whole

as aholistic

Lifeempathy

being

externalist

biographical

crosscultural

Canterbury 50th Anniversary

remembering

motives

enjoymentnarrative

experience

remedial

fun

Buen vivir

interaction

planning

evaluatiing

barometric

Well-being

statistics

enlightenment

doing

social

your life

facts

good

All things

afterlife

DATA

Anthropological

wanting

Neil Thin

scalenumbers

policy

University of Edinburgh

culture

datagraphics

ikigai holism

Life domains

subjectivity

Contributions to

feeling

appreciativestories

pathology

liking

identity

prudential

flourishing

sympathy

self

virtue

Virtual life

value

ineffable

time

savouring

How happy

welfare

Self-interest

utility

you

schooling

having

PHONE

self

pleasureYES

NO

barometerevalluation

aspiration

Suma qamana

progress

EXPAND

planning

virtue

luck

surveys

discourses

fieldwork

goods

dignity

betterment

contrastSelf-making

Happiness studies

“All things considered, how happy are you with your life these days?”

How can happiness research strengthen the anthropology of selves and lives?

How can anthropological (ethnographic) approaches strengthen happiness research?

50 years ago

(roughly)

George Foster (1965) ‘Peasant society and the image of limited good.’

Marshall Sahlins (1966) ‘The original affluent society’.

Langness, Lewis L. (1965) The Life History in Anthropological Science.

Michael Banton (1964) 'Anthropological perspectives in sociology.’

Hadley Cantril (1965) The Pattern of Human

Concerns.

• Pathbreaking 14-country survey of happiness, based on the ‘self-anchoring’ Cantril ladder

• 11-point scale from ‘the worst possible life for you’ to ‘the best possible life for you’

• Also in 1965: Bradburn, N.M, and D. Caplovitz Reports on Happiness.

‘Happiness’ frequency in books 1800-2008 (Google Ngram)

1900

2000

1800

Modern happiness promotion: a little UK cultural history

• Who first argued that argued that the point of morality, and hence of governance, was to achieve the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest numbers’?

Francis Hutcheson1694-1746

• Happiness is what counts, and everyone’s happiness should count equally

John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland:

govts should assess the ‘quantum of happiness’

Two approaches to happiness:Bureaucratic interest in living standards and socio-dynamics

Biographical interest in psycho-dynamics and personal agency

Samuel Smiles and the ‘self-help’ movement: happiness is mainly built from the inside out

Happiness is not a potato

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean?

… to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure

Charlotte Brontë, Villette

Numbers vs Stories

Quantitative vs Qualitative learning

20th CenturyQuantifiers Narrators

Psychologists, economists, neuroscientists, some sociologists

Psychotherapists, biographers, anthropologists, some narrative psychologists and sociologists

Public psychometrics: new insights, but some misleading yet persuasive narratives.

Is there really an ‘increasing gap’ between the economy and happiness?

…or was the ‘gap’ just an artifact of the incommensurable scales?

Source: Stevenson, Betsey, and Justin Wolfers 2013 ‘Subjective well‐being and income: is there any evidence of satiation?’ Washington, DC: Brookings Institute

… and in what meaningful sense can we divide up a ‘pie’ of ‘happiness determinants’?

Source: lots of Sonja Lyubomirsky texts, e.g. Lyubomirsky et al, 2004, 'Achieving sustainable new happiness: Prospects, practices, and prescriptions.’ in P.A. Linley & A. Joseph (Eds.), Positive psychology in practice. Chichester: Wiley, pp. 127-145'

…and some people really do take

numerophilia too far. Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada

claimed to have found a ‘critical

positivity ratio’ of ‘2.9013’

Thin (2012) Social Happiness, chapter on ‘Assessing happiness’

Do numberised self-reports show real respect for happiness?

Theodore Porter (1995): numbers are ‘the enemy of subjectivity’

David Boyle (2000): counting won’t make us happy

Stephen Jay Gould (1983): it is harmful to reify abstractions for the purposes of bureaucratic counting and ranking

Three parallel trends in humanities and social sciences since 1960s

• A ‘statistical turn’ in happiness studies

• A ‘narrative turn’ in both humanities and social sciences

• Public and scholarly interest in how individuals develop an ‘authentic’ sense of ‘meaning-in-life’

Google Scholar (in title) (2015)

anthropology AND happiness 6

sociology AND happiness 30

economics AND happiness 430

psychology AND happiness 340

philosophy AND happiness 220

history AND happiness 153

anthropology AND (euphemistically) health 1,100

anthropology AND religion 510

anthropology AND gender 330

anthropology AND development 1,050

anthropology AND violence 330

anthropology AND suffering 70

“we mustn’t expect more

precision than the subject

matter allows”

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

How’s life?

Isn’t that a bit like trying to catch fireworks with a lasso?

How should we define happiness?

Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"Let us go and make our visit.

Surprisingly, there is reliable compliance in happiness surveys worldwide

Maybe eight, maybe two

I’m a nine

Which of these most realistically echoes your feelings and self-evaluations?

“All things considered, how happy are you with your life these days?”

You

How happy?All things

Your life these days

The happiness lens W

hat

mak

e?does it

difference

The happiness lens po

sitiv

ity

holism

life course

empathy

goodfeelings

liveswhole

How do we develop a sense of self?

How do we develop an understandingof what our lives are like?

A ‘happiness lens’ means adopting appreciative approaches to research, policy and practice:

good

feelings

whole

lives

How happy are you? How’s life?

How do the bits fit together?

How’s your life going? What’s the story?

Being

(having, doing, relating, identifying, empathising)

Wanting

(hoping, aspiring, expecting, comparing)

Liking

(enjoying, showing appreciation)

Savouring

(noticing, remembering, narrating, sharing,

thanking)

Evaluating

(assessing value of self, others, and environment – past, present and future)

Happiness as a process of self-composition

Valence Value

Virtue

Scholars should aim to help people live better

Two ways of doing this:

Remedial: find trouble, sort it out

Appreciative: learn about how happiness happens, promote it

Minimally acceptable living

Clinical (remedial,

therapeutic, medical) policy

and practice

Appreciative (or ‘positive’)

policy and practice

Appreciative research focused on

strengths and enjoyments or

preventive maintenance

Pathological or clinical research

focused on sufferings and remedies

Preventive action

Aspirational/appreciative planning and learning

n.b. cultural variation in the meaning, salience, value, and expresssion of positivity

- e.g. moral disapproval of self-positivity in Asia, and in some social sciences

- e.g. this-worldly vs afterlife rewards

Jeanne Tsai (2014) ‘cultural shaping of happiness’

• Stanford University crosscultural psychologist

• ‘ideal affect’ – what people believe they ought to feel

• ‘happiness’ in general may be universally valued, but e.g in USA this means high-arousal, vs China low-arousal positive emotions

Joel Robbins: ‘Beyond the suffering subject.’

• Since 1990s, anths’ attention has shifted from the ‘exotic other’ to the ‘suffering subject’.

• Now, our interest in goodness is on the rise – value, morality, well-being, empathy, care, hope etc.

exoticism suffering goodness

Malinowski (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific

The goal [of ethnography]…is…to grasp the native’s point of view…what concerns him most intimately … [we must try to understand the] subjective desire or feeling … the substance of their happiness.

But I was unable to say what these meant. …it was very difficult to decide which of the diagrams was most like the face they were making because people’s faces move very quickly.

Mark Haddon (2003) Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime

Ethnography promotes intercultural

empathy

Autistic people can’t understand us

‘neurotypicals’ think we’re a

puzzle

Don’t neglect self-empathy: how do socio-cultural

processes help or hinder…

Interdomain coherence (e.g. work-life harmony)

Biographical coherence (making sense of expected and unexpected disruptions in life narratives

Nils Bubandt and Ton Otto (2010) 'Anthropology

and the predicaments of holism'

Hermeneutic holism = meaning in context

Methodologically, holism risks presupposing ‘bounded, static, homogeneous wholes’

…but might this concern also apply to psychological holism? Do happiness scholars presuppose a unified, holistic experience of happiness?

Which life is better?happiness

Life course

Gordon Mathews (1996) What Makes Life Worth Living?

• Ikigai – what makes life worth living

• Ittaikan - commitment to group (communitarianism)

• jiko jitsugen - self-realization (individualism, creativity)

Melania Calestani (2013) An Anthropological Journey into Well-

Being: Insights from Bolivia

Everyday vs intellectual-romantic discourses of ‘the good life’ among Aymara people in El Alto:

• Suma jakaña – ‘placenta’: family life, local spirituality and health

• Suma Qamaña – idealised and less localised material, economic, and political wellbeing

appreciation empathy holism life narrative

Mathews 1996…Life Worth Living

y y y y

Wallman 1996Wellbeing …AIDS

n y/n y/n y/n

Adelson 2001Being Alive Well

y/n y/n y y/n

Lim Khek Gee 2008Imagining the Good Life

y/n Y Y y/n

Jackson 2011Life …Limits: Wellbeing…

n y/n y/n y/n

Calestani 2013Wellbeing Bolivia

y y y y/n

Fischer 2014Good Life …Wellbeing

y y y y/n

How can happiness research strengthen the anthropology of selves and lives?

How can anthropological (ethnographic) approaches strengthen happiness research?

•cultural appreciation

•appreciative empathy

•prudential ethnobiography

• Appreciative enquiry

• Respect for ineffability

• Hermeneutic holism