Values of Happiness Hau Books

VALUES OF HAPPINESS Hau BOOKS Executive Editor Giovanni da Col Managing Editor Sean M. Dowdy Editorial Board Anne-Christine Taylor Carlos Fausto Danilyn Rutherford Ilana Gershon Jason Throop Joel Robbins Jonathan Parry Michael Lempert Stephan Palmié www.haubooks.com VALUES OF HAPPINESS TOWard AN ANthrOPOLOGY OF PUrpOSE IN LifE Special Issues in Ethnographic Theory Series Edited by Iza Kavedžija and Harry Walker Hau Books Chicago © 2016 Hau Books Hau Books Special Issues in Ethnographic Theory Series (Volume 2) The HAU Books Special Issues in Ethnographic Theory Series prints paperback versions of pathbreaking collections, previously published in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Cover Photo © Skye Hohmann Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9861325-7-5 LCCN: 2016959208 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is marketed and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. Distributed Open Access under a Creative Commons License (CC-BY ND-NC 4.0) Table of Contents List of Contributors vii introduction Values of happiness Harry Walker and Iza Kavedžija 1 chapter one Ambivalent happiness and virtuous suffering C. Jason Throop 29 chapter two Being careful what you wish for: The case of happiness in China Charles Stafford 59 chapter three The good life in balance: Insights from aging Japan Iza Kavedžija 83 chapter four Techniques of happiness: Moving toward and away from the good life in a rual Ethopian community Dena Freeman 109 vi VALUES OF HAPPINESS chapter five “Good without God”: Happiness and pleasure among the humanists Matthew Engelke 133 chapter six Mindful in Westminster: The politics of meditation and the limits of neoliberal critique Joanna Cook 163 chapter seven The path to happiness? Prosperity, suffering, and transnational migration in Britain and Sylhet Katy Gardner 191 chapter eight Militantly well Henrik E. Vigh 215 chapter nine Le bonheur suisse, again Michael Lambek 237 chapter ten Joy within tranquility: Amazonian Urarina styles of happiness Harry Walker 267 afterword On happiness, values, and time: The long and short of it Joel Robbins 293 Index 317 List of Contributors Joanna Cook is an anthropologist at University College London. She is the author of Meditation in modern Buddhism: Renunciation and change in Thai monastic life (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and the coeditor of The state we’re in: Reflecting on democracy’s troubles (Berghahn Books, 2016), Detachment: Essays on the limits of relational thinking (Manchester University Press, 2015) and South- east Asian perspectives on power (Routledge, 2012). Matthew Engelke is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of A problem of presence: Be- yond scripture in an African church (University of California Press, 2007), which won the 2008 Geertz Prize for Anthropology of Religion and the 2009 Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, and God’s agents: Biblical publicity in contemporary England (University of California Press, 2013). He is coeditor, most recently, of Global Christianity, global critique (with Joel Robbins), a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (2010). He has run Prickly Paradigm Press with Marshall Sahlins since 2002, and was editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthro- pological Institute from 2010 to 2013. Dena Freeman is a Senior Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthro- pology at the London School of Economics. She has carried out research in Ethiopia for over twenty years and has written about cultural change, inequality, marginalization, happiness, religion, and development. Her most recent book viii VALUES OF HAPPINESS is Pentecostalism and development: Churches, NGOs and social change in Africa (Palgrave 2012). Katy Gardner is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics where she is currently Head of Department. Her published works include Global migrants, local lives: Travel and transformation in rural Bangladesh (Oxford University Press, 1995); Age, narrative and migration: The life histories and the life course amongst British Bengali elders in London (Berg, 2002); and Dis- cordant developments: Global capitalism and the struggle for survival in Bangladesh (Pluto Press, 2012). She has also written a book on Anthropology and Devel- opment (Anthropology and development: Challenges for the twenty first century, with David Lewis, Pluto Press, 2015) and is the author of several novels and a collection of short stories. Iza Kavedžija has worked in Japan on meaning in life, motivation, life choices, aging, and the life-course. She is currently a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Exeter. Her monograph Meaning in life: Tales from aging Japan, based on her work with older Japanese, exploring their experiences of aging, narrativity, and wellbeing, is forthcoming with University of Pennsylvania Press. She is currently carrying out research examining practices of contemporary art production among a community of young avant-garde artists in the Japanese city of Osaka. Michael Lambek holds a Canada Research Chair and is Professor of Anthro- pology at the University of Toronto. He carries out the majority of his fieldwork in the Western Indian Ocean and is the author or editor of a dozen books, most recently The ethical condition (University of Chicago Press, 2015), A companion to the anthropology of religion (edited with Janice Boddy; Wiley-Blackwell, paper edition 2015), and Four lectures on ethics: Anthropological perspectives (with Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane; Hau Books, 2015). Joel Robbins is Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at the Univer- sity of Cambridge. Much of his recent work has focused on the anthropological study of values. Charles Stafford teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics and is also the publisher and editor of Anthropology of this Century. He is a LIST OF CONtribUTOrs ix specialist in cognitive anthropology and the author of The roads of Chinese child- hood (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Separation and reunion in modern China (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and the editor of Ordinary ethics in China (Bloomsbury, 2013). C. Jason Throop is Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on pain, suffering, empathy, and morality on the island of Yap in the Western Caroline Islands of Micronesia. He is the author of Suffering and sentiment: Exploring the vicissi- tudes of experience and pain in Yap (University of California Press, 2010) and the coeditor of the volumes Toward an anthropology of the will (Stanford University Press, 2010) and The anthropology of empathy: Experiencing the lives of others in Pacific societies (Berghahn Books, 2011). Henrik Vigh is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. He has researched issues of youth and conflict in both Europe and Africa and has written extensively on issues of social crisis, conflict, and mobilization. He is the author of Navigating terrains of war: Youth and soldiering in Guinea-Bissau. His current research investigates the intersection between war and crime focus- ing on the transnational movement of cocaine through militant networks in West Africa. Harry Walker has worked in the Peruvian Amazon on a range of topics includ- ing personhood, materiality, exchange, shamanism, law, sport, and social change. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His monograph on the Amazonian Urarina, Under a watchful eye: Self, power and intimacy in Amazonia (University of California Press, 2013), explores the emergence of personal autonomy through intimate but asymmetrical relations of nurturance and dependency. He has recently published on the apprehension of formal law and its relationship to ritual practice, and coedited a recent special issue on Amazonian appropriations of documents and bureaucracy. He is currently carrying out research on concep- tions of justice and injustice. introduction Values of happiness Harry Walker and Iza Kavedžija “Tell me how you define happiness, and I’ll tell you who you are!” So concludes one survey of the concept’s treatment by Western philosophy over the past two millennia (S. Bok 2010: 54), testifying not only to the diversity of ways in which happiness has been understood—even just within our own intellectual heritage— but also, and more importantly, to its role as what we might term a diagnostic of forms of life. How people conceive of, evaluate, and pursue (or not) happiness can reveal much about how they live and the values they hold dear. An ethnographic inquiry into happiness, we argue, offers a unique window onto the ways in which people diversely situated in time and space grapple with fundamental questions about how to live, the ends of life, and what it means to be human. The idea of happiness—however defined in its specifics—makes a claim about what is most desirable and worthwhile in a person’s life. It purports to be an all-inclusive assessment of a person’s condition, either at a specific moment in time or in relation to a life in its entirety; it expresses a hope that the various aims, enjoyments, and desires that characterize a life—though they may often conflict with each other—may ultimately be harmonized, or somehow rendered coherent (White 2006). For most people in the West today, happiness is about feeling good; it denotes a preponderance of positive over negative affect, and a 2 HARRY WALKER AND IZA KAVEdžIJA general sense of contentment or satisfaction with life. It is inherently subjective, consisting of people’s evaluations of their own life, both affective and cognitive (Diener 1984; Argyle, Martin, and Crossland 1989). This is, of course, but one of many ways in which the term has been understood—and, like all others, says much about the social, economic, and political conditions in which it emerged.

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