The light switches hanging from their receptacles are the result of a failed attempt to fix the wiring damage. I'm not sure if the circuits are live or not, but I'm not going to find out. Rest assured, in most cases they are, and my dad operates the lights this way, with a careful touch.

Ironically, as I was growing up, the lighting controls for the basement were in a permanent state of hanging in a stiff tangle of wires, not mounted to anything, requiring much care to turn on the lights without electrocuting oneself. On a visit to the house a few years ago, I found that these basement switches, after 40 years, were finally finished and mounted. Now the lighting controls in the rest of the house seem to have inherited that unfinished state. "Conservation of switch mounting" is what the quantum mechanic physicists would call it, I think.