Saburova Lyudmila
Abstract: The article deals with an approach to health as social phenomenon. In this context, the notion of “symbolic capital” is explored. Outside the clinical practice, the concept of health is actually presented in everyday social life and used as a designation (symbolization) of the quality and style of life. In the field of social interaction, the individual experience of health and related physical or spiritual practices becomes an interactive phenomenon, where an investment in health as a symbolic capital and exchange of symbolic resources with other types of resources is simultaneously carried out. Health as a symbolic capital is constructed and consumed in dialogue with different agents of the social world. The article analyzes the strategies of capitalization of health as a symbolic resource. The direction and amount of investment in health is defined by fields of symbolic power that claims the value of health and healthy living as self-evident
and self-valuable. Two most important fields of symbolic control in the sphere of health in the modern world – academic medicine and religious and philosophical systems – are described. Symbolic capitalization in these fields takes place through the construction of an individual image of “healthy person”, or “person following healthy lifestyle”, or “spiritual person”. In this context, health designates itself as the external form of social and individual life. Such form of constructing the “image of health” becomes the point of generation, replication and multiplication of symbolic capital at the individual and group level.
Keywords: individual and public health; symbolic capital; healthy lifestyle; selfpresentation; construction of image of health; capitalization; exchange; symbolic power.