Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Healthization: Turning Life Into Health

Healthization: Turning Life Into Health

Trnka, Susanna

Hardcover

Health GeneralAnthropologyGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 1512828165
ISBN13: 9781512828160
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: Sep 30 2025
Pages: 280
Weight: 1.20
Height: 0.75 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

What does it mean to be healthy? Is it a measure of physical illness, of a mental health condition, or of emotional control? In twenty-first-century Aotearoa/New Zealand, it is all of the above. Being healthy in this country requires an investment of extensive work, resources, and time. Because while it encompasses the above categories, for many young people in Aotearoa/New Zealand, health also extends to having strong, trusted friendships--to feeling that one's emotions are being recognized while recognizing the emotions of others. Health for these youth may also consist of creating a daily space for mindfulness while maintaining productivity; working up the motivation to work out; quantifying and graphing nutrition stats; being able to talk openly about one's mental health; and maybe even wearing the right lipstick.

These activities are particularly salient in Aotearoa/New Zealand where the past forty years have witnessed a growing emphasis on the importance of patient self-responsibility and where the state has invested heavily in health, even introducing a wellbeing budget that tracks the economy via wellbeing measures. All of these activities add up to a concept--and a worldview--that anthropologist Susanna Trnka conceptualizes as healthization. Through this framework, managing one's emotions, keeping one's sense of balance, and tracking the number of miles run, swum, or bicycled, become overlapping, all-consuming activities, to the point of almost encompassing life itself. By analyzing ethnographic interviews with young people, Trnka reveals the emotional, financial, and deeply personal ideas at stake as understandings of health shift in the minds of young people. Often at the vanguard of new trends in mental health, physical fitness, and digital health technologies, the youth in Aotearoa/New Zealand enact what it means to be well in the twenty-first century.

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