ABSTRACT
I began this book with key lessons from the sociology of health and illness (Chapter 1). These lessons, about the cultural and historical situation of what we define as illness and as health, helped to highlight health and illness as intertwined (health/illness) and as emergent phenomena. To speak of health/illness as emergent is to say that health/illness takes shape and is experienced in relation to fluctuating configurations of people, meanings and material objects manifest in actual social settings. To speak of actuality, is to underline the temporal dimension of health/illness, how the seemingly same condition, whether schizophrenia, cancer, depression or pain associated with an injury can be seen to vary over space and time depending upon its position in relation to other aspects of social ecology. I hope that I have been able to point out the considerable degree of freedom associated with what comes to count as particular forms of health/illness, namely that the compass of health/illness narrows in relation to specific material, social, symbolic and temporal arrangements.
