Enduring as a mode of living with uncertainty

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.