Health as moral performance: ritual, transgression and taboo

Abstract

Taking as its point of departure the problematic distinction between illness as ‘deviance’ and health as ‘conformity’, this article ventures an alternative notion of health which oscillates precariously between bodily discipline and corporeal transgression; modalities which both reflect and reproduce fundamental tensions and contradictions in Western culture. Underlying this is a notion of the ‘recalcitrant’ body; one which, as an (un) containable entity in any one domain or discourse, demands both cultural ‘limits’ and points of corporeal ‘transgression’. Drawing upon recent sociological and anthropological work within this area, these issues are illustrated through: (i) the ritual performance of health as ‘dilemmatic’; (ii) the cultural shift towards more holistic, emotionally expressive, forms of health and embodiment; and (iii) the so-called ‘resacralization’ of social life and resurgence of emotions and ‘effervescent bodies’ at the turn of the century: developments which, it is suggested, hold out both positive and negative possibilities.