000; Hindmarch and Brinkman 1999;
Scott-Ham and Burton 2005; Hughes et al 2007). Yet only three of the students who completed
a questionnaire (n=500) commented that they would consider limiting their alcohol consumption
as a means of avoiding DFSA. The significant risk factor for sexual assault has been sublimated,
and a very limited risk factor has been responded to with an elaborate set of rituals. One of the
reasons for this unbalanced response to risk is convenience. Drinking alcohol is central to
student life, providing both the pretext and the context for socializing . It is inconvenient to
reduce alcohol consumption and, in a social context where there are fewer barriers in terms of
‘appropriate’ gendered conduct, there are few obvious social constraints to excessive female
drinking. However, this freedom comes at a cost: alcohol consumption and the pressure to forge
friendships quickly create a sense of vulnerability. It is precisely this sort of situation that creates
the desire for ritual, some absorbing practice of unquestionable worth that provides the illusion
that one is ‘doing all that one can’ to allay a risk. This is what some repeat hand-washers, avid
pink ribbon-wearers, and drink-spiking avoiders have in common: a sublimation of uncertainty
by means of ritual.

The original rationale for the behaviour is unimportant for the continuance of a risk ritual

To suggest that ‘risk rituals’ produce a feeling that one is ‘doing all that one can’ may seem
strange since, as has already been suggested, they so often do not attend to the threat in question.
Yet in uncertain periods or situations – when there is no absolute way of avoiding illness, when
the risk in question requires one to contravene social conventions like heavy alcohol
consumption – there may well emerge a collectively-experienced desire to act, even if the action
undertaken is, objectively-speaking, redundant. This,is commonly understood in anthropology to
be a defining feature of ritualistic behaviour; again, it should be pointed out that in terms of
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meeting the desire for certainty in the short-term, such behavior is not at all irrational, though it
might well be unconscious and unreflexive. Nonetheless, in the tradition of sociological risk
research, there is an assumption that risk-related behaviour is ipso facto conscious and reflexive.
Giddens (1991: 76), in particular, conceives of risk-consciousness in this way, describing it as a
process of perpetual and pointed self-questioning. Yet, as Campbell (1996) so astutely points out,
an action that was originally ‘freely’ (that is personally and consciously) chosen can become
habitual behaviour in which the original purpose or rationale is sublimated. This is precisely the
case with ‘risk rituals’. A woman might read about self-checking for breast cancer, think about
its efficacy, decide that it’s a reasonable measure to take – but once she starts this monthly
procedure, it may become ritualistic, and be continued even after it has been demonstrated that
this practice does not improve one’s chances of detecting the illness early.

There has been a tendency in risk research to see such behavior as ‘irrational’, an aberration that
draws our attention away from the core manifestations of the ‘risk society’ – calculability,
probabilistic thinking, and rational reflection. Responses to a threat that might be deemed
irrational – the searching out of ‘alternative’ treatments for an ailment or the superstitious
reading of horoscopes before air-travel – are often seen as harkening back to pre-modern ways of
thinking. They are seen as products of the ‘risk society’ only in as much as they constitute some
sort of reaction against this now dominant social structure. Such a demarcation of ‘rational’ and
‘irrational’ responses to danger is mainly due to the theoretical basis of much risk research, in
the duel processes of detraditionalization and demystification (Beck, 2001; Giddens, 1991). Yet,
when we look closely at people’s responses to risk, they are rarely clear-cut manifestations of
such socio-historical processes, even whilst these same people recognize that the workings of
their bodies and physical surrounds are best understood scientifically, and the chance of certain
threats occurring is properly understood through statistical analysis. Whilst ‘risk rituals’ might
frequently be unreflexive and unconscious, the threats to which this behaviour is a response are
still recognizable as risks of a modern variety. It is not a fear of animistic spirits or godly
reprimand that informs the ritual of, say, repeat hand-washing, but the discourse of statistical
probability and scientific evidence.

Risk rituals have manifest and latent functions

If a risk-related behaviour has been found to be inadequate or unsuccessful, why continue with
such a practice? With regard to ‘risk rituals’, one important reason is that they are not simply
directed at allaying risk but are functional beyond this. The drivers of risk rituals are social
dynamics such as a pervasive sense of uncertainty or a collective sense of disempowerment. In
this context, ‘risk rituals’, like rituals more generally, often appear ‘content-less’; it is the
symbolic act of separation, repetition, abstention, or assimilation that is of primary importance,
as opposed to the specific material properties involved in the act. As Durkheim argues (2001
[1917]), a hallmark of ritual is that its formal qualities – the actual gesture of allowing or
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disallowing access or conduct, sanctifying or condemning certain spaces – reify social structures.
It is, he writes, the “set of regularly repeated acts” in a ritual that are of “central importance”
(ibid: 312). Rituals often transform an individual or a group in such a way as to reiterate the
rightfulness of a certain line of progression (from childhood to adulthood, an unclean to clean
body), and it is the symbolic performing of the change that grants a person or group access to a
new space or identity. There is, then, no need to reform a ritual on the basis of material changes
in circumstances: a ‘coming of age’ ritual, for example, occurs at the same age for all,
irrespective of each individual’s rate of physical maturation. Equally, we do not expect someone
to be literally transformed into an adult by the ritual. Similarly, an individual does not judge the
efficaciousness of a ‘risk ritual’ in terms of whether it tangibly reduces a risk, nor is its tangible
success what drives changes to the ritual. Instead, it is its role in dissipating feelings of
uncertainty and/or affirming group norms and cultural motifs that secures its continuation. ‘Risk
rituals’, in other words, are symbolic of social processes, and are functional over and above their
apparent role in lessening risk.

It is a mainstay of anthropology that rituals fulfill social functions, often serving a protective role
(as in the case of rituals performed by shamans), at other times allowing for transformation (as in
the case of rite of passage ceremonies). Merton (1968), in his elaboration of Parsons’
functionalist theory of society, pointed out that rituals have manifest and latent functions. A
ritual is manifestly directed at what is often a parochial or natural concern: curing a physical
ailment, acknowledging someone’s entry into adulthood, or welcoming a neighboring family.
These are the obvious, or ‘surface’, meanings of rituals. Yet these same rituals also have latent
meanings: curative rituals often involve expelling malignant outside forces and dramatize a
community’s relationship to their physical and social surroundings (Turner 1967); rites of
passage reinforce social hierarchies (van Gennep, 2004); and ‘gift-giving’ allows for the
development of tacit exchange relationships (Mauss 2004). Merton used the example of the rain
dance to substantiate his argument. The manifest function of this ritual, he writes, is to bring on
much-needed rain. Whilst sense-perception might lead individuals to inwardly question the
efficacy of the ritual, the ritual’s worth does not rest on this function alone. The rain dance
allows for a sense of solidarity during a period of immense strain; it produces the feeling, again,
that a community is ‘doing all that they can’ in the face of extreme uncertainty.

‘Risk rituals’ may operate in a similar fashion, and this helps explain why they can be sustained
irrespective of demonstrable efficacy.

It is worth noting at this juncture that uncertainty is not in itself problematic: it is generally only
when there is no available means of resolving uncertainty (of knowing for sure or acting
resolutely) that we experience anxiety, worry, or frustration. It is precisely at such moments that
we may feel the need to adopt rituals that alleviate one or both feelings; most often the ritual in
question sublimates or absorbs the problem of being unable to resolve uncertainty. Thus, the
student who focuses upon drink-spiking avoidance is able to push to one side ambivalent feelings
about alcohol consumption. Conscious that they could be the unlucky person who falls victim to
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a publicized risk, the risk ritual subject displaces otherwise irresolvable uncertainty onto
momentarily absorbing tasks. Further, the repeat hand-washer does not feel doubly- or trebly-
cleansed: these are not, in other words, conscious attempts to decrease the statistical probability
of falling prey to crime or illness. Likewise, in the ritual of undertaking religious ablutions one
does not experience each wash as a step towards spiritual propriety – it is the routine’s
compound, metaphorical effect that’s important.

Risk Rituals are Driven by Moral and Social Imperatives

As Douglas argues, certain dangers are elevated to the position of ‘risk’ by a society because
they embody the boundaries of certain group norms and structures. Similarly, ‘risk rituals’ are
driven by moral and social imperatives; they do not arise randomly, but reflect prevailing social
conditions. Two social pressures are particularly important in producing ‘risk rituals’: firstly, the
injunction that each of us should ‘do his or her bit’ to lessen a collectively-created risk and,
secondly, the injunction to ‘take care of yourself’ to lessen one’s personal experience of risk.
Recycling and flu-avoidance strategies are examples of ‘risk rituals’ that emerge because of the
former pressure. Repeat hand-washing, drink-spiking awareness, and self-checking for cancer
are examples of rituals that arise because of the latter pressure.

The first set of ‘risk rituals’ – those based on the moral imperative that one should ‘do one’s bit’
–are driven by recognizably social pressures, and are nearest to the sorts of rituals we would
associate with religious life. Recycling, for example, is an act that demonstrates conformity to a
new ethos of ‘doing your bit’ for the environment and ‘the future’. In an individualistic age it is a
proto-social act that is perhaps all the more significant given the rarity of other such gestures.
The (in this case very real) risk – of climate change - is remote or in an indeterminate future. In
this context the immediate pressure, rather than the need to avoid soon and certain harm, is to
conform to moral pressure to alleviate a collective risk. The daily task of recycling is a necessary
rite in the attainment of an elusive, and hallowed, future: it is easy to see how such a practice
might become ritualistic and, like religious practices, delineate the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’
(Durkheim 2001 [1917]). For Durkheim, the ritual is not simply a means of achieving the sacred,
it is a means of affirming one’s commitment to something beyond this profane life – it has, in
short, a moral dimension.

The second category of ‘risk rituals’, those that are self-oriented and self-protective, is indicative
of a different type of moral pressure; to foster a commitment to take care of oneself. This “new
morality of health” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001: 140) is referred to as ‘responsibilisation’
in relation to safety as well as health (Gray 2009). We may be anxious about limiting our wine
consumption, for example, but this concern has a more privatized character than collective moral
prohibitions; we are each responsible for ‘doing the right thing’ for ourselves, by ourselves. The
self-checker and drink-spiking-avoider are, in this context, responding to social pressure to man
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one’s defenses and adapt one’s behaviour in the pursuit of personal safety and health. The ritual
of risk assessment in relation to such things as undergraduate supervision is driven by a similar
concern for individual culpability, though it is a strikingly bureaucratized ritual. Driven by an
individualized sense that it is best to insulate oneself from possible recourse, even though legal
action is virtually unknown, such risk assessment is sustained by a perhaps realistic sense that, in
the event of an allegation of improper conduct, one’s employing institution can not be
confidently relied upon to take on the burden of responsibility. In the risk society, even the
general practitioner may feel they have to consider a medical procedure in terms of how negative
outcomes will affect their position, as well as that of the patient. Self-protective rituals are born
of individualization and, in turn, create and recreate that same social process.

Unsuccessful Ritualisation?

The main thrust of our argument is that certain risk-related behaviour should be seen as
ritualistic. Like other rituals, practices like recycling and self-checking for cancer are socially-
functional, confirming our adherence to social codes of behaviour. They are also distinctly
contemporary rituals, providing the illusion of personal control under conditions of uncertainty,
and dramatizing our sense of personal responsibility. Yet in anthropological terms, rituals are
generally supposed to do more than protect; they are supposed to transform. The rain dance
discussed by Merton and the various ‘positive’ rites analyzed by Durkheim promise passage
from a state of gracelessness or uncleanness, or allow a community to pass from a state of
dissolution or despair to one of coherence or hopefulness. By way of conclusion, we want to
briefly consider whether risk rituals allow for such a transformation.

In one sense, ‘risk rituals’ that are based on a social pressure to ‘do your bit’ do seem to allow
for transformation, as they involve the pursuit of a ‘better future’. Yet the recycler differs in
important ways from, say, the religious person performing religious ablutions. For the former,
the cultural backdrop to the ritual is a sense of likely degeneration, as opposed to expected
salvation. After all, for the recycler and flu-avoider individual risk avoidance is forever
undermined by others’ non-compliance with the given ritual. In contrast, for the person taking
part in a religious ritual there is no requirement that others carry it out. This matters, because for
the recycler, the ritual is never truly a positive one, in the sense that the ‘better future’ one is
reaching towards is, frustratingly, conditional upon others doing as one does. This, coupled with
the suggestion that we aren’t ‘doing enough’ to avoid environmental degradation, makes it
unlikely that the recycling ritual allows one to feel ready, fit, resolved, absolved – emotional
responses we would expect a transformative religious ritual, like ablutions, to prompt.

It might be argued that the rain dance is a more useful point of comparison to the recycling ritual.
Both are negative rituals, aimed at avoiding future catastrophe; both necessitate group, as
opposed to individual, action; and the context for both is a general sense of crisis. What's useful
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about this comparison is that the rain dance nonetheless provides the greater possibility for
transformation. The rain dance might seem and be experienced as a 'desperate bid' for a better
future, and thus one that doesn't provide a clear sense of success – nor does it offer the relief that
comes from an arbitrary 'gate-keeping' ritual, like repeat hand-washing or ablutions. Nonetheless,
it does offer the possibility for collective action in the face of adversity; the community has
chosen a particular remedy to a problem, requiring everyone’s contribution. At least this allows
for a sense of having collectively expended energy in a shared direction – this, in itself, allows
for some sort of transformation. In contrast, the recycling ritual might be a common action
(something many people do), but it is not, crucially, a collective one.

Self-oriented risk rituals aren’t directed toward achieving collective transformation.

Superficially,, they seem to be only protective. Nonetheless, we might see them, like religious
ablutions, as allowing for individual transformation. In many instances, they allow the individual
to manage uncertainty, and ‘get on with life’. The ritual does not dissolve the uncertainty, but it
does act as a gate-keeping activity that allows one to feel able to continue with normal existence
feeling as though one has dealt responsibly with risk. Yet to what degree does ‘being able to get
on with one’s normal existence’ constitute transformation? Self-protective ‘risk rituals’ allow
one to carry on with profane life, to borrow from Durkheim, as opposed to gain access to the
sacred. It might be objected that this is simply because they are not adjuncts to a broader
worldview, such as a religion or political movement; religious rituals, after all, relate to a scheme
of thought in which a vision of the sacred is fully elaborated. Nonetheless, self-protective ‘risk
rituals’ do answer to a particular, dominant current of thought. They are not evidence of
individual pathologies, but the consequence of a reigning conception of the individual as,
unrealistically, responsible for their destiny, health, and safety. That such ‘risk rituals’ don’t
allow us to reach toward the sacred suggests that: ‘taking care of yourself’ is an endless pursuit
with no firm sign of success (and, in contrast, definite indicators of failure). Health promotion is
an ongoing task, for example, and there are no clear signs of one having ‘achieved’ adequate
health-consciousness, only manifest signs of failure (obesity and cancer, amongst others). You
may never have too much health-consciousness or crime prevention – but, it will be objected, nor
can you be too involved in religious rituals. The difference is that the former are goals in and of
themselves, whilst a religious ritual is directed towards the achievement of the circumscribed end
of Heavenly salvation. Unlike religious or community rituals, ‘risk rituals’ are born out of and
perpetuate a state of uncertainty – and it is this that perhaps best characterizes the phenomenon.
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