Showing an interest in the well-being of the people we write about is the primary way of showing that we care about them. Anthropology must do better in this regard. The patchiness and cultural idiosyncrasies of anthropology are embarrassingly evident in our weak engagement in the study of well-being. Although we all know that it is a paramount concern of all humans, the main anthropological disposition towards well-being has been to say nothing directly about it, and certainly not to develop it as an analytical or normative theme. Explicit anthropological attention to well-being has tended to polarize into either naive anti-modernist celebrations of non-Western well-being on the one hand, or gloomy and perhaps voyeuristic immersion into ill-being on the other.
Each of these three kinds of disposition (ignoring it, uncritically celebrating it, or exploring only its absence) is a distinctive kind of empathy failure. Without explicit, balanced, and plausible scrutiny of well-being the anthropological ‘other’ is, by default, unfeeling, and their life is unevaluated. When feelings or values are discussed, anthropologists have tended to describe people as either exceptionally well (in ‘lost paradise’ accounts) or exceptionally ill (in the now much more common explorations of suffering, poverty, and powerlessness). Balanced and careful enquiry into well-being has yet to emerge in anthropology, although three unprecedented anthropological collections on well-being begin to point the way (Corsin Jimenez 2007; Gough and McGregor 2007; and Mathews and Izquierdo 2008).
Well-being refers to the goodness of a person’s life, or of some aspect of it like health, happiness, relationships or spirituality. Unlike virtue or status, well-being refers only to prudential value, to how well things are going for the person being judged. This goodness can be judged ‘objectively’ through some commonly agreed criteria. Someone who has a ‘good life’ doesn’t necessarily enjoy it. Well-being can be usefully seen has having three kinds of meaning: a hedonic sense of enjoyment, a subjective-evaluative sense of life satisfaction (in relation to some personally salient criteria and aspirations), and an objective-evaluative sense of goodness according to some agreed normative criteria. The ‘being’ part is interestingly complex too: it doesn’t necessarily refer to an individual human body and psyche in the here and now. The ancient Greek term for well-being, eudaimo-nia (which literally means ‘having a good spirit’) and the South Asian concept of \karma (the cumulative effects of actions on well-being over several lifetimes), remind us that the person whose well-being is assessed may have porous boundaries and be distributed through other people, other species, and other lives.
Well-being is individually and culturally variable in significant and interesting ways. The salient contents of well-being vary (health, relationships, activities, capabilities, spiritual encounters, and so on), and so do people’s views on how to achieve it. The values underpinning ‘well’ vary, as do existential concepts of ‘being’ and ontological concepts of ‘self’. Abstract concepts of well-being may or may not feature in moral discourse. The wellness emphasized may be of individuals or collectivities, this-wordly or other-wordly, bodily or mental, human or spiritual. The respective importance of inner feelings and outward displays varies, and such a distinction may or may not be made. Enhancement of well-being may or may not be seen as a valid personal pursuit, or as the collectively valued criterion for judging the goodness or fairness of institutions and policies.
Anthropological literature whose titles announce interest in ‘well-being’, ‘health’, ‘mental health’, ‘experience’ and ‘subjectivity’ tends mainly to be about ill-being and suffering, and perhaps about therapy and damage limitation, but not about understanding and promoting really good lives. Anthropologies of morality, social inequality, social development, therapy and post-trauma rehabilitation all habitually ignore the implicit well-being themes that ought to provide their rationales. There have of course been important contributions to the understanding of well-being, but these have come indirectly (and hence inefficiently and partially), via writing about ill-being, suffering, and therapy, and via incidental, underanalysed ethnographic snippets that tell us something about how people how people conceptualize well-being.
The core challenge in the anthropology of well-being is about balancing relativism and universalism. People’s enjoyment of life is relative to their cultural contexts, their age and gender, to the expectations they have grown up with, and to their individual capabilities and characters. But relativism can distract us from evaluating cultural practices and institutions, as Edgerton so tellingly exposed in his book Sick Societies (1992). Consideration of well-being also reminds us of our anthropological duty to say something about human nature (Bloch 2005). By discussing well-being we can learn a lot about what people (professional evolutionary scientists or otherwise) believe concerning how humanity evolved and how that knowledge relates to well-being and morality. Do people perceive ‘mismatches’ between current situations and those we evolved in, which they believe we need to resolve (Grinde 2002; Gluckman and Hanson 2006)? Is it good (morally, or for our pleasure or dignity) to live according to human ‘nature’ and in a ‘natural’ setting? Do people imagine some primordial well-being that we have lost through some original sin or bad development, and do they anticipate more well-being in some this-worldly or heavenly future?
Unless we strengthen our analysis of how people conceptualize, debate, promote, expect, and experience well-being, too much of our anthropological writing will remain inconsiderate (appearing not to care about other people’s well-being), non-evaluative (implicitly or explicitly refusing to discuss the goodness or badness of institutions and practices in terms of their fairness or their effects on well-being), anaesthetic (ignoring people’s feelings), and unimportant (failing to spell out implications for practices and policies that might improve well-being). Since other disciplines such as sociology, medicine, psychology, economics and moral philosophy have all developed sophisticated analytical and empirical studies of well-being (see e.g. Kahneman et al. 1999; McGillivray 2007), anthropology could also become much less intellectually parochial by linking up with these disciplines in holistic and multicultural studies of well-being.
