title: Health as a meaningful social practice.
abstract: 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 ideological - practices of health can be illustrated by comparing three periods in American culture: (1) the late 19th and early 20th century; (2) the 1970s and 1980s; and (3) the first years of the 21st century.
authors.affiliation: University of Washington, Tacoma, Washington 98402-3100, USA. crawford@u.washington.edu
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Crawford
mesh_terms: D001294:Attitude to Health / Q000208:ethnology*; D003469:Culture; D015438:Health Behavior; D006293:Health Promotion; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D006801:Humans; D012648:Self Care; D012923:Social Class; D012941:Social Responsibility; D012962:Sociology, Medical / Q000266:history*; D014481:United States