How people conceive of happiness reveals much about who they are and the values they hold dear. The modern conception of happiness as private good feeling is the result of a long sequence of changes in dominant conceptions of the ends of life and of humanity's place in the cosmos. This invites reflection on how the very vagueness of happiness can account for its powerful claim to render diverse values commensurable. In arguing for the importance of a critical, ethnographic approach to happiness-one concerned less with gauging how happy people are than with how happiness figures as an idea, mood, or motive in everyday life-we highlight its relationship to values, as well as questions of scope, virtue, and responsibility. Whether real or elusive, the pursuit of happiness structures time in specific ways and is largely other-oriented, insofar as one's own happiness would seem best left in the hands of others.
In this article I explore ideas of the good and meaningful life in older age, based on ethnographic research with older Japanese in the city of Osaka. Some of my interlocutors and friends in the field spoke about the approaching end of their life. When speaking about the time remaining, many expressed their sense that the future ‘will somehow turn out [all right]’ (nantonaku). This statement of quiet hope acknowledged change and encapsulated a desire to support others; it also shifted emphasis away from the future. This is not to say that the experience was for my interlocutors primarily marked by an orientation towards the past: by reminiscing and recollection. Inhabiting the moment was equally important. While reminiscing and narrating past events clearly relate to meaning-making, then, what is the role of dwelling in the moment for maintaining a meaningful existence? I will argue that dwelling in the moment allows for the cultivation of an attitude of gratitude, which lends meaning to a life. This attitude of gratitude binds together both reflection on the past and attention to the present moment in its fullness. It also, I suggest, opens up space for a particular kind of hope, grounded in the moment. Thus, the sense of the good and meaningful life that my older friends conveyed encapsulates an attitude of gratitude as a way of inhabiting the present, rather than dwelling in the past or leaping towards the future.
This article examines how the category of the elderly in Japan is constructed through diverse forms of care, understood as moral practices intrinsic to peoples' senses of self. It offers an analysis of a range of informal as well as institutional configurations of care in the Japanese urban context, highlighting the complexity as well as the overlapping nature of these diverse arrangements. It also explores ethnographically how older people experience these arrangements as they move through different sites of care, and how they negotiate the conflicting demands on their sense of self. The various types of care at work in these settings all contribute to different understandings of older persons, and different constructions of the category of the elderly: as clients; as visitors or guests; as fragile 'struggling persons'; as 'grannies' in familial relations; as (caring) neighbours. More than a handful of labels, these variable configurations of personal identity affect care practices and social relationships in direct and tangible ways. The concept of care has recently gained prominence as a "defining moral practice" that shapes both caregivers' and care-receivers' senses of self (Kleinman 2009:239). In the anthropology of aging, care practices have been shown to have profound consequences for making, sustaining or eroding the person. Buch (2013), for example, shows how older adults in Chicago are able to maintain a sense of independent selfhood with the support of their home workers, who, in provision of care to their clients, made an effort to embody their client's values and sensory histories (Buch 2013:639, 647). When taken to refer to a particular mode of relating to others in settings beyond the medical context, care and personhood can be so inextricably entwined as to reveal fundamental presuppositions about the nature of being in particular cultural contexts (e.g. Borneman 1997; see also Walker 2013).Writing about healthcare and diabetes patients, Annemarie Mol (2008) has drawn a useful contrast between what she terms the "logic of care" and the "logic of choice." The latter hinges on a conception of individuals as citizens or consumers in charge of making choices. If these are made poorly, something must be wrong with either the information they were provided or with their capacities to choose. As citizens, such individuals can form collectives to further their cause, and as consumers they are seen as parts of collectives, to whom goods and services (including treatments and support) can be marketed and sold. The logic of care, by contrast, moves away from an understanding of treatment as a series of moments of choice, and refers instead to a continuous, fluid and collaborative effort with uncertain outcomes. This ties specialists and other health providers into a network with patients, to make decisions jointly and to revise and amend them in a continuous iterative process. In the logic of care, collectives precede persons, and one always already belongs to a number of collectives, though these ...
This paper explores how the Japanese inhabitants of a densely populated urban neighbourhood negotiate proximity and distance in their social relationships. Based on ethnography of a community salon in the city of Osaka, the paper explores how topics and styles of conversation, modes of interaction between salon‐goers, are constituted with respect to a pervasive concern for manners and for the emotions of others. Focusing on the importance of ‘form’ and its relevance for morality, I argue that formality serves as an enabling device for creating new relationships among older Japanese, preserving sociality while protecting oneself and others from the burdens of emotion and excessive proximity. By focusing on the ethics of ‘doing things properly’ (chanto suru) I explore the relationship of manners and care. By taking manners into account, I turn my attention in this article to those relationships crafted and maintained amongst those to whom one is not very close, and with whom one may not wish to become intimate. In this way I explore the question of how to treat well those towards whom one wishes to maintain distance: in other words, how to care for those who are not one's friends?
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