Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by M Izabel on October 3, 2012 at 10:08am

After watching the documentary, "Happy", weeks ago and reading stuff about happiness and positive psychology, your paper, indeed, is a good supplementary reading.  Thank you.

Your introductory examples fail to give me a sense that they are about "good life".  From the documentary and other readings, it seems to me that "good life" is an individual's perception of contentment.  A homeless person can think of his as a good life because he does not pay bills, rent, etc.  It is his positive rationalization of his life.

What I sense from your examples is "good living".  I think there is a huge difference between the two.  "Good living" is not individualistic. It connotes interaction and connection.  The woman's concern at the cinema is about a community living good.  The harvest in Guatemala is a good cultural living.  The taxi driver is just living good morally or spiritually.  These three examples, clearly, are about perceived social obligations.one is willing to do for the achievement of quality life.  Whether their actions make them achieve good life is unclear ethnographically.

I hope I make sense.      

 

Permalink Reply by Huon Wardle on October 3, 2012 at 10:56am

On the archaeological side, though notions of happiness are difficult to judge except as reflected in the various texts, concepts of the good life are surely registered where there exist remains of an elderly or weak person who has lived to an old age, where grave goods show the kinds of constituents of life that people value, where land and other resources show signs of cooperative use and so on. I am not sure why subjective measures would be out if we do add in the literature of the period(s) - Apuleius' Golden Ass gives a very sharp rendering of what life in an empire was like for ordinary people (and animals).

I agree with M though, the good life and good living (if we agree on those terms) do cover different things which can't simply be blended into each other though they can't be extricated from each other either. Individual perception/imagining clearly produces results that are at odds with shared models of good living and is often in conflict with these shared/negotiated models. This is particularly visible under 'modern' conditions but I doubt it has ever been untrue.

Permalink Reply by Daniel Miller on October 3, 2012 at 11:52am

First to thank the author since this addresses a singularly important concern for anthropology. The work of myself and my students would support many of these observations including the stress on agency and dignity and especially fairness. Anthropologists have a problem in that we are rightly sceptical of attempts to measure ideals such as happiness but have difficulty persuading people of the authority behind the criteria we claim other people possess for wellbeing. My main problem with this paper as written is that I think it tends to stress the more benign and positive aspects of our intervention such as the critique of glib economic perspectives. But it doesn’t really tackle the more problematic elements in pushing forward our own agendas.

Let me suggest just two of these. The paper’s first substantive example is shopping, something I have worked on for many years. He notes that people are prepared to express a moral premium in their purchases, which is undoubtedly true. But as I argued in my book The Dialectics of Shopping the situation is a good deal more complex. I started from exactly the same evidence, which was the marked discrepancy between what shoppers said and what they actually do. What I found was that shoppers faced many contradictions in their evaluation. For example a concern with organics and fair trade as an ethical commitment were opposed by the centrality of saving money from household budgets which expressed an equally moral concern with the welfare of their families. Either you had to show concern for your own family or give more money to help the welfare of producers. But each was at the expense of the other. The point is that being ethical is not simply a determination of welfare concerns, it creates all sort of contradictions and irreconcilable aspirations, So we would be better off thinking of welfare itself as an arena of contradiction.

The second problem is that the paper seems to assume that all welfare aspirations are benign. But working in conditions of cultural relativism that which comes across as benign for a given population may not be benign according to more universalistic ideals of a dominant ideology, that is our ideology. For example in the book I wrote with Heather Horst The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. The last chapter of this book was an attempt to follow through the same Amartya Sen agenda that is being discussed here. The problem we raised was that this seems to confirm whatever a given population regard as appropriate to their welfare. But the population we studied was, amongst other things, extremely homophobic. For them a good life consisted of one in which homosexuality was eradicated as a curse of the human condition. In short if anthropologists are going to deal seriously with our own perspective on welfare then it seems we must include these other contradictions which lie between our own concept of welfare and those of the populations that we encounter. I appreciate that similar suggestions have occurred in the previous discussion.  

Having said that, I do not want to detract from all the positive contributions of this paper given the extraordinarily crass perspectives that currently dominate in the absence of anthropological influence

Permalink Reply by Michael E. Smith on October 3, 2012 at 5:13pm

A few remarks. On John's suggestions: Skeletal evidence, like many other types of archaeological evidence, can be highly revealing and useful. One problem, however, is sampling. Where preservation is good and where we have excavated a lot, archaeologists can produce remarkably detailed reconstructions of all sorts of things. But in many context, we don't have a good enough sample of burials to make reliable inferences. As for the scale of trade, this is indeed measurable, and in various works I have compared households and communities for the amount of imports, and for the average distance of those imports.

@Keith - my own work focuses on domestic artifact inventories, without prejudgments on how goods were obtained (purchased/traded/produced/stolen/etc.).So the market/nonmarket origin of things is not an issue. I am also involved in comparing households in a commercial economy (Aztec) with those in a command economy (Inka). One area where archaeological methods have advanced tremendously recently is in methods to identify and analyze markets and commercial exchange (nice reivew by Feinman and Garraty, Annual Review of Anthro v.39, 2010). As for the 99%, please note that I said "time" and "societies" not population!! Sorry, it was a crude rhetorical device.

@Huon- Yes, there are some written accounts from ancient times that can give an idea of what some philosphers or elites thought about "the good life," but I'd prefer the results of ten peasant houses excavated than ten Greek philosophers on the good life as a guide to wellbeing in Greek society. And for msot ancient societies, there are either no available documents, or else those that do exist do not have useful information on wellbeing.

Permalink Reply by Tijo Salverda on October 4, 2012 at 8:06am

For example a concern with organics and fair trade as an ethical commitment were opposed by the centrality of saving money from household budgets which expressed an equally moral concern with the welfare of their families. Either you had to show concern for your own family or give more money to help the welfare of producers. But each was at the expense of the other. The point is that being ethical is not simply a determination of welfare concerns, it creates all sort of contradictions and irreconcilable aspirations, So we would be better off thinking of welfare itself as an arena of contradiction.

Daniel Miller's observations touch upon a point very relevant in the analysis of, and the aim for, a good life. It raises the question how to reconcile between two (or more) ‘good’ sides, as this appears often to be a trade-off. In our aims for a world that values the good life more than it currently does - and the associated new and experimental ways to accomplish this - do we, for example, value 'the wellbeing of society' more than the 'wellbeing of the family unit'? From a societal point of view I would say the first, but I am sure that for many people the latter will prevail. Biological aspects are probably of influence here, but also dominant views about the importance of family. Since both are more inclusive than the 'individual' it is easy to support either side, yet as Daniel shows they may nevertheless often conflict. How do we reconcile this kind of trade-offs?

 

Here, anthropology’s quality seems also to be its curse (at least, I every now and then see it like that). We tend to be better capable of accounting for nuance and contradictions. We are trained at deconstructing our own views (see also Daniel's second problem). But are these good qualities in pushing for change? Hence, I sometimes wonder if our training not also makes us relatively bad protestors – apart from, of course, anthropology’s fight against its mortal enemy, ‘the neoliberalist’.

 

Permalink Reply by John McCreery on October 4, 2012 at 10:03am

Tijo, a question if I may. You mention the well-being of society and the well-being of the family unit. What about the well-being of the individual? Is it only in my generation that so many anthropologists are individuals who wanted to leave home and strike out on their own, rejecting in whole or part the family and other traditions in which they were raised?

Permalink Reply by Ted Fischer on October 4, 2012 at 3:38pm

Daniel brings up two key points that I left out of this paper, and while I deal with them a bit more in the longer manuscript, they are still weak spots.  Miller in his work on shopping gets at the complexities of decision making very effectively--buying isn't just for self-interest, it can also be for other-interest, love, and what I term moral projects.  This is a major point in itself, but taking the next step: these are not always back-and-white alternatives, and folks often have to struggle with the complexities of what to do.  It is hard to capture that--Miller does it well--and I tend to portray this as starker than it actually is.  My feeble defense is that I am trying to speak to economists and development professionals as well as anthropologists, and so employing some of the reductionist modeling to keep things relatively simple.  But Miller's point is right on and correct.

On his second point: indeed, aspirations are NOT always (or ever?) benign.  The German case offers plenty of examples of this.  And what I term moral projects can as easily be neo-nazi fanaticism or religious extremism as building what those of us reading this would consider a better world.  Yes.  And, as Habermas has pointed out, there is a nasty underside to "community": that same inclusion involves exclusion.  And so when thinking of collective greater goods, this is a troublesome reality.  From a social science standpoint, it fits into my scheme.  From a public policy or positive anthropology stance, I am not quite sure what to do with this.

Daniel Miller said:

But as I argued in my book The Dialectics of Shoppingthe situation is a good deal more complex. I started from exactly the same evidence, which was the marked discrepancy between what shoppers said and what they actually do. What I found was that shoppers faced many contradictions in their evaluation. For example a concern with organics and fair trade as an ethical commitment were opposed by the centrality of saving money from household budgets which expressed an equally moral concern with the welfare of their families. Either you had to show concern for your own family or give more money to help the welfare of producers. But each was at the expense of the other. The point is that being ethical is not simply a determination of welfare concerns, it creates all sort of contradictions and irreconcilable aspirations, So we would be better off thinking of welfare itself as an arena of contradiction.

The second problem is that the paper seems to assume that all welfare aspirations are benign. But working in conditions of cultural relativism that which comes across as benign for a given population may not be benign according to more universalistic ideals of a dominant ideology, that is our ideology. For example in the book I wrote with Heather Horst The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. The last chapter of this book was an attempt to follow through the same Amartya Sen agenda that is being discussed here. The problem we raised was that this seems to confirm whatever a given population regard as appropriate to their welfare. But the population we studied was, amongst other things, extremely homophobic. For them a good life consisted of one in which homosexuality was eradicated as a curse of the human condition. In short if anthropologists are going to deal seriously with our own perspective on welfare then it seems we must include these other contradictions which lie between our own concept of welfare and those of the populations that we encounter. I appreciate that similar suggestions have occurred in the previous discussion.  

Permalink Reply by Melania Calestani on October 4, 2012 at 3:42pm

John McCreery said:

Tijo, a question if I may. You mention the well-being of society and the well-being of the family unit. What about the well-being of the individual? Is it only in my generation that so many anthropologists are individuals who wanted to leave home and strike out on their own, rejecting in whole or part the family and other traditions in which they were raised?

 

Very good points Tijo, John and Daniel. This takes us back to the tension that may or may not exist between individual, family and collective desires/definitions of well-being. For some people, well-being may be achieved when their actions are socially recognised in the process of engaging in collective interactions and practices. Therefore, well-being in this specific case seems closer to morality rather than individual happiness. For others, what matters is to move away, creating something new and becoming someone different: issues of identity as well as gender and generational differences require contextualisation in terms of time and space. Well-being  is definitely connected with concepts and ideas about what it means to be a person.

 

This takes me to the work of existential anthropologist Michael Jackson, who considers  well-being ‘not as a settled state but as a field of struggle’ (2011, p.ix), creating sometime a sense of discontinuity between what people are and what they might become. To what extent is well-being something which people experience in the here and now, and how far is it an aspiration for the future and inspired by the past? Everyday life is full of problems and difficulties that affect our perceptions of the present, the past and the future. How much ‘ill-being’ is considered normal, containable or predictable and at what point it becomes dysfunctional and abnormal is as an important question as the pursuit of well-being. For example, the context in which an individual lives will inform his/her evaluation of ill-being. What is important is not only how healthy they are, but also how much support they receive when they fall ill and how long their illness lasts. Also, what is important is not so much the money they have or don’t have, but how much is considered sufficient to live well over a given period of time in that particular context. Jackson also writes that it is rare to meet people that are completely and permanently satisfied, but it’s also rare to meet people who expect nothing from life -despite the hardship or prosperity of their lives, never imaging that their situations could or should be improved somehow. Jackson concludes that well-being is elusive and transitory and can be experienced by the rich as well by the poor in all societies.

 

Do you agree with him?

 

Permalink Reply by Ted Fischer on October 4, 2012 at 3:45pm

Good point, Huon.  I would mention that if we substitute "multidimensional wellbeing" for "the good life" some economists (e.g. Robert Fogel) use height to stand in for overall wellbeing.  It is an interesting idea: that height captures health and inequalities better than average GNP.  It is also fascinating in this regard that in the early twentieth century, US males were the tallest Western population, but after WWII, Northern European heights took off, and now Dutch men average almost 5 inches taller than American males.  And that probably does tell us something about comparative qualities of life.

Huon Wardle said:

On the archaeological side, though notions of happiness are difficult to judge except as reflected in the various texts, concepts of the good life are surely registered where there exist remains of an elderly or weak person who has lived to an old age, where grave goods show the kinds of constituents of life that people value, where land and other resources show signs of cooperative use and so on. I am not sure why subjective measures would be out if we do add in the literature of the period(s) - Apuleius' Golden Ass gives a very sharp rendering of what life in an empire was like for ordinary people (and animals).

I agree with M though, the good life and good living (if we agree on those terms) do cover different things which can't simply be blended into each other though they can't be extricated from each other either. Individual perception/imagining clearly produces results that are at odds with shared models of good living and is often in conflict with these shared/negotiated models. This is particularly visible under 'modern' conditions but I doubt it has ever been untrue.

Permalink Reply by Tijo Salverda on October 4, 2012 at 3:46pm

Hi John, it's not that I don't believe in the well-being of the individual - on the contrary. Yet, the discussion about the good life appears to focus on the well-being of larger social units, preferably humanity as a whole. Imagining trade-offs between the individual and society (or family, or any other social unit) seemed too obvious, without (hopefully) falling into the trap of seeing them as opposites. My examples, and following up on Daniel Miller's comment, were meant to address the potential conflict between social units that may both be relevant to a good life.   

Permalink Reply by Ted Fischer on October 4, 2012 at 3:47pm

Tijo Salverda said: Here, anthropology’s quality seems also to be its curse (at least, I every now and then see it like that). We tend to be better capable of accounting for nuance and contradictions. We are trained at deconstructing our own views (see also Daniel's second problem). But are these good qualities in pushing for change? Hence, I sometimes wonder if our training not also makes us relatively bad protestors – apart from, of course, anthropology’s fight against its mortal enemy, ‘the neoliberalist’.
YES, Tijo, I think you are right.  BUt how, then, to balance are aptitude for critique to make it less endless critique and more positive contribution.  As you point out this isn't easy.

Permalink Reply by Ted Fischer on October 4, 2012 at 3:57pm

Nice point, Melania.  Happiness is definitely transitory, and wellbeing very well may be as well, given changes over the life course (as John has pointed out) and power relations (Tijo).  At the same time, I tend to think there is something more enduring the wellbeing--that there does tend to be (and perhaps only after mid life?!) something consistent as well.  That can change, but not as much as one might expect.  Even loosing a limb, it turn out, seems to affect wellbeing negatively only in the short term.  We adapt back to a norm very quickly.  What do you think?  Is wellbeing transitory, elusive and perhaps illusive?

Melania Calestani said:

[Michael] Jackson also writes that it is rare to meet people that are completely and permanently satisfied, but it’s also rare to meet people who expect nothing from life -despite the hardship or prosperity of their lives, never imaging that their situations could or should be improved somehow. Jackson concludes that well-being is elusive and transitory and can be experienced by the rich as well by the poor in all societies.

 Do you agree with him?

 

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