Last modified: 2010-05-26
Abstract
We experience a historical orientation towards concepts of health and practices of health in contemporary western societies.Notions and discourses of health enter into moral and political debates about society, about society’s core institutions and about the ways of life and forms of subjectivity of its individual citizens. They are put into practice in national policies, in organizational changes, in the health care system and on the private market of health goods and services. Even in the individual citizen’s intimate evaluations of self and others discourses of health play a part.
This could be viewed positively as a general social development towards improving the human condition, but it should also be regarded with some suspicion. Ideas and practices of health also have a powerful capacity to subject intimate domains and experiences of human life to forms of technological, rational and individualized reasoning that brings potential threats of inequality, exclusion and domination with them.
Particularly, the historical and institutionalized influence of bio-medical thought in the health care systems have been criticized for its pathogenic perspective on human life. Also its base in the natural sciences and positivist method have been criticized for objectifying and reducing human subjectivity and subjective health issues to physically measureable standards and externally observable patterns of behaviors and symptoms.
Following the Ottowa Charter theories of health promotion have sought to formulate critical alternatives to the medical conceptions of health. Alternatively, health has been articulated as a resource for an individual’s capacity for living in the contexts of everyday life. In the contexts of everyday life the individual subject’s ‘abstracted’ health behaviors can be understood as meaningful forms of participation in social practice that relate to contextual conditions and make sense from the perspective of the individual.
However, grounding a perspective on health phenomena in the subject’s everyday life also has potential shortcomings that I wish to discuss in this presentation. I will sketch out four critical points and point to possible ways of overcoming them through a subject oriented theoretical perspective on the personal conduct of everyday life.