Happiness: Notes on History, Culture and Governance

Authors

  • C. Kingfisher University of Lethbridge

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/hcs.2013.145

Keywords:

happiness, neoliberalism, cultural & historical specificity

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the emergence of happiness and well-being as keystones of contemporary EuroAmerican culture. Drawing on the relationship between disciplinary enterprises and forms of governance, as well as on cross-cultural comparison with fa’asamoa (the Samoan Way), I work to situate the current EuroAmerican obsession with happiness and well-being as a cultural formation – that is, as an artifact of a historically and culturally unique set of patterns and forces – thus problematizing its taken-for-granted status, in academic and policy-making circles, as a self-evident and universal goal with universal characteristics. I pay particular attention to the forms of governance that the contemporary orientation to happiness inaugurates and instantiates.

Author Biography

C. Kingfisher, University of Lethbridge

Catherine Kingfisher is Professor Anthropology at the University of Lethbridge. She is author of A Policy Travelogue: Tracing Welfare Reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada (Berghahn, 2013), and Women in the American Welfare Trap (Pennyslvania, 1996); and editor of Western Welfare in Decline: Globalization and Women's Poverty (Pennsylvania 2002). Her work focuses on policy, power & inequality, neoliberalism, gender, personhood, and, more recently, happiness and well-being.

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Published

2013-11-15

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2013): Translating Happiness: Medicine, Culture and Social Progress

Section

Articles

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