Overview

Individuals' relationships to their own bodies have been radically transformed by the proliferation of health information and advice. The dominance of mediated, commodified and rationalised health advice has cultivated a sense of personal responsibility for health, and intensified both the desire for better health and anxieties concerning the health consequences of everyday actions. This book explores the development of abstract forms of self-care promotion, which have come to overlay and reconstitute older ways of caring for one's self that are more deeply embedded in local cultures and traditions. The first half of this book provides a history of the increasing promotion of self-care in various fields, including publishing, clinical practice and advertising. This provides an empirical and historical basis for the discussion of political implications in the second half of the book. These first chapters also highlight the similarities between these recent health care modalities, which are rarely acknowledged in the literature. The second half of the book analyses the major competing approaches to explaining the proliferation of self-care promotion, and its cumulative political implications. This approach provides a bridge between technocratic health promotion literature and recent sociological work on the politics of embodiment. Self-Care will be of essential interest to students and academics working within the fields of sociology, health and social welfare.

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9780415300582

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Christopher Ziguras is Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Globalism Institute at RMIT University. He is editor of The International Publishing Services Market (with Bill Cope, 2002) and has published numerous articles examining the impact of rationalization, commodification and electronic mediation on the constitution of identity, particularly in international education and health promotion.

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