Health as a meaningful social practice

The pursuit of health has become a highly valued activity in modern and contemporary life, commanding enormous resources and generating an expansive professionalization and commercialization along with attendant goods, services and knowledge. Health has also become a focal, signifying practice. As a 'key word', health is constructed in relation to social structures and experience and systematically articulated with other meanings and practices. Although the cogency of health as a practical concept is largely a product of the enormous influence of modern medicine, medical conceptions have never been able to contain the irrepressible proliferation of meanings associated with health. The meaningful - and…