Household collectives: resituating health promotion and physical activity

Abstract

In this article, we situate the practices of health and physical activity in household collectives, and conceptualise everyday health 'behaviour' and lifestyle as complex, collective practices. Based on an ethnographic study on everyday family life and health practices, we provide a framework for understanding the household as a collective, where the household collective may take precedence over individual preferences, and individual behaviour has collective implications. We describe the household as a node for practices, gathered by the activities that draw together and align actors in collective practices of everyday life. In the everyday efforts of the households to live up to ideals and balance conflicting practices, healthy living is about more than simple, individual choices about whether to follow health recommendations or not. It is also dependent on pragmatic negotiations, the distribution of roles and tasks and conflicts between ideals and what is feasible in the everyday management and maintaining of the household. We suggest that engaging with these collectives could serve as a useful point of departure for health promotion activities, situating health promotion in the here and now of collectives, tinkering with their specific constellations, values and identities in the entangledness of multiple household practices.

Keywords: collective; ethnography; family; health promotion; household; practice theory.