Paper short abstract:

The uncertainties that neoliberalism has created and that the Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated have led ordinary people to pursue new projects of remaining healthy. While these projects are commonly understood as personal, they are in fact deeply enmeshed in politics, whether overtly or covertly.

Paper long abstract:

Alongside the increase of insecurity about health and healthcare around the world since the 1980s, the concept of wellness has emerged as a new way of thinking about bodies and health in relation to the social and natural world. This multifaceted expansion deserves more systematic analysis than it has received to date. Its different manifestations all share a concern with maintaining the body in good working order and with preventing illness, and thus the Covid-19 pandemic placed it at the centre of public debates and day-to-day concerns. While many people experience the pursuit of wellness as a personal quest of self-improvement, it is everywhere a quintessential manifestation of neoliberal modernity. Wellness discourses and practices manufacture new ideas about what the body should look like and how it should function. In addition, wellness circulates both locally and globally in the form of commodities or gifts, as well as in the form of language that is laden with political and cultural meanings. An anthropological approach is particularly relevant to understanding how people strategize to maintain a healthy balance of the body with the mind, soul, and environment, however these may be defined, starting with people’s self-understandings and the structural conditions that shape their lives, rather than from the perspective of national institutions that aim to regulate illness. Wellness serves as a barometer of changes in experiences of the body in the new economy, relationships of citizens to institutions, and ways of coping with and adapting to change in an uncertain world.