What do you think?
Rate this book
Values of Happiness: Toward an Anthropology of Purpose in Life
How people conceive of happiness reveals much about who they are and the values they hold dear. Drawing on ethnographic insights from diverse field sites around the world, this book offers a unique window onto the ways in which people grapple with fundamental questions about how to live and what it means to be human. Developing a distinctly anthropological approach concerned less with gauging how happy people are than with how happiness figures as an idea, mood, and motive in everyday life, the book explores how people strive to live well within challenging or even hostile circumstances.
The contributors explore how happiness intersects with dominant social values as well as an array of aims and aspirations that are potentially conflicting, demonstrating that not every kind of happiness is seen as a worthwhile aim or evaluated in positive moral terms. In tracing this link between different conceptions of happiness and their evaluations, the book engages some of the most fundamental questions concerning human What is it and how is it achieved? Is happiness everywhere a paramount value or aim in life? How does it relate to other ideas of the good? What role does happiness play in orienting peoples’ desires and life choices? Taking these questions seriously, the book draws together considerations of meaning, values, and affect, while recognizing the diversity of human ends.
The contributors explore how happiness intersects with dominant social values as well as an array of aims and aspirations that are potentially conflicting, demonstrating that not every kind of happiness is seen as a worthwhile aim or evaluated in positive moral terms. In tracing this link between different conceptions of happiness and their evaluations, the book engages some of the most fundamental questions concerning human What is it and how is it achieved? Is happiness everywhere a paramount value or aim in life? How does it relate to other ideas of the good? What role does happiness play in orienting peoples’ desires and life choices? Taking these questions seriously, the book draws together considerations of meaning, values, and affect, while recognizing the diversity of human ends.
- GenresAnthropology
336 pages, Paperback
Published March 15, 2017
2 people are currently reading
22 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 27, 2018
From TED talks to Bhutan’s Gross Happiness Index, conversations on happiness have taken center-stage in popular and public discourse. This new cultural commitment to happiness draws heavily on research from the interrelated fields of psychology neuroscience and economics. The essays in Values of Happiness, however, acutely reveal the deficiencies of contemporary happiness research, beyond the oft-cited inaccuracies in measurement and self-reporting. In neglecting the lived experiences of happiness, it perpetuates a narrow Western definition of happiness as a positive affective state closely correlated with a several variables including wealth, education and political stability. This, in turn, implies that happiness is only available to a fraction of the world’s population. But, is happiness truly unachievable without economic security? Or is happiness a more fluid state that waxes and wanes? And does prosperity necessarily lead to contentment? My intention in casting these questions is not to disregard the very real perils of poverty or the correlation between economic prosperity and wellbeing, but is in fact inspired by the intriguing stories of the authors’ interlocutors in Bangladesh, Japan and the highlands of Ethiopia, amongst other field sites, which collectively paint a more complex picture of happiness, in turn problematizing the simplistic causalities that contemporary research puts forth.
Consisting of 10 stimulating essays, Values of Happiness invites us to consider the intricacies of happiness, exploring how it is culturally constituted, its relationship with suffering and how — inspired by Sara Ahmed’s call attend to the ‘work’ of happiness — its pursuit orients the lives of individuals. For instance, Iza Kavedžija’s senior Japanese interlocutors explain that happiness stems from maintaining a careful balancing act between developing close friendships and keeping friends at arms length, reminding us that happiness is not, as contemporary research contends, a singular phenomenon. On the other hand, for C. Jason Throop’s Yapese interlocutor, Gonop, happiness is interlaced with suffering. This is also true for Katy Gardener’s Bangladeshi interlocutors, for whom the realization of happiness and material prosperity through migration is often punctuated by periods of unhappiness. Collectively, these ethnographic vignettes point to the multifaceted and fleeting nature of happiness, the awareness of which, Sara Ahmed argues, enables us to move away from conceiving of (pure) happiness as an aspiration, but instead as something that comes and goes, and that may sometimes co-exist with pain and hardship. I particularly appreciated this easeful perspective on happiness because, as Ahmed contends, it makes space for alternative ways of being beyond pursuits commonly associated with happiness. Indeed, as several authors in the book reinforce, the quest for happiness often generates a localized “happiness script” (p. 201), to use Gardner’s term, which details the path(s) to prosperity, happiness and success, thereby narrowing the horizon of what constitutes happiness for individuals and communities. Based on the script in Bangladesh for instance, Gardner reveals that young Bangladeshi’s conceive of migration as the path to happiness. This line of reasoning was particularly telling and it forced me to pause and consider the “happiness scripts” silently operating in my own life, paving the way for some fruitful introspection.
Evidently, then, this anthropological exploration of happiness is a timely and important contribution to contemporary happiness research, adding the necessary depth and nuance. Despite being written by academics, who are sometimes guilty of writing in a convoluted manner, the text is highly readable and I’m certain that even a reader unfamiliar with the terrain of anthropology will enjoy and benefit immensely from this book, as I have. I highly recommend it to students of anthropology and anyone interested in happiness studies!
Consisting of 10 stimulating essays, Values of Happiness invites us to consider the intricacies of happiness, exploring how it is culturally constituted, its relationship with suffering and how — inspired by Sara Ahmed’s call attend to the ‘work’ of happiness — its pursuit orients the lives of individuals. For instance, Iza Kavedžija’s senior Japanese interlocutors explain that happiness stems from maintaining a careful balancing act between developing close friendships and keeping friends at arms length, reminding us that happiness is not, as contemporary research contends, a singular phenomenon. On the other hand, for C. Jason Throop’s Yapese interlocutor, Gonop, happiness is interlaced with suffering. This is also true for Katy Gardener’s Bangladeshi interlocutors, for whom the realization of happiness and material prosperity through migration is often punctuated by periods of unhappiness. Collectively, these ethnographic vignettes point to the multifaceted and fleeting nature of happiness, the awareness of which, Sara Ahmed argues, enables us to move away from conceiving of (pure) happiness as an aspiration, but instead as something that comes and goes, and that may sometimes co-exist with pain and hardship. I particularly appreciated this easeful perspective on happiness because, as Ahmed contends, it makes space for alternative ways of being beyond pursuits commonly associated with happiness. Indeed, as several authors in the book reinforce, the quest for happiness often generates a localized “happiness script” (p. 201), to use Gardner’s term, which details the path(s) to prosperity, happiness and success, thereby narrowing the horizon of what constitutes happiness for individuals and communities. Based on the script in Bangladesh for instance, Gardner reveals that young Bangladeshi’s conceive of migration as the path to happiness. This line of reasoning was particularly telling and it forced me to pause and consider the “happiness scripts” silently operating in my own life, paving the way for some fruitful introspection.
Evidently, then, this anthropological exploration of happiness is a timely and important contribution to contemporary happiness research, adding the necessary depth and nuance. Despite being written by academics, who are sometimes guilty of writing in a convoluted manner, the text is highly readable and I’m certain that even a reader unfamiliar with the terrain of anthropology will enjoy and benefit immensely from this book, as I have. I highly recommend it to students of anthropology and anyone interested in happiness studies!
February 9, 2018
Values of happiness: Toward an Anthropology of Purpose in Life by Iza Kavedžija, Harry Walker and afterword by Joel Robbins offers a unique ethnographic approach, to the topic of happiness. The book is a fundamental contribution to happiness studies, the cross-disciplinary debates on this topic and its renewed interest in social sciences, the so called “happiness turn”. Actually, how happiness figures as an idea, mood, or motive in everyday life, how happiness is conceptualized and therefore, how people act to live happy or not, consciously or not, in ways conditioned by dominant social values are at the core of anthropology. The contributions affirm the importance of critically and ethnographically engaging, “from the ground up” as the authors say, with the broader dimensions of social, cultural, moral, economic and political of human experience of happiness, rather than being happiness just a private and personal issue as intended by Western conceptions.
The authors explore the links between happiness and different aspects like values, responsibilities and scope, revealing “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 authors explore the links between happiness and different aspects like values, responsibilities and scope, revealing “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.”
Read
March 23, 2022"It is significant that none of the contributors to this volume employed the strategy of asking people directly about happiness as a central part of their research. This may be, in the end, what most distinguishes our approach from that adopted by the happiness studies community. Needless to say, while this avoids some of the problems faced by studies reliant on self-reporting, it raises other problems of its own. One is that we are simply unable to contribute to the vast enterprise of gauging comparative levels of happiness around the world, or indeed quantifying in any way “how happy” people are...Our focus here, then, is not on gauging or comparing levels of happiness, but on how happiness figures as an idea, mood, or motive in people’s day-to-day live"
March 31, 2020
Anthropological study of what happiness is for different cultures. This book was utterly enjoyable and the underlying academic theory was accessible. Enjoyed the different perspectives and different theoretical approaches to happiness. A book that will remain in my collection.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews