Identities under risk or risk as identity? Youth’s health and the contemporary life

Abstract

This is an essay on the issue of the identity of the Brazilian youth related to risks in our contemporary culture. There is a brief approach towards conceptual dimensions connected to categories such as ‘health’, ‘contemporaneity’, ‘identity’, ‘youth’. Some statistical aspects related to morbidity and mortality are presented in order to generate a synthetic framework of the epidemiological situation in our context. An analysis is proposed, from a sociological point of view, concerning the construction of fluid identities in a society characterized by precariousness and excess in many levels. At last, it is suggested how the link between risk and ambivalence in many ways frame respective attitudes of exposure (adventure) and avoidance (prevention). Keywords: risk, identity, youth, social sciences in health.