Odds and ends: risk, mortality, and the politics of contingency

Medical anthropology's cogent rethinking of conventional biomedical categories has largely overlooked the core problems of one key concept of both biomedical and social scientific analysis: risk. In particular, the use of the term in medical anthropology (and the social sciences more generally) frequently rests on two assumptions: (1) that contingency necessarily constitutes a threat to individual experience or social order; and (2) that a risk management paradigm that relies on a model of statistical probability is the ontologically preeminent way of engaging chance. Other approaches which do not take risk as the starting point for understanding contingency also have problems; they too assume that contingency is necessarily cause for crisis. These problematic root assumptions lead social analysts to miss how individual actors and local communities variously engage, rather than minimize, contingency. I suggest a new approach that instead aims to treat contingency as normatively neutral and as arising in four domains of experience. Conventional approaches also miss how attempts to account for unexpected events themselves involve struggles between competing paradigms (or tropes) of chance. This contest over accountability I call here the politics of contingency, and I seek thereby to signal the need to renovate our language of uncertainty in order to address its political dimensions. I trace the literature to identify some sources of these terminological problems, and through an examination of the life and death of a close contact in Chania, Crete, I explore his own approach to chance and the different, competing interpretations of his death. I thereby demonstrate the importance of revamping the conventional approach to understanding the contingent nature of human life.