Understanding health as part of a s

Understanding health as part of a shared cultural discourse recognises how it is employed as an ‘identity strategy and dividing practice’, where the

78 The nature of health

healthy Self is juxtaposed against, and protected from, the diseased Other (Crawford 2006: 414). Disease and the diseased body each represent a tan-gible threat to social stability by reminding the Self that health is fragile and easily disrupted, but it also suggests that with sufficient will these threats can be contained or even eradicated, both personally and collectively. The protection of individual health during the nineteenth century was, for example, not merely the avenue towards personal redemption but a social duty, and the Victorian association of individual hygiene and national vigour is replicated in contemporary debates about obesity, smoking and other ‘epidemics’ that threaten a society’s well-being. Reforming social behaviour thus remains firmly part of modern health promotion, and this is evident within the context of modern sport, where performance technolo-gies, like diseases, are thought to represent a material risk to both an ath-lete’s health and the broader institution of sport. The prohibition of performance enhancing substances and methods for reasons of health is, thus, embedded in a specific social agenda where health and morality are not discrete but rather are essentially integrated to ensure that sport and other social identities remain unblemished.