Counting and recounting happiness and culture: On happiness surveys and prudential ethnobiography

Abstract

Abstract:The analysis of numerical data from happiness surveys has caught the attention of governments, corporations, and public media. It is questionable, however, whether the humanistic and empathetic aspirations of happiness scholarship can be well served by numerical reductionism unless this is more effectively complemented by ethnobiographical approaches which explore how self-ratings emerge from cultural contexts and self-narratives. Happiness is imagined, generated, and expressed both through quantification and through stories. In scholarship, as in everyday life, we count and recount our blessings. This somewhat neglected distinction between numerical and narrative representations of happiness applies to conceptual, experiential, and methodological issues. It may help us to understand the social construction of happiness in cultural contexts, in conjunction with other distinctions such as those between affective and cognitive appraisals, and between hedonic and eudaimonic versions of the good life. There are potential synergies between psychometric and ethnobiographical approaches which could help us to recover some of the core humanistic values of the 'happiness lens', namely: empathy (respect for subjectivity); positivity (attention to goodness); holism; a lifespan perspective; and consequentialist transparency (making progressive intentions and causal theories explicit). Anthropology has good potential to help strengthen these values, particularly by using ethnobiography to help us understand what numerical representations of happiness mean.

Happy just because. A cross-cultural study on subjective wellbeing in three Indigenous societies

“…However, as explained above, we used a variation of standard metrics of life satisfaction, which might potentially reduce the comparability of our results with research using other metrics. Second, our results should also be treated carefully because the expression of happiness itself is culturally patterned [ 58 ] and any cross-cultural research on subjective well-being faces the risk of exporting (or even imposing) Western concepts to non-Western cultures, potentially leading to invalid results [ 59 ]. We have deliberately tried to minimize this bias, by recording respondents’ reactions and responses to our questions verbatim , but the bias might still be present.…”

Which ‘being’ in wellbeing? Ontology, wellness and the geographies of happiness

“…Kahneman and Krueger, 2006). For Ahmed and other critics, we are back to measuring complex philosophical and political concepts numerically, re-affirming classical models of development with little allowance for the diversity of human lifeways (Loera-Gonzalez, 2014; Thin, 2012; White, 2010). Indeed, while the endeavour of measuring wellbeing in this positivistic manner has obvious appeal in terms of its ready applicability, it has been argued as being detrimental to other ways of knowing and understanding human wellbeing (Eckersley, 2008; White, 2016; White et al, 2012).…”

“…As Lather and St. Pierre (2013: 630) note, however, in the context of attempts at posthumanist qualitative research, the challenging question remains: ‘How do we think a “research problem” in the imbrication of an agentic assemblage of diverse elements that are constantly intra-acting, never stable, never the same?’ In response, with a grounding in post-structuralism, Duff prioritizes the role of sensory ethnography, combined with approaches from emotional geographies (Bondi, 2005), though other productive combinations drawing on other methodological developments will surely be desirable, not least engaging increasingly with various life-course and longitudinal approaches. The requirement will stand, however, for a heightened openness to research practices which supplement or contextualize quantified ‘data’ on wellbeing, reintroducing the embodied, the emergent and the emplaced, which can be obscured within more conventional measures, as well as in many traditional qualitative techniques (Duff, 2010; Kuntz and Presnall, 2012; MacLure, 2013; Thin, 2012; Conradson, 2005).…”

Seeking the happiness agents in rural Japan through the case study in Kyushu region

“…Up to this time, scholars in various disciplines have conducted considerable research on happiness. Some focus on the meaning of the happiness in different cultures using cross-cultural and cross-national perspectives (Uchida, Norasakkunkit and Kitayama 2004;Uchida and Ogihara 2012;Hommerich and Klien 2012;Thin 2012). Others take an economic approach to the happiness issue (Binswanger 2006;Frey and Stutzer 2002).…”