Well Being, Cultural Pathology, and Personal Rejuvenation in a Chinese City: 1981- 2005

Editors

Gordon Mathews & Carolina Izquierdo

Document Type

Chapter

Publication Date

2008

Publication Title

The Good Life: Well Being in Anthropological Perspective

Publisher

Berghahn Publishers

Publisher Location

Oxford (England)

Abstract

Anthropology has long shied away from examining how human beings may lead happy and fulfilling lives. This book, however, shows that the ethnographic examination of well-being—defined as “the optimal state for an individual, a community, and a society”—and the comparison of well-being within and across societies is a new and important area for anthropological inquiry. Distinctly different in different places, but also reflecting our common humanity, well-being is intimately linked to the idea of happiness and its pursuits. Noted anthropological researchers have come together in this volume to examine well-being in a range of diverse ways and to investigate it in a range of settings: from the Peruvian Amazon, the Australian outback, and the Canadian north, to India, China, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States.

Disciplines

Anthropology | Social and Behavioral Sciences | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Language

English

Permissions

Use Find in Your Library, contact the author, or interlibrary loan to garner a copy of the item. Publisher policy does not allow archiving the final published version. If a post-print (author's peer-reviewed manuscript) is allowed and available, or publisher policy changes, the item will be deposited.


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