Values of Happiness: Ethnographic Perspectives on Living Well
Date: 10th and 11th January 2013
Venue: Seligman Library (OLD 6.05), Old Building, LSE
Convenors: Harry Walker and Iza Kavedžija
Recent global events, often marked by frustration at the injustices and exclusions produced by unrestrained capitalism and the neoliberal agenda, have opened up new spaces for reflection and debate concerning the kind of society worth pursuing and how best to pursue it. While these issues have been central to the many speculative, utopian, and revolutionary visions of philosophers and other social thinkers over the centuries, these remain limited by their relative detachment from the aspirations and experiences of the real people whose lives may be at stake. Interventions for promoting desirable social change, whether at a policy or grassroots level, must take into account what matters most to people, and why, in different contexts and social settings.
The question of what makes people happy is increasingly prominent in recent public and academic discourse; happiness is now often promoted as a key policy goal. Yet attempts to measure and quantify happiness have tended to suffer from a lack of adequate contextualisation, while potentially excluding the other factors that may make up a meaningful, satisfying life – including the importance of social justice and the common good for individual well-being. This arguably reflects a broader shift towards an understanding of happiness as a subjective or psychological state, rather than as an evaluation of a life as a meaningful whole. Anthropology has not yet made a substantial contribution to these public debates, but is particularly well positioned to do so for a number of reasons, including its ability to widen the terms of discussion beyond ethnocentric assumptions, and its long-standing interest and expertise in relating the life experiences of individuals to the wider social and moral orders.
This workshop will examine the conditions and possibilities of human flourishing in a cross-cultural perspective. Contributors will offer grounded ethnographic perspectives on individual life satisfaction and its relation to shared values and forms of association, as well as social or systemic barriers to its pursuit or realization. They will be invited to engage current public debates by critically examining concepts of “happiness” and “subjective well-being”, rethinking their relationship to the common good, and to collaborate in developing a theoretical framework for future anthropological engagements and interventions. Specific topics to be addressed in relation to these themes may include the following:
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Ethics and Virtue. Does happiness result from the practice of virtue? What are the possibilities for a new global ethics, and might some shared conception of the good life provide a possible foundation?
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Freedom and Responsibility. Social movements have long sought to “free” and “empower” the people. But how much freedom, and of what kind, do people actually want in order to be happy? Of what significance are poststructuralist critiques of the liberal humanist assumption that people naturally desire freedom, or arguments that an attachment to subjection may be an intrinsic condition of being a subject? How important is individual autonomy or competence as compared with embeddedness in social relations, and are these in tension?
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The Common Good. How do people conceptualise the common good in different cultural contexts, especially as it relates to subjective well-being? Does the individual pursuit of happiness contribute to its advancement? Conversely, of what subjective significance are social justice and equality? Are individual versus collective well-being differently valued or promoted, and how are these reconciled?
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Transcendence. To what extent do individuals seek or achieve fulfilment through dedication or commitment to something larger than themselves (including children, meaningful work, the wider community, or religion)?
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Temporal Orientations. Do people adjudicate between possible courses of action in light of anticipated subjective states in the future? How successful are their predictions? Conversely, are memories of past positive emotions and experiences significant motivators?
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Means and Ends. In what ways is happiness conditioned by the relationship between peoples’ wants and perceived needs, on the one hand, and their means for achieving these ends on the other? What can we learn from earlier models such as the ‘original affluent society’ or the ‘image of limited good’? What are the effects of the capitalist image of unlimited growth?
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Personhood. What role do notions of self-fulfilment or self-actualisation play in pursuits of happiness? Are such notions ethnocentric? Are existential anxieties about purpose in life specific to modern Western societies? How important, for subjective well-being, is alignment of personal goals and preferences with dominant cultural norms and expectations?
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Changing Aspirations. How do the conditions of happiness or well-being change over time? Does this change follow some kind of pattern? For example, does the importance of relative status or prestige increase as societies become more affluent or unequal?
Participants:
Nurit Bird-David (Haifa)
Joanna Cook (Goldsmiths)
Matthew Engelke (LSE)
Dena Freeman (UCL)
Katy Gardner (Sussex)
Iza Kavedžija (Oxford)
James Laidlaw (Cambridge)
Michael Lambek (Toronto)
Charles Stafford (LSE)
Jason Throop (UCLA)
Henrik Vigh (Copenhagen)
Harry Walker (LSE)
Supported by the LSE Annual Fund|
