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Edgework: The Sociology of Risk-Taking by Stephen Lyng

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By Stephen Lyng

What do skydiving, mountain climbing, and downhill snowboarding have in universal with stock-trading, unprotected intercourse, and sadomasochism? All are excessive hazard objectives. Edgework explores the area of voluntary risk-taking, investigating the seductive nature of pursuing peril and teasing out the bounds among criminal and legal habit; wide awake and subconscious acts; sanity and madness; appropriate probability and stupidity. the celebrated individuals to this assortment profile excessive risk-takers and discover their reports with chance via such themes as juvenile delinquency, road anarchism, sadomasochism, avant-garde paintings, enterprise dangers, and severe activity.

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Example text

As one who has devoted much attention to conceptualizing the shift from production-based systems to a society dominated by consumer culture, Baudrillard is at his best in describing the changes brought about by the consumption revolution. For Baudrillard, the key to understanding this shift is to begin with how the body reproduces itself in socially mediated action. Although Marx sees the body’s potential realized through the creative expropriation of material substance to satisfy human needs, Baudrillard looks to consumption practices that stimulate desire as the principle means of corporeal reproduction.

Consider, for example, the contrast between the manufactured “spectacle” of consumer settings and the spectacular character of the natural settings in which commercial adventure is often conducted. The spectacle of a Disneyworld fireworks display hardly compares with the spectacular panorama of canyon walls on a whitewater rafting trip, although it is certainly true that both environments possess a magical quality for observers. Moreover, what commercial edgework may offer customers is an opportunity to experience an active “personal spectacle” as opposed to the passive “collective spectacle” found within the cathedrals of consumption.

In spite of recent efforts to identify a distinctive postmodernist tradition of social theorizing (Seidman, 1991), some commentators point to as many differences between theories often associated with the postmodernist “tradition” as similarities between them (Smart, 1993; Best and Kellner, 1991). Consequently, it may make more sense to examine how various themes developed in different strands of postmodernist thought are related to edgework activities. I will begin by examining edgework in the context of the postmodern world dominated by consumer culture.

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