Wellness: A Cultural Linguistic Analysis of the Conceptualisation of Health

This chapter presents a Cultural Linguistic analysis of the conceptualisation of wellness as found in contemporary internet language. It considers how cultural conceptualisations found in the discourses of health, wellness and detoxification intersect with other conceptualisations including for example the notions of sacredness and purity associated with religion (Douglas 1966). wellness is structured by three broad cultural models: the ‘detox’ model, which incorporates aspects of Beck’s (1992) notion of ‘Risk Society’, a ‘medical countercultural’ model, and a ‘whole health’ model. This chapter also considers how knowledge of the cultural conceptualisations for wellness affects responses to medical advice from different sources. The analysis takes account of the cultural schemas (Quinn 1987; Sharifian 2011), image schemas (Johnson 1987) and conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson 1980) underpinning this view of health and demonstrates the value of Cultural Linguistic approaches in Medical and Health Humanities.