Slides from lecture on the prospects for mutual enrichment between happiness research and sociocultural anthropology, given at University of Canterbury as part of their 50th Anniversary series of lectures.

1. whole
as a
holistic
Life
empathy
being
externalist
biographical
crosscultural
Canterbury 50th
Anniversary
remembering
motives
enjoyment
narrative
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
scale
numbers
policy
University of Edinburgh
culture
data
graphics
ikigai holism
Life domains
subjectivity
Contributions to
feeling
appreciative
stories
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
barometer
evalluation
aspiration
Suma qamana
progress
EXPAND
planning
virtue
luck
surveys
discourses
fieldwork
goods
dignity
betterment
contrast
Self-making
Happiness studies

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

3. How can happiness research strengthen the
anthropology of selves and lives?
How can anthropological (ethnographic)
approaches strengthen happiness research?

4. 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.’

5. 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.

6. ‘Happiness’ frequency in books 1800-2008 (Google Ngram)
1900
2000
1800

7. 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’?

8. Francis Hutcheson
1694-1746
• Happiness is what
counts, and
everyone’s happiness
should count equally

9. 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

10. 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

11. Numbers vs Stories
Quantitative vs Qualitative learning

12. 20th Century
Quantifiers Narrators
Psychologists, economists,
neuroscientists, some
sociologists
Psychotherapists, biographers,
anthropologists, some narrative
psychologists and sociologists

13. Public psychometrics: new insights, but
some misleading yet persuasive narratives.
Is there really
an ‘increasing
gap’ between
the economy
and happiness?

14. …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

15. … 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'

16. …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’

17. 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

18. 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’

19. 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

20. “we mustn’t
expect more
precision than
the subject
matter allows”
Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics

21. How’s life?
Isn’t that a bit
like trying to
catch fireworks
with a lasso?

22. How should we
define
happiness?
Oh, do not ask,
"What is it?"
Let us go and
make our visit.

23. 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?

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

27. How do we
develop a
sense of self?
How do we
develop an
understanding
of what our
lives are like?

28. A ‘happiness lens’ means adopting appreciative
approaches to research, policy and practice:
good
feelings
whole
lives
How happy are
you? How’s life?
How’s your life going? What’s the story?

29. 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
ValenceValue
Virtue

30. 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

31. 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

32. 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

33. 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

34. 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

35. 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.

36. 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

37. Ethnography
promotes intercultural
empathy
Autistic people can’t
understand us
‘neurotypicals’
think we’re a
puzzle

38. 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

39. 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?

40. Which life is better?
h
a
p
p
i
n
e
s
s
Life course

41. 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)

42. 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

43. appreciation empathy holism life narrative
Mathews 1996
…Life Worth Living
y y y y
Wallman 1996
Wellbeing …AIDS
n y/n y/n y/n
Adelson 2001
Being Alive Well
y/n y/n y y/n
Lim Khek Gee 2008
Imagining the Good Life
y/n Y Y y/n
Jackson 2011
Life …Limits:
Wellbeing…
n y/n y/n y/n
Calestani 2013
Wellbeing Bolivia
y y y y/n
Fischer 2014
Good Life …Wellbeing
y y y y/n

44. 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