Enduring as a mode of living with uncertainty

Abstract

In addition to management and control, which in risk research have been studied extensively, there is a diversity and heterogeneity in people's responses to uncertainty that has mostly remained hidden. The aim of my article is to discuss some of the variation in people's ways of ‘living with uncertainty,’ an expression that is widely applied among many anthropologists and sociologists dealing with research into issues of risk and chronic illness. My intent is to open up and theorise the expression further with the argument that ‘living’ consists in a variety of actions and practices. I want to attend not only to the different empirical meanings of action and agency as they emerge within the activities of modern everyday life, but also to attend to the kinds of analytical questions that are opened up when action is analysed in its wide variety of modalities, as control, resistance, embracing, and enduring. What then does it mean to endure? According to the ethnographic results, enduring is constituted occasionally just in dwelling, or lingering, or embedded deeply within the everyday. What is created in these processes is ethical agency. The vocabulary of agency that the social sciences have in circulation, however, does not grasp this kind of agency to its fullest extent. This article thus is aimed at contributing to discussions on the relations between the uncertainty of the lived-everyday, which has been brought about by illness, and the varieties of human action by emphasising the potentialities and possibilities this agency has to offer.

Keywords:

• uncertainty
• enduring
• agency
• suffering

Notes

1.Subjunctivity for her describes uncertainty of practice. It is ‘the mood of doubt, hope, will, potential … a quality of not just narratives, but at least of some aspects of life,’ among them human action (Whyte 1997).

2.In social sciences, before and after Giddens, there have been extensive discussions on the topic of agency. Several current critical discussions point to definitions highlighting the processual nature of action as well as modalities such as creativity (Joas 1994), heterogeneity (McNay 1999), or habituality (Bourdieu 1990), which may allow provision for attempts to conceptualise action in the context of living with uncertainty. In this paper, I define my theoretical underpinnings and interests within feminist studies (McNay 1999) and Bourdieu-inspired discussions on practice.

3.The Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle. 1954. Translated and introduced by David Ross. London: University of Oxford Press.

4.Idiopathic chronic pain means pain without a diagnostic name. This kind of pain is anthropologically interesting because it illuminates modern medical knowledge as cultural knowledge, based on visibility of the causal agent as the main criteria for illness (for more details, see Honkasalo 2001).

5.All my informants are over 40 years of age.

6.According to his reading of Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, Foucault (1990) defines ethics as ‘positive’ in that in conceives of ethics as a set of practical activities that are germane to a certain way of life. Ethics in this definition is embedded in a set of practices and discourses through which ethical subjects are come to be formed. For the study of ethical agency, Foucault proposes a fourfold scheme. About this ethical formation, see Foucault 1990, pp. 25–27.

7.By ‘lived,’ I refer to Levinas (1974) and want to emphasise responsibility of the other as a question beyond language and reflection.