THE ECOLOGY OF FEAR
We tend to take fear for granted. We tend to think of fear as an instinctual
reaction that applies to everyone all the time. Indeed, life has seemingly
become more dangerous, not because it is, but because the notion of risk
has become “debounded, in spatial, temporal and social terms” (Pain,
2009 ,p. 469). Is the taken-for-grantedness of the unbounded sense of risk
and fear that gives it is pernicious effects. Geographers, however, have
pointed out that there are ecologies of fear; that there are “emotive topo-
graphies”; that fear is patterned, spatial, and specific to certain social
groups (Anderson & Smith, 2001; Kye, 2008; Pain, 2000; Pain & Smith,
2008 ). What then can we learn if we do a local ethnography of fear? In
other words, how are fears created, who do we fear, and who names fears?
Firstly, how indeed are fears created? Fear is frequently produced by
globalizing discourses about for example the threat of terrorism, the danger
of environmental devastation, the sense that we now live in a “risk society.”
These globalizing discourses imply that we are all equally at risk. Then
again, the experience of fear signifies larger social meanings. It speaks to
personal and collective histories, political discourses, and social construc-
tions of certain social and ethnic groups as dangerous. Fears are also
coproduced by the built environment and infrastructures of securitization.
We tend to fear degraded, dark, and uncared for public spaces (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Degraded Places.Source: The West Bank Wall in East Jerusalem. Photo
taken by the author.
22 CHRISTINE LEUENBERGER