Values of Happiness

Iza Kavedžija is a lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Meaning in Life. Harry Walker is assistant professor in the department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Under a Watchful Eye.

出版者:HAU

作者:Joel Robbins

页数:233

出版时间:2017-3-15

价格:USD 25.00

装帧:Paperback

isbn号码:9780986132575

图书标签:研究相关人类学幸福

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. In tracing this link between different conceptions of happiness and their evaluations, the book engages some of the most fundamental questions concerning human happiness: What is it and how is it achieved? Is happiness everywhere a paramount value or aim in life? How does it relate to other ideas of the good? What role does happiness play in orienting peoples’ desires and life choices? Taking these questions seriously, the book draws together considerations of meaning, values, and affect, while recognizing the diversity of human ends.