A disposition of risk: Climbing practice,reflexive modernity and the habitus

An observant participant

To articulate this argument I draw from research consisting of 35 interviews with experienced climbers and 18 months of ‘multi-site’ (Marcus, 1995) ethnography. These sites are primarily across North America, though they have included extensive involvement in Australian climbing communities, along with periods in Europe, South America and expeditionary settings. These sites were chosen to correspond with the climbing season in order to cover alpine, waterfall and rock climbing styles. The access to and possibility of climbing in these styles varies substantially across the seasons, whether it is too warm for ice, too cold for rock, or the weather is too unstable during particular seasons. The primary focus however was on ‘high-risk’ or ‘edgework’ (Lyng 1990) climbing styles. These styles generally mean that climbers will potentially suffer fatal consequences if they make mistakes (such as falling), but this can also come from the general dangerousness of the mountain terrain (avalanches, storms, rockfalls and so on).

Over the course of this research I underwent the process of becoming a climber and gaining experience in high-risk climbing styles. I have been involved in ice, rock, alpine and expeditionary ascents during the course of this research. This has given me a much greater access to willing participants and stories. Wacquant’s (2004) ‘observant participation’ method has been vital to this approach, as forging my own habitus to become a climber myself has granted my research the possibility of reflexive insight into the ways that these abilities develop. Habitus hence is not only a conceptual tool, but also a methodological one. It allows for the mirroring of the practical acquisition of dispositions that is also undergone by others in the research field (Wacquant, 2013a: 19). This has allowed me to ‘test the robustness and fruitfulness of habitus as guide for probing the springs of social conduct’ (Wacquant, 2013a: 19). In this context, ‘insider research’ (Hodkinson, 2005) boasts some significant advantages. It is easier to communicate and build rapport with participants and it has meant deeper descriptions of experiences can be pursued. Equally, the researcher has the ‘ability to gauge the honesty and accuracy of responses’ (Hockey, quoted in Hellawell, 2006: 488). Interviews often included discussion about climbing routes that I had completed or was familiar with, meaning it was easier to grapple with the embodied intricacies participants describe.

It is important to note that I have retained the position that risk-taking practices are often partially grounded in ‘accidental’ exposure to climbing or high-risk activities and were not part of the explicit motivations for practitioners’ original engagement with them. It was my own involvement in climbing that brought this to my attention, as I had become involved in outdoor sports but became friends with climbers who introduced me to the sport. After becoming involved I had noticed similar trajectories. During my research this was confirmed, as participants rarely report that their original intention to get involved in climbing came from a desire to be in risky positions. Rather this change in disposition tends to occur ‘progressively and imperceptibly’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 11). ¹ It was this apparent ‘accidental’ progression into risk-taking that led to my adoption of Bourdieu’s concepts, in order to engage with both the conscious motivations of climbers along with the pre-reflexive and habitual elements that drive risk-taking practices. ²

Reflexive modernization

At the structural level, reflexive modernization refers to ‘the possibility of a creative (self-) destruction for an entire epoch: that of industrial society’ (Beck, 1994: 2). Beck refers to a process of ‘disembedding’ from social forms endemic to industrial society and a re-embedding in the social forms of a second modernity (Beck, 1994: 2). This new modernity is characterized by the effects – the risks or ‘bads’ – of industrial society predominating in individuals’ understandings of the social world (Beck, 1994: 6). While expert knowledge systems have continued to create technologies that, during the first modernity, were seen as obvious demonstrations of success, we are now beginning to see their originally unexpected and dangerous side-effects. From Chernobyl through to asbestos, the consequences of modernity’s success are becoming known. Presently, people are becoming aware of the problems and failures of expert knowledge and technologies, and more skeptical about such knowledge and technologies: ‘Ironically, our continually perfected scientific-technological society has granted us the fatal insight that we do not know what we do not know’ (Beck, 2009: 47). Individuals may no longer experience the world as linear, stable and known. Instead, as we learn more about the risks endemic to the process of modernization, agents can assume that there are many variables that remain unknown. The agent is aware that the institutions of society have lost the capacity to ‘define or control risks in a rational way’ and thus individual agents must become equipped to manage these themselves (Beck, 2009: 54).

As is clear above, individualization of risk forms an important part of Beck’s scheme. It should be noted that Beck refers not to a simple individualism or individuation, but an ‘institutionalised individualism’ (Beck, 1999: 9). Or, in other words, welfare states shift away from policies focusing on collectives – families, classes, workplaces, etc. – towards a focus on the individual. In this context people are forced to act as individuals, as policies continue to target and define them as such (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 3–4). It follows that the dominant philosophy of modern western societies is one of ‘individual self-fulfilment and achievement’, where ‘choosing, deciding, shaping individuals who aspire to be the authors of their lives, the creators of their identities, and the central characters of our time’ (Beck, 1999: 9) become paramount. Where once an agent’s structural conditions would have been seen as a ‘“blow of fate” sent by God or nature … for which they bore no responsibility’ (Beck, 1992b: 136), agents now believe that it is their own acts that structure their conditions. This logic is so deeply integrated that the agent feels they must even take responsibility for the institutions that have constructed these events: ‘the institutional conditions that determine individuals are no longer just events and conditions that happen to them, but also consequences of the decisions that they themselves have made’ (Beck, 1992b: 136, emphasis in original).

While Beck gives a convincing account of a shifting modernity, he is often critiqued for lacking an account of how it unfolds in the daily lives of individuals. As Binkley (2009) and Farrugia (2013) note, one of the issues with much of the work on individualization and reflexivity is the ‘strict cognitivist terms’ (Binkley, 2009: 88) that are used to discuss this social transformation, lacking consideration of the ‘specific human and social objects, embodied temporalities and habituated dispositions, to which such highly cognitive, reflexive technologies are applied’ (Binkley, 2009: 96; see also Elliott, 2002: 300). Lash (1994) and McNay (1999) emphasize this aspect of critique, arguing that reflexivity is itself reified in Beck’s account, and that he overemphasizes personal transformation while ignoring the more routinized, habitual components of everyday life and decision-making. This includes concerns such as the imbalances of gendered individualization (McNay, 1999: 103) or class and inequality (Lash, 1994: 130–1). Hence, some literature has pointed to the need for a theory of practice, such as Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977), to be integrated into Beck’s macro-theory.

One of the most compelling syntheses of Beck and Bourdieu is Paul Sweetman’s (2003) notion of ‘reflexive habitus’. Many critics have argued that Bourdieu’s habitus does little to incorporate reflexive awareness into daily practice because our dispositional schemas lie beneath the level of conscious accessibility. However, Sweetman (2003) points to Bourdieu’s discussion of ‘crisis’, where a disruption occurs between the dispositional anticipation of habitus and the expectation of fields. In these ruptures, habitus can no longer rely on pre-reflexive dispositions to act appropriately. Within the vacuum this situation creates, reflexivity emerges in order to realign the agent within a field, or with new fields in order to maintain meaningful practice. But this situation, as Beck notes, becomes routinized: ‘living and acting in uncertainty becomes a kind of basic experience’ (Beck, quoted in Sweetman, 2003: 540, emphasis in original). In turn, this creates a reflexive habitus, one where reflexivity, paradoxically, has become an unreflexive element of an individual’s disposition:

Where the spheres of social life increasingly multiply and fragment, where a pluralisation of lifeworlds and an increasing autonomy of social fields require mobility across an increasing variety of sectors by everyday actors, the match of subjective expectations and objective outcomes, mediated by taken-for-granted, embodied knowledges, becomes increasingly prone to disruption. Indeed, many have incorporated such permanent conditions of disruption into their everyday habits. (Binkley, 2009: 101)

This approach gives us the opportunity to position habitus within Beck’s specific socio-historical context. Thus as people (from a specific class, nation and historical period) share these dispositions, it becomes increasingly likely that risk awareness will become integrated into general perceptive apprehensions of the world. However, while Sweetman (2003) looks to disjuncture as a phenomenon which brings about reflexivity, this is dependent upon locating oneself back within normative social conditions. The case of hermeneutic reflexivity and its application to edgework practice, however, is one that draws the agent deeper into the field of practice that they are negotiating. In this regard, the dispositional improvisation that is a critical component of the ontological complicity between habitus and field would perhaps be a better companion with hermeneutic reflexivity. This will be explored below.

Improvisation and habitus

Bourdieu argues that habitus and field are never perfectly synchronous. This is because an agent cannot acquire the totality of dispositions indigenous to a field. Dispositional acquisition remains forever incomplete, through both the dynamic nature of fields and the impossibility of any single agent knowing a field completely (Hilgers, 2009). This requires that the agent function in a state of ‘regulated improvisation’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 79). It is this dynamic that makes field theory work so effectively, since the partial blindness of all agents is also what facilitates a struggle for positions within a field:

Positions and position-takings never [have] a mechanical or inevitable character. In a field … [a position] is only established through the practical strategies of agents endowed with different habitus and quantities of specific capital, and therefore with unequal mastery of the specific forces of production bequeathed by all the previous generations and capable of perceiving the space of positions as more or less wide spaces of possibles in which the things that offer themselves to them as ‘to be done’ present themselves more or less compellingly. (Bourdieu, 2000: 151)

Agents adopt abilities as they can, if they can. And while this may give them a ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 66) it by no means bequeaths a mastery of it. It would be an oversight to miss this element of Bourdieu’s work, given that, in order for habitus to be a completely deterministic device, it would have to correctly capture in its anticipation the complete objective realization of events:

Habitus alone never spawns a definite practice: it takes the conjunction of disposition and position, subjective capacity and objective possibility, habitus and social space (or field) to produce a given conduct or expression. And this meeting between skilled agent and pregnant world spans the gamut from felicitous to strained, smooth to rough, fertile to futile. (Wacquant, 2013b: 194)

Agents will hence anticipate futures but cannot fully predict them. This means that, as action unfolds, agents continually improvise at least part of their response.

In the risk society, building communities based around collective understandings of risk ultimately requires individualized interpretations in practice. If this is accepted, then it is not necessarily a disjuncture between habitus and field that occurs, but a greater ambiguity in what is required within fields. It hence becomes more difficult to anticipate what is necessary in a situation and agents rely more heavily on their capacity to improvise. I argue that this improvisation, or improvisational space, is the state where ‘hermeneutic reflexivity’ emerges (Lash, 1994). As Lash explains:

This sort of reflexivity is made possible via the (aesthetic) raw materials of time-space distanciated narratives, images, sounds and the like. But its mode of attunement even to itself in self-reflexivity is one [in] which the monitoring subject cannot be de-situated to obtain the objectivity (or realism) of the ‘cognitive’ reflexivity analysed by Beck and Giddens. (Lash, 1994: 210)

Agents draw on an underlying condition of improvisation, whereby they understand the need to continually adjust and/or modify their position, but cannot access (or rarely access) the ‘de-situated’ space required to make a cognitive apprehension of the circumstances of the event. This condition serves as a form of tactical improvisation that intrinsically modifies the nature of practice, and a reintegration of dispositional learning (as a structured structure of the habitus) that integrates both an expectation of less stable fields and the need to continually make improvisational contributions for maintaining the stability of practice.

If this account of the link between reflexive modernization and edgework is accepted, then the agent is not only cognitively disposed towards apprehending phenomena as risks, but also the general perceptual, appreciative and embodied schemas of an agent are oriented towards practising risk. And since agents ‘only have to follow the leanings of their habitus in order to take over, unwittingly, the intention immanent in the corresponding practices, to find an activity which is entirely “them” and, with it, kindred spirits’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 223), it is possible to see how these schemas of risk become specific to the practice of climbing. The climbing field relies on the risk-management skills of reflexive modernity, as although climbing is easily interpreted as dangerous, climbers have a reasonable amount of choice in what level of danger they are prepared to accept. Indeed, climbers demonstrate a sophisticated process of selecting justifiable risks, as will be discussed below.

Risk in the vertical

One of the most interesting elements of risk in climbing is the complexity of preparing for it. The dangerous terrains of climbing require careful attention to detail during the experience but also in anticipation of the dangers that will be present within the experience. It is important to make this point explicit. One of the major governing principles of the climbing field is the requirement that climbers actively develop their ability to assess the particular circumstances that they are likely to face. Many of these will eventually be normalized, but nevertheless this process will be continuously and consciously dealt with. Throughout this engagement climbing gains appeal because the climbing field presents the dangers and uncertainties of vertical environments as increasingly comprehensible and controllable spaces. Respondents in my research continually demonstrated a reflexive awareness of the ability to manage risks in climbing environments. Here, one of the crucial aspects of the level of risk undertaken was that it was under the control of the climber: ‘I think a lot of it’s control too. You’re in control of a lot of the risks climbing … oh apart from alpine where there’s a lot more objective dangers. ³ But I think rock climbing – a lot of the risks are in your control’ (Mary). ⁴ Mary’s comment suggests that in typical rock climbing environments climbers have the option to select the level of risk they wish to be exposed to. This corresponds with the findings of West and Allin’s (2010) interviews of British rock climbers. Here, it was shown that rock climbers perceived a high level of control over risks, which allowed them to maintain risks at an acceptable level (West and Allin, 2010). However, it is worth noting that Mary contrasts the risks of rock climbing with those of alpine climbing, suggesting that in the mountains, risks are less controllable. This is an important notion which is overlooked in West and Allin’s (2010) study. Many rock climbers, such as Mary, engage in alpine climbing as well, problematizing research solely focused on traditional rock climbing because of the tendency of climbers to engage with higher risk climbing as well, finding this to be a rewarding experience, based on the presence of these risks. For instance, Johnson, another interviewee, explained that a positive aspect of the challenge that was presented to him in the alpine environment was being a competent judge of objective dangers: ‘if I get to make a decision about the weather for me that’s much more effective, much more fascinating and it’s one of my goals to be making correct safety decisions in the outdoors, correct decisions about the environment in the outdoors’ (Johnson).

In the negotiation of the route itself, climbers will typically gain insights through the use of a climbing guidebook. While those attempting a climb for the first time may have spoken with knowledgeable people and studied photos of a particular route before attempting a climb, the contemporary repeater of these routes can follow detailed information as to what they need to bring, what they need to do, when they need to start and how long it will take. Heywood also draws attention to this process, noting that:

Guidebooks contain enormous amounts of information, much of it in a codified, convention-governed form; with these descriptions the competent interpreter approaches the climb with a considerable amount of reliable, intersubjectively verified knowledge. Unpredictability is significantly reduced, while the climber’s ability to objectify and control the climbing environment increases. (1994: 186)

Hence, the guidebook demonstrates two important elements of climbing practice. First, the ‘competent interpreter’ is one who shares a similar sense of risk perception with other climbers. Climbers have only a weak reliance on formal organizations, ⁵ yet build codified, collective perceptions of risk. Second, while the risk itself is understood through a shared disposition, it is deployed in individualized interpretations in practice. These, as will be shown below, require an improvised negotiation on the part of the climber between the field’s system of logic towards risk and an awareness of their own capabilities.

An important tactic for negotiating risk is to select routes which offer challenges that will not escape the control of the climber. Through this process the risk can be managed, through the selection of routes that have good protection. ⁶ Traditional rock climbing protection is often very dependable in the right circumstances and climbers will exploit this in order to lead ⁷ more physically demanding climbs that are likely to result in a fall. In an interview with Fiona, a particular traditional rock climbing route is considered. I am familiar with the route – it is a 30 metre crack ⁸ in an almost vertical sandstone face. There are no obtrusions from the face, which means that the line between the climber and the ground is direct. The crack offers good opportunities to place removable protection, or what climbers call ‘gear’. These will allow the climber to take a fall without concern about hitting the ground, or obstacles – an ideal place to push the limits:

Fiona chose to lead routes that she had a high chance of falling on. Although the difficulty of the climb was higher than she would usually be prepared to lead, the route discussed had excellent protection, enabling her to safely ascend without concern about a potentially serious fall. It would represent a far more serious risk had the route had poor or scarce protection. As Sol explains, falling is not acceptable on serious routes, so it is necessary to develop climbing ability where it is safe to fall:

You definitely don’t want to fall in the mountains. Um, or even on big climbs.… But I think, again, with sport climbing ¹¹ comes into that training your technical ability to perform on longer, harder routes. So obviously, to push your technical ability you have to get yourself to that point where you’re falling off at some time. Sport climbing has made that a safe place to do that. (Sol)

The mountains present less quality protection and thus a fall could mean serious injury or death. By climbing in areas where protection is dependable and help is close, climbers can develop their abilities before heading into more distant and poorly protected climbing areas. This gives climbers a space to feel out their peak abilities, allowing them to choose more moderate climbs in remote or more dangerous terrains. Thus, when climbers are in remote areas, with the possibility of retreat or rescue curtailed, it is necessary to be more cautious about the seriousness of the route undertaken. Oz draws out this point when discussing climbing in Antarctica: ‘if something goes wrong, the station’s closed for winter, then you’re a long way from anywhere. So you really pull back. You don’t stick your neck out at all. You’re very conservative, because if something goes wrong, [the situation] compounds pretty quickly’ (Oz). By climbing at lower grades of difficulty, climbers can both be more certain of their abilities and can move faster in order to get on and off a climb as quickly as possible in order to minimize time spent in a vulnerable situation. This indicates a level of improvisation between the subjective abilities of the climber and the objective circumstances they confront.

Even with these methods of risk management, climbers continue to be injured or killed while climbing. This is often enough to cause concern in the risk-conscious climber. Thus, another manner in which climbers go about assessing risks is through an understanding of how accidents, especially fatal ones, typically occur. John notes that: ‘It’s funny, when I first went to Yosemite I did a big reading up of what killed people ’cause I wanted to know so I could try and stop it from happening to me. And the majority, like 70 per cent of the accidents were on abseil or on descent’. John’s response to the possibility of being killed was to understand the major causes of fatal accidents while climbing. This allowed him to prepare himself to be more cautious and mindful during stages where accidents are more frequent. These forms of cognitive reflexivity transmute into the hermeneutic, whereby the climber reinvigorates their vigilance during descent: going down is not just escape – as the hard work is now done – but remains known as a place of peril that must be actively guarded against.

In this regard, a component of a disposition of risk is also a routinized sense of control. Climbers continue to try and control the parameters of their engagement with climbing environments. But they do so in a way habituates this sense itself, becoming an underlying and unproblematized element of practice. The constitution of climbing as a ‘self-contained web of social relations’ (Wacquant, 1995: 85) also deposits within the dispositional orientation of a climber a sense that hazards and dangers can always be turned into risks. Accidents, as objective and unalterable moments, happen ‘to others’ (Wacquant, 1995: 86), a process that helps to maintain the illusion of control (Lyng, 1990: 872) in what Laurendeau (2006: 599–600) notes is a practice of ‘blaming the victim’, which helps sustain the idea that the hazards of the sport can be mastered. In this regard, ‘the accident itself is to be regarded as a unique event that disturbs an otherwise harmonious order’ (Dean, 2010: 214). This also demonstrates Beck’s (1992b: 136) position, quoted above, where even the uncontrollable structural elements of an agent’s position are viewed as having been shaped by their own decision-making. It follows that the shared disposition of risk that is drawn from broader social space is one that is reconstituted in climbing with a similar orientation of practice: controlling the uncontrollable.

However, sometimes specific fault cannot be attributed to the victim and recourse must be made to other forces to retain this sense of harmony. This is the argument that an accident was ‘fateful’ (Laurendeau, 2006: 599–600). In the annual publication Accidents in North American Mountaineering published by the American Alpine Club an example of this can be seen in the analysis of an accident on an Alaskan mountain: ‘short of not climbing that route on that day, this was one of those accidents that could be described as an “act of nature”. There are hazards in the mountains, and it is impossible to mitigate all of them’ (American Alpine Club, 2005: 21). The mountains still retain a sense of a pre-industrial hazard that are seen as ‘“strokes of fate” raining down on mankind [sic] from “outside” and attributable to an “other” – gods, demons, Nature’ (Beck, 1992a: 98). Events that have no explicable means of incorporation into a disposition of risk are hence reconstituted as parts of the impossibility of full control. But they are also simultaneously placed outside of the logic of climbing practice.

A disposition of risk

It is important to return to my argument that risk awareness and reflexivity do not characterize habitus, but a disposition of a habitus. As Lahire (2011) elaborates, agents rarely perform in a general manner in all areas of practice. He questions the unity of habitus and suggests that this claim needs to be put to rigorous scrutiny. Essentially, the habitus allows the agent to engage across fields, invoking the requisite dispositional configurations for the given engagement. But these engagements can be contradictory, requiring different logics and approaches. An agent who is extremely reflexive in one field, may be required to be unreflexive in another. As Lahire notes of basketball and generalization:

One of the main defects of theoretical discourses, in both philosophy and the social sciences, is to generalise unwarrantedly from a particular case of the real. Like those specialists in ‘games’ who present ‘the rules of basketball’ as ‘universal rules of the game’, valid for every kind of game that exists … theorists of action – even the most lucid in their number – quite seriously defend partial theories as if they were general ones. (Lahire, 2011: 212)

In climbing, this point is critical. As can be seen above, climbers do not have a lust for absolute danger, nor for overwhelmingly safe practice. What is required, then, is a disposition to continually assess and reassess the climber’s own level of ability and correctly link this into the appropriate challenges of climbing space. This is made all the more necessary through climbing’s lack of formal organizational elements. Yet, while climbers exhibit here a strong capacity for conscious risk management, in the practice of climbing itself this level of cognitive apprehension of risk can become a hindrance. Climbers must instead rely on a deeply developed conditioning of the body and emotional responses to challenging situations. In stages of edgework climbers take up a posture that relies on these aspects of improvised practice – coming up with a means of overcoming obstacles as these are confronted without having to resort to a cognitive strategizing of the adjustment. The climber prepares themselves through an extensive, if not routinized practice of conscious preparation explicitly to be released from it.

It is here that we see the habitualization of risk-conscious practice. As John, an experienced climber, notes in an interview: ‘What we’re trying to do is overcome, is to ignore that little voice in your head that’s saying “this isn’t safe, don’t do it”. You try and sort of shout it down and ignore it to climb through something’. That is, the means of engagement with risks in reflexive modernity that demand a rapid ‘thinking-through’ of possible risks, when exposed to the genuine space of risk-taking, become an impediment to the deeply corporeal experience of climbing. In his discussion of edgework, Lyng (2012; 2014) takes up the concept of hermeneutic reflexivity to account for edgework practice, noting that ‘the immediacy of the edge is a zone of uncertainty where the limit between discursive intelligibility and unintelligibility is approached, opening up new possibilities of embodiment and experience’ (2014: 11). This is because edgework shifts the agent towards a reflexivity about the ‘nature of reality’, where typical cultural conceptions, for instance of time and space (Lyng, 1990: 861), become disrupted through the navigation of the edge. In essence, therefore, rather than simply a risk experience, edgework is an opportunity to push the mundane functions of hermeneutic reflexivity to the limit.

Conclusion

With such a breadth of ways to manage the selection of climbs, climbers are faced with the potential of losing the sense of risk and adventure. Routinization and predictability can be developed through careful training, preparation and selection of climbs (Heywood, 2006: 461). However, the empowering element of climbing is not simply to manage risks into oblivion. Rather, ‘the attraction of the mountains lies in seeking and meeting difficulty to the limit of one’s ability, not going beyond it’ (Mitchell, 1983: 157).

What has been articulated here is a mode of considering the relationship that edgework climbing styles have with the risk society. This is a position that has recently been considered by Lyng:

The hermeneutics of edgework are more directly connected to a central imperative of the system – the increasing prevalence of risk agency and consciousness in the risk society. As social life is increasingly dominated by the modern idea of risk and a broad range of institutional practices based on this idea … risk taking in the everyday lives of people becomes more common and acceptable – in family and friendship relations, couple relationships, and leisure opportunities – opening up new opportunities for reflexivity. (Lyng, 2012: 412)

The relationship between an increasingly pervasive sense of risk in everyday society and the more extreme risks of edgework has become more apparent, though the nature of this relationship is still weakly characterized. In order to deepen this characterization, I have turned to Bourdieu’s theory of practice to examine how risk becomes schematized in a manner that becomes transferable between the mundane and exaggerated domains of risk. In this routinization of risk perception and practice a disposition of risk is produced. This is a transmutable disposition, required across a broad range of practices as fields become increasingly ambiguous, varied and unstable. This requires that the habitus incorporates the generative components of invention and improvisation as a means of creating meaningful engagement.

While climbers utilize a high level of rational invention in order to construct and enhance their climbing ability, in the moments of edgework practice an extreme sense of hermeneutic reflexivity is experienced, where one must rely on the deeply engrained capacity to interpret and respond to personal risk. But Lyng overstates the emancipatory potential of this experience. Whatever transcendental opportunity edgework might afford, it remains firmly linked to and dependent on a regulated system of practice. This is captured by the concept of habitus, given that ‘the conditioned and unconditional freedom it [habitus] secures is as remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from a simple mechanical reproduction of the initial conditions’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 95). This suggests that the edgeworker is formed neither by a linearity nor randomness. Rather, on the one hand climbing demonstrates the regulated elements of behaviour through the interactions of an agent with a field’s logic of practice. On the other, the field cannot be fully known and practice never fully anticipated. It is within these spaces of improvisation that we might find the greatest realization of the rewards of risk-taking practice.