Iza Kavedzija Bücher

The Process of Wellbeing develops an anthropological perspective on wellbeing as an intersubjective process that can be approached through the prism of three complementary conceptual framings: conviviality; care; and creativity.

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.

"A central concern of this book is the complex relationship between the good life, or what it means to live well, and one's sense of meaning or purpose in life. In the Japanese context, a useful starting point for exploring this issue is the concept of ikigai. This can be translated as "that which makes one's life worth living," or what makes life "livable," as it were. One might or might not "have" an ikigai--in which case the term refers to a particular motivation to live or a purpose in life. What and who one cares for is closely related to purpose in life, sometimes considered the basis of ikigai. In this sense, ikigai can refer to a more general form of well-being and pleasure in life, especially when used in relation to the elderly. This raises certain existential questions in relation to older age: does maintaining a particular purpose in life, a well-defined source of meaning, remain possible or even necessary in older age? Indeed, do even younger people have or need such a well-defined purpose? To what extent are life stories relating to meaning and purpose in one's life related to stories of expectations and values in the broader society? In short, I argue that the issues of aging and the good and meaningful life are inextricably connected"-- Provided by publisher