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Values of Happiness : Toward an Anthropology of Purpose in Life
About This Book
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.
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Table of contents
- Table of Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction - Values of happiness / Harry Walker and Iza Kavedžija
- Chapter One - Ambivalent happiness and virtuous suffering / C. Jason Throop
- Chapter Two - Being careful what you wish for: The case of happiness in China / Charles Stafford
- Chapter Three - The good life in balance: Insights from aging Japan / Iza Kavedžija
- Chapter Four - Techniques of happiness: Moving toward and away from the good life in a rual Ethopian community / Dena Freeman
- Chapter Five - “Good without God”: Happiness and pleasure among the humanists / Matthew Engelke
- Chapter Six - Mindful in Westminster: The politics of meditation and the limits of neoliberal critique / Joanna Cook
- Chapter Seven - The path to happiness? Prosperity, suffering, and transnational migration in Britain and Sylhet / Katy Gardner
- Chapter Eight - Militantly well / Henrik E. Vigh
- Chapter Nine - Le bonheur suisse, again / Michael Lambek
- Chapter Ten - Joy within tranquility: Amazonian Urarina styles of happiness / Harry Walker
- Afterword - On happiness, values, and time: The long and short of it / Joel Robbins
- Index