Life with and without its antithesis

Abstract

The impetus for this reflection on well-being comes from the way the sustainability of life itself seems under threat from climate change. The terms of debate, what is meant by ‘life’, are ripe for re-imagining. When anthropologists take the contemporary valorisation of life as obscuring social realities of a destructive kind, they promote a certain kind of antithesis; attempts to re-balance a positive with a negative emphasis re-valorise the positive tenor that life carries. What is in turn occluded in such valorisations are other ways of assessing destruction and rupture. This contribution returns to the old adage about death as the regeneration of life in order to discuss ethnographic materials (from old Melanesia) best served by dismantling the antithetical structure. Death does not just emerge as a part of everyday life but as something for and with which people must actively work in order for there to be any future at all. This gives their sense of misfortune and bodily affliction a very particular resonance. Perhaps, too, such a sense challenges assumptions about just what is taken on board in evaluations of sustainability.