The Practice of Control in Risk Activities

In this paper I would like to challenge the dominating understanding of voluntary risk-taking as activities with a focus on risk (Lyng). Instead I am arguing for a shift in focus from risk to control, which is the outcome of a successful interaction with risk. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on climbing and scuba diving, I analyse the practice of control as what Foucault calls a “technology of the self”. With this shift in focus to control, participants in risk activities are understood as practicing a dominating ideal in the post welfare era, where the individual is increasingly supposed to be responsible and in control of his/her own life (Simon).