There is no such thing as health, only social practices: An empirical exploration of social health

ABSTRACT

Einleitung Social medicine and other social sciences have long shown that health is not born of pure biology operating separately from social structures. Social health, itself a contested term, has variously attempted to stress the social aspects of health. Existing understandings, however, reify social life. To move beyond such reifications and develop a more nuanced understanding of social health in the making, we investigate how political measures, undertaken to curtail the spread of Covid-19, effected everyday lives with a particular focus on social health understood as something which is enacted in and through social practice. Methoden The presentation draws on empirical data collected in an ethnographic study of the Covid-19 pandemic between March 2020 and April 2022. 80 individuals from across Germany participated in the study. Interviews, focused on everyday practices, were conducted in three-months-intervals. Additionally, participants had the possibility of adding audio-visual materials from their everyday lives. The paper adopts an interplay between a deductive theoretical concept and inductive understandings found in the data. We asked what is social health and how is it lived? This approach enabled us to engage intriguing findings that challenged or enriched our deductive model and in returning to the data we further interrogated our initial understandings through comparison and reflection. Constructing our empirical account was an ongoing pragmatic process of 'puzzling out' and problem solving that drew on our existing theoretical understandings. Ergebnisse Our presentation concretizes our theoretical understandings with original data sourced during the pandemic to advance a robust notion showing health to be lived social practices sustained in care work. Facing both threats to their biological and social health, our data shows how care work both for self and other, long rendered invisible, became indispensable for participants innovatively maintaining their social health during the pandemic. The analysis shows creative, reflexive, meaning-making actors not over-determined by structural realities or behavioral choices but rather exercising agency to develop new modes of care for self and other. Ultimately, it reveals that health is lived and practiced in the minutiae of the everyday and that it unfolds in the complexity, fluidity and dynamicity of social relations, precisely that which was altered in an instant by the Maßnahmen. Schlussfolgerung Health as this ethnographic study during a time of crisis demonstrates cannot be reduced to behaviors with consequences for biological and psychological? health but needs to be widened to grasp the importance of social practices long understood to be meaningless for health. Studying social health through the lens of ethnography enables a robust and novel understanding of social health capable of grasping health as lived social practice sustained in care work.