Pursuits of Happiness

Well-Being in Anthropological Perspective

Gordon Mathews, Carolina Izquierdo, Gordon Mathews, Carolina Izquierdo

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9781845457082
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781845458775
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference
• Index: Social Sciences

Anthropology has long shied away from examining how human beings may lead happy and fulfilling lives. This book, however, shows that the ethnographic examination of well-being—defined as "the optimal state for an individual, a community, and a society"—and the comparison of well-being within and across societies is a new and important area for anthropological inquiry. Distinctly different in different places, but also reflecting our common humanity, well-being is intimately linked to the idea of happiness and its pursuits. Noted anthropological researchers have come together in this volume to examine well-being in a range of diverse ways and to investigate it in a range of settings: from the Peruvian Amazon, the Australian outback, and the Canadian north, to India, China, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States.

PART ONE

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

1

WHY ANTHROPOLOGY CAN ILL AFFORD
TO IGNORE WELL-BEING

Neil Thin

The goal [of ethnography]…is, briefly, to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world…what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him. In each culture, the values are slightly different; people aspire after different aims, follow different impulses, yearn after a different form of happiness. To study the institutions, customs, and codes or to study the behavior and mentality without the subjective desire of feeling by what these people live, of realizing the substance of their happiness…is…to miss the greatest reward which we can hope to obtain from the study of man.

Malinowski 1978 [1922], 25.

In his foundational text, Malinowski urged anthropologists to explore diverse views on happiness and the meaning of life. Imagine how you would feel if, similarly assuming sociocultural anthropology to be about things that humans care about, your proposals to study well-being received the following advice from colleagues:

“That doesn't sound very anthropological: it's too individualistic and psychological. Not to mention ethnocentric and value-laden. We study relations, structures, and networks, not motives and feelings. We don't make evaluative judgments.”

“If you must explore psychology, avoid emotions and stick with cognitive psychology: explore mental maps, terminologies, and symbolic patterning, but not motives and feelings.”

“If you do look at emotions, focus on collective representations of these—rituals and language, not private experience.”

“If you still insist that emotional experience matters, dwell on the adverse emotions. Look at anger, hate, suffering, depression, fear, shame and embarrassment. Give love, aspiration, joy, and satisfaction a wide berth.”

“If you're still insistent on ‘well-being,' you could treat it as a health issue, or use it as a heading but actually write about the things that go horribly wrong with people's lives.”

Exaggerated though this may sound, academic social anthropology does seem to have been imbibing this kind of advice despite Malinowski's initial pleas. Sociocultural anthropology has been institutionally averse to the study of well-being. In his introductory textbook, Eriksen briefly alludes to the discipline's recent and marginal interest in the emotions, noting that “many anthropologists still take them more or less for granted and presume that they are inborn.” Next, he notes the rise since the 1970s of attention to the “social construction of emotions” (1995, 227). The implication? Only when recognized as “socially constructed” are the emotions deemed worthy of anthropological study.

Though no serious anthropologist could deny that emotions are both inborn and products of cultural learning and social construction, and both private and public, in practice most anthropologists have treated them as natural and private, and therefore irrelevant to social analysis. We have been particularly reluctant to address subjective well-being, the experience of feeling happy, which is arguably how most humans feel most of the time (Diener and Diener 1996). Anthropologists have been far more interested in pathologies and oddities than in normality. Yet a responsible exploration of the human condition, surely, must from the outset offer some basic description of normal happiness. We could then try to interpret the great wonder of this almost universal achievement. How is well-being achieved, by different kinds of people, at various stages in their lives, in diverse contexts, despite the ever-threatening sources of harm and misery? Are these achievements really as uninteresting as Tolstoy implied in his brash opening of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”?

Clearly meant as a teaser, Tolstoy's aphorism is often quoted as an intellectual sneer at the banality of happiness. Most anthropologists have similarly assumed well-being to be too boringly uniform to merit attention. Exceptions have largely been confined to the “lost Eden” myths that tell us how happy or affluent people were until modernity started spoiling everything. Famous examples of naïve romanticism and anti-developmentalism include Lévi-Strauss's claim in Tristes Tropiques that it “would have been better for our well-being” if mankind had stayed in the Neolithic stage of evolution (1973 [1955], 446); Lorna Marshall's book The Harmless People (1959), which portrayed the !Kung as happy and peace-loving, overlooking the appalling rates of !Kung-!Kung violence and murder; Turnbull's The Forest People which portrayed Mbuti life as “a wonderful thing full of joy and happiness and free of care” in which people remained blissfully insouciant towards the hardships and dangers of the forest (1961, 29); Sahlins's “Original Affluent Society” essay, claiming that hunter-gatherers are like Zen monks who attain well-being by choosing simplicity (1968); Michelle Rosaldo's expressions of sadness at the advent of development that had robbed Ilongot men of their head-hunting fun (1980); and Norberg-Hodge's assertions that Ladakhi people had little experience of ill-being and poverty until development came along, but that their ancient sense of “joie de vivre” has survived despite these modern sufferings (1991, 83). Even Chagnon, whose gleeful cataloguing of grotesque levels of violence is somewhat at odds with the biblical Eden, changed the title of his well-known book from Yanamamö: The Fierce People (1968) to Yanamamö: The Last Days of Eden (1992).

Such texts lack any plausible theory of comparative well-being. Similarly, the credibility of our discipline is not helped by the kind of uncritical romanticism exemplified by Bodley's entry (2004) in the online edition of Encarta, which assures readers that anthropologists don't believe in progress, that their relativist approach has allowed them to reveal “that every cultural group lives in a way that works well for many of its people,” and that “anthropologists work from the assumption that a culture is effective and adaptive for the people who live in it…[and that] a culture structures and gives meaning to the lives of its members and allows them to work and prosper.” I trust that most anthropologists today would not pretend that all cultures are equally good, and would recognize in principle that some cultures, or institutions, beliefs, and practices, are better than others at allowing people to achieve well-being and to achieve meaningful lives.

Anthropologists do seem to be allowed to refer to the goodness of life in their book titles, but only on condition that the main text is actually about the badness of life. You can write a book about the Anthropology of Welfare that is almost entirely about ill-fare (Edgar and Russell 1998), or a book about Mental health that is entirely about mental illness (Desjarlais et al. 1995), or a book about Human Rights that is entirely about human wrongs (Wilson 1997), or, hedging your bets, you can write a book on Contentment and Suffering purporting to cover both sides of the story, but then largely forget about the “contentment” part (Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994). Or you can just be an honest Tolstoyan, decide that extreme forms of ill-being and suffering are more interesting than well-being, and write about these without pausing to discuss what normal well-being might look like (Scheper-Hughes 1979, 1992; Kleinman and Good 1985; Kleinman et al. 1997).

Any discipline reluctant to study normality is going to have trouble studying well-being. It is this institutionalized incapacity that bedevils anthropology. It detracts from our relevance to the real world, and from our claims to scientific rigor and ethical standards. I am not arguing against the study of oddities as a route to understanding normality. But communities of scholars must be prepared to find themselves odd too. The cold-shouldering of well-being by anthropologists is itself a bizarre feature of the culture of academic anthropology, one that begs to be analyzed. How can a discipline that for over a century has promoted holistic analysis of the important dimensions of human life have had so little to say about well-being and its place in cultural debate and narratives about the meaning or purpose of life? How can so many of us have explored meanings, processes, and patternings of society and culture with scarcely a glance at the ways in which humans enjoy their lives, or at their views on well-being?

My argument is in part normative: to be relevant and respectable, anthropology must (not just could or should but must) do much more than it has so far done to theorize and collate our contributions to the understanding of well-being (and of its pursuit and moral valuation) in diverse cultural contexts. My argument is also intellectual and introspective: by analyzing the well-being deficit in anthropology, we can learn much about the history and culture of our discipline.

Background: A History of Interest in Well-Being

In the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the philosophers whose work eventually made modern social science possible wrote extensively about “happiness” and related concepts like “welfare” and “utility.” Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Condorcet, Marx, Comte, and Spencer were all explicitly interested in promoting better understanding of happiness, and also in its relevance to social analysis and social policy. Adam Smith and Malthus both affirmed that happiness is the ultimate human goal—although the replacement of happiness with wealth soon earned the discipline of economics the title of the “dismal science,” and by the start of the twentieth century, Alfred Marshall (1902) was to declare that economics was no longer directly concerned with well-being but rather with material goods.

Durkheim's strong interest in happiness, life satisfaction, and health is evident in all of his key texts. The psychological traditions were also steeped in happiness theory until the silencing of happiness crept in. Wundt and Freud wrote extensively on the meaning of happiness and its role in social life. It is most prominent in the work of William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is almost obsessively focused on happiness—as the ultimate good, as a personality trait of religious entrepreneurs and hence as the source of religious faith, and as a moral objective for programs of mental self-control. Given the silencing of research into happiness that took place during the first half of the twentieth century, it wasn't until the 1960s that even a tiny minority of psychologists began to follow his advice and focus on positive emotion and its manipulability.

Well-being research throughout the twentieth century has largely been dominated by philosophers, theologians, moral crusaders, self-improvement gurus, and more recently by psychologists and economists. Even writings on cross-cultural perspectives on happiness are authored almost entirely by psychologists (e.g., see Diener and Suh 2000, whose nineteen authors are all psychologists). Reference books and introductory texts on anthropology (including even key textbooks on psychological anthropology such as Bock 1980, 1988; Harré and Parrott 1996 [1985]; Schwartz et al. 1992; and Segall et al. 1999) typically have no entries on happiness or well-being. Rapport and Overing's (2000) collection of sixty essays on “key concepts” in anthropology includes none on well-being, happiness, human flourishing, emotion, or quality of life. The subject index of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Barnard and Spencer 1996) skips blithely from “habitus” to “harmonic regimes” and “haruspicy” without a thought for happiness, and from “warfare” to “Wenner-Gren Foundation” with no nod towards well-being. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Veenhoven's introduction to the World Database of Happiness (1997), which heralds a breakthrough in social science research on happiness as a complement to nonempirical philosophizing, and which argues in principle for cross-cultural comparative studies of happiness, recommends no anthropological readings on happiness.

Identifying and Interpreting the Deficit

Anthropology can contribute to the cross-cultural understanding of well-being, but not without theoretical debate, a foregrounding of well-being in the discipline, engagement with the research on well-being in other disciplines, and some careful consideration of why hitherto the anthropology of well-being has been so weak and inexplicit. In an earlier paper on the anthropology of happiness (Thin 2005), I argued that the cross-cultural study of happiness was inhibited in twentieth-century anthropology by four sets of factors, each of which is similarly applicable to the well-being deficit.

First, there has been a relativist/adaptivist bias against evaluation and evaluative comparison, and in favor of naïve romanticism about some non-Western cultures. In Anthropology by Comparison, Fox and Gingrich remind us of the sense of public responsibility that anthropologists felt in the 1920s and 1930s, part of which was to offer cultural comparisons that would be in the public interest. Since then, and particularly in the last two decades of the twentieth century, they argue, we have been neglecting cross-cultural comparison (2002, 1-3). Anthropologists have described situations and analyzed patterns without coming to explicit judgments about the good or bad quality of human experience. In anthropology and in cross-cultural or multicultural studies, relativism has acted as a strong deterrent against cross-cultural comparative moral judgments (for an excellent if pathological critique, see Edgerton 1992).

Second, the pathological/clinical bias has been more recently evident in the tendency to focus on suffering, ill-being, and adverse emotion. I have discussed this pervasive pathologism in the social sciences in my book Social Progress and Sustainable Development (2002). With well-being assumed as the default, ill-being attracts more commentary than well-being. Hollan and Wellenkamp tried to assess both “contentment” and “suffering” but focused on the latter, saying that for the Toraja they spoke and lived with, “happiness and contentment can best be defined as the occasional and fleeting absence of suffering and hardship” (1994, 28). Edgerton's critique of nonevaluative anthropology would have been better still if he had complemented his litany of maladaptive cultural practices with some portrayal of what an “adaptive” or “well” culture might look like.

Third, the cognitivist/social constructionist bias has steered anthropologists away from interpretation of emotions and experiences in social analysis. In part this bias arose in reaction to the excessive naturalism of biological determinists' and evolutionary psychologists' accounts of “basic emotions” and of their imputed influences on culture and social institutions. Rodney Needham's Structure and Sentiment, a structuralist manifesto against psychologism, epitomizes the cognitivist bias. He declared psychological interpretations of kinship systems to be “demonstrably wrong” (1962, vii-viii), and seemed oblivious to the simple point that no kind of account of kinship—whether it is descriptive, analytical, or normative—can reasonably be proposed without reference to the ways in which people emotionally experience kinship systems. Could this man be in some way related to the Rodney Need-ham who, just nineteen years later, was writing a scathing attack on anthropologists' failure to write about “inner states” as understood through “indigenous psychology” (Needham 1981, 56)? In this later work Needham exemplifies social constructionism, arguing reasonably enough that anthropologists' naïve belief in universal inner states had made them neglect psychology. Social constructionist anthropologists since then have produced a great deal of interesting work on emotion, but this has been marred both by its pathological bias and by its often clumsy attempts to portray social construction as a better alternative to evolutionary psychology rather than as complementary to it (for good critiques, see Lyon 1995; Reddy 1997, 2001).

Finally, the antiutilitarian and antihedonistic biases combine to restrict anthropological understanding of motives and pleasures. Starting with Frazer's preface to Malinowski's Argonauts, anthropologists have shunned so-called utilitarian motives and explanations, rejecting as ethnocentric Western economists' assumptions about rationality. In doing so, they have revealed their own ignorance of utilitarian philosophy. Malinowski claimed to be antiutilitarian, but was wrong to think that by describing Trobrianders as spending effort on yam cultivation that was “unnecessary…from a utilitarian point of view” (1978 [1922], 60), he was showing the irrelevance of modern economics to the interpretation of culture. Trobrianders do, as individuals, see such efforts as necessary for their well-being, as part of the meaning-making project of life. As Elvin Hatch has recently pointed out, Malinowski's own functionalist theory “assumed a universal standard of good” and “rested on…a version of utilitarian theory whereby the practical benefits of institutions served as a standard for making judgments” (1997, 373). And since “utility” for utilitarians ranges from pleasure (Bentham 1948 [1776]) to “worthy” happiness (Mill 1863), anthropologists wanting to engage with economists or moral philosophers would need to be able to make subtle distinctions among diverse kinds of pleas...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Lists of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Anthropology, Happiness, and Well-Being
• Part One: Theoretical Background
• Part Two: Well-Being in Small-Scale Societies
• Part Three: Well-Being, Culture, and The State
• Part Four: New Anthropological Directions
• Conclusion: Towards an Anthropology of Well-Being
• Index