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What defines "happiness," and how can we attain it? The ways in which people in China ask and answer this universal question tell a lot about the tensions and challenges they face during periods of remarkable political and economic change. Based on a five-year original study conducted by a select team of China experts, The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness begins by asking if Chinese citizens’ assessment of their life is primarily a judgment of their social relationships. The book shows how different dimensions of happiness are manifest in the moral and ethical understandings that embed individuals in specific communities. Vividly describing the moral dilemmas experienced in contemporary Chinese society, the rituals of happiness performed in modern weddings, the practices of conviviality carried out in shared meals, the professional tensions confronted by social workers, and the hopes and frustrations shared by political reformers, the contributors to this important study illuminate the causes of anxiety and reasons for hope in China today.
What defines "happiness," and how can we attain it? The ways in which people in China ask and answer this universal question tell a lot about the tensions and challenges they face during periods of remarkable political and economic change. Based on a five-year original study conducted by a select team of China experts, The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness begins by asking if Chinese citizens’ assessment of their life is primarily a judgment of their social relationships. The book shows how different dimensions of happiness are manifest in the moral and ethical understandings that embed individuals in specific communities. Vividly describing the moral dilemmas experienced in contemporary Chinese society, the rituals of happiness performed in modern weddings, the practices of conviviality carried out in shared meals, the professional tensions confronted by social workers, and the hopes and frustrations shared by political reformers, the contributors to this important study illuminate the causes of anxiety and reasons for hope in China today.
Happiness is on China’s agenda. From Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream” to online chat forums, the conspicuous references to happiness are hard to miss. This groundbreaking volume analyzes how different social groups make use of the concept and shows how closely official discourses on happiness are intertwined with popular sentiments. The Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to define happiness and well-being around family-focused Han Chinese cultural traditions clearly strike a chord with the wider population. The collection highlights the links connecting the ideologies promoted by the government and the way they inform, and are in turn informed by, various deliberations and feelings circulating in the society. Contributors analyze the government’s “happiness maximization strategies,” including public service advertising campaigns, Confucian and Daoist-inflected discourses adapted for the self-help market, and the promotion of positive psychology as well as “happy housewives.” They also discuss forces countering the hegemonic discourse: different forms of happiness in the LGBTQ community, teachings of Tibetan Buddhism that subvert the material culture propagated by the government, and the cynical messages in online novels that expose the fictitious nature of propaganda. Collectively, the authors bring out contemporary Chinese voices engaging with different philosophies, practices, and idealistic imaginings on what it means to be happy. “This distinctive volume creates sustained dialogues around a substantive debate. Rejecting the conventional contrasts between China and the West, and yet deeply immersed in sinophone media, the authors understand Chinese discourse on happiness as multiple but interconnected conversations within a globally shared production of knowledge. Equally concerned with text and image, they exhibit an ethnographic eye as sharp as any orthodox ethnography.” —Deborah Davis, Yale University “Wielander and Hird have put together a superbly researched and thoughtfully written set of essays on the multiple ways in which that most elusive of all states—happiness—is understood and pursued in contemporary China. A volume that should become required reading for all interested in Chinese society today.” —Julia C. Strauss, SOAS, University of London “Chinese Discourses on Happiness is a timely new collection of essays edited by two sinologists based in Britain, Gerda Wielander and Derek Hird. It explores how China’s propaganda machine devotes extraordinary efforts to promoting the idea that the Chinese people enjoy good and meaningful lives under Communism—precisely because economic growth alone does a poor job of generating happiness.” —The Economist
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. Gordon Mathews is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has written What Makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds (1996) and Global Culture /Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket (2000), and co-written Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation (2007); he has co-edited Consuming Hong Kong (2001) and Japan's Changing Generations (2004). Carolina Izquierdo is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for the Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research has centered on health and well-being among the Matsigenka in the Peruvian Amazon, the Mapuche in Chile, and middle-class families in the United States.
Under the Song Dynasty, China experienced rapid commercial growth and monetization of the economy. In the same period, the austere ethical turn that led to neo-Confucianism was becoming increasingly prevalent in the imperial bureaucracy and literati culture. Tracing the influences of these trends in Chinese intellectual history, All Mine! explores the varied ways in which eleventh-century writers worked through the conflicting values of this new world. Stephen Owen contends that in the new money economy of the Song, writers became preoccupied with the question of whether material things can bring happiness. Key thinkers returned to this problem, weighing the conflicting influences of worldly possessions and material comfort against Confucian ideology, which locates true contentment in the Way and disdains attachment to things. In a series of essays, Owen examines the works of writers such as the prose master Ouyang Xiu, who asked whether tranquility could be found in the backwater to which he had been exiled; the poet and essayist Su Dongpo, who was put on trial for slandering the emperor; and the historian Sima Guang, whose private garden elicited reflections on private ownership. Through strikingly original readings of major eleventh-century figures, All Mine! inquires not only into the material conditions of happiness but also the broader conditions of knowledge.
What do women want? The same thing men were promised in the Declaration of Independence: happiness, or at least the freedom to pursue it. For women, though, pursuing happiness is a complicated endeavor, and if you head out into America and talk to women one-on-one, as Jill Filipovic has done, you'll see that happiness is indelibly shaped by the constraints of gender, the expectations of feminine sacrifice, and the myriad ways that womanhood itself differs along lines of race, class, location, and identity. In The H-Spot, Filipovic argues that the main obstacle standing in-between women and happiness is a rigged system. In this world of unfinished feminism, men have long been able to "have it all" because of free female labor, while the bar of achievement for women has only gotten higher. Never before have women at every economic level had to work so much (whether it's to be an accomplished white-collar employee or just make ends meet). Never before have the standards of feminine perfection been so high. And never before have the requirements for being a "good mother" been so extreme. If our laws and policies made women's happiness and fulfillment a goal in and of itself, Filipovic contends, many of our country's most contentious political issues -- from reproductive rights to equal pay to welfare spending -- would swiftly be resolved. Filipovic argues that it is more important than ever to prioritize women's happiness-and that doing so will make men's lives better, too. Here, she provides an outline for a feminist movement we all need and a blueprint for how policy, laws, and society can deliver on the promise of the pursuit of happiness for all.
Cutting-edge science and spirituality tell us that what we believe, think, and feel actually determine the makeup of our body at the cellular level. In Zen and the Art of Happiness, you will learn how to think and feel so that what you think and feel creates happiness and vibrancy in your life rather than gloominess or depression. You’ll learn how to adapt to life’s inevitable changes, how to deal with stress in a healthy way, and how to nurture a mindful happiness in your daily life. Most importantly, the gentle wisdom of Zen and the Art of Happiness will show you how to invite magnificent experiences into your life and create a personal philosophy that will sustain you through anything. A timeless work about the art of happiness, the way of happiness, the inner game of happiness.
A text for researchers and practitioners interested in human happiness. Its editors and chapter contributors are world leaders in the investigation of happiness across the fields of psychology, education, philosophy, social policy and economics.
Inspires us - in wryly gentle prose - to outgrow the impossible pursuit of happiness, and instead make peace with the perfection of the way things are. Including ourselves! Magid invites readers to consider the notion that our certainty that we are broken may be turning our (3z(Bpursuit of happiness(S3(B into a source of yet more suffering. He takes an unusual look at our (S2(Bsecret practices(S3(B (what we?re REALLY doing, when we say (S2(Bpracticing(S3(B) and (S2(Bcurative fantasies,(S3(B wherein we have ideals of what spiritual practices will "do" for us, "cure" us. In doing so, he helps us look squarely at such pitfalls of spiritual practice so that we can avoid them. Along the way, Magid lays out a rich roadmap of a new "psychological-minded Zen," which may be among the most important spiritual developments of the present day.
The astounding yet true rags-to-riches saga of a homeless father who raised and cared for his son on the mean streets of San Francisco and went on to become a crown prince of Wall Street At the age of twenty, Milwaukee native Chris Gardner, just out of the Navy, arrived in San Francisco to pursue a promising career in medicine. Considered a prodigy in scientific research, he surprised everyone and himself by setting his sights on the competitive world of high finance. Yet no sooner had he landed an entry-level position at a prestigious firm than Gardner found himself caught in a web of incredibly challenging circumstances that left him as part of the city's working homeless and with a toddler son. Motivated by the promise he made to himself as a fatherless child to never abandon his own children, the two spent almost a year moving among shelters, "HO-tels," soup lines, and even sleeping in the public restroom of a subway station. Never giving in to despair, Gardner made an astonishing transformation from being part of the city's invisible poor to being a powerful player in its financial district. More than a memoir of Gardner's financial success, this is the story of a man who breaks his own family's cycle of men abandoning their children. Mythic, triumphant, and unstintingly honest, The Pursuit of Happyness conjures heroes like Horatio Alger and Antwone Fisher, and appeals to the very essence of the American Dream.