Household collectives: resituating health promotion and physical activity

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.