|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
What makes for a meaningful life? In the Japanese context, the
concept of ikigai provides a clue. Translated as "that which makes
one's life worth living," ikigai has also come to mean that which
gives a person happiness. In Japan, where the demographic cohort of
elderly citizens is growing, and new modes of living and
relationships are revising traditional multigenerational family
structures, the elderly experience of ikigai is considered a public
health concern. Without a relevant model for meaningful and joyful
older age, the increasing older population of Japan must create new
cultural forms that center the ikigai that comes from old age. In
Making Meaningful Lives, Iza Kavedzija provides a rich
anthropological account of the lives and concerns of older Japanese
women and men. Grounded in years of ethnographic fieldwork at two
community centers in Osaka, Kavedzija offers an intimate narrative
analysis of the existential concerns of her active, independent
subjects. Alone and in groups, the elderly residents of these
communities make sense of their lives and shifting ikigai with
humor, conversation, and storytelling. They are as much providers
as recipients of care, challenging common images of the elderly as
frail and dependent, while illustrating a more complex argument:
maintaining independence nevertheless requires cultivating multiple
dependences on others. Making Meaningful Lives argues that an
anthropology of the elderly is uniquely suited to examine the
competing values of dependence and independence, sociality and
isolation, intimacy and freedom, that people must balance
throughout all of life's stages.
What makes for a meaningful life? In the Japanese context, the
concept of ikigai provides a clue. Translated as "that which makes
one's life worth living," ikigai has also come to mean that which
gives a person happiness. In Japan, where the demographic cohort of
elderly citizens is growing, and new modes of living and
relationships are revising traditional multigenerational family
structures, the elderly experience of ikigai is considered a public
health concern. Without a relevant model for meaningful and joyful
older age, the increasing older population of Japan must create new
cultural forms that center the ikigai that comes from old age. In
Making Meaningful Lives, Iza Kavedzija provides a rich
anthropological account of the lives and concerns of older Japanese
women and men. Grounded in years of ethnographic fieldwork at two
community centers in Osaka, Kavedzija offers an intimate narrative
analysis of the existential concerns of her active, independent
subjects. Alone and in groups, the elderly residents of these
communities make sense of their lives and shifting ikigai with
humor, conversation, and storytelling. They are as much providers
as recipients of care, challenging common images of the elderly as
frail and dependent, while illustrating a more complex argument:
maintaining independence nevertheless requires cultivating multiple
dependences on others. Making Meaningful Lives argues that an
anthropology of the elderly is uniquely suited to examine the
competing values of dependence and independence, sociality and
isolation, intimacy and freedom, that people must balance
throughout all of life's stages.
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. Drawing on ethnographic
discussions of these themes in a range of cultural contexts around
the world, it shows how anthropological research can help to
enlarge and refine understandings of wellbeing, through dialogue
with different perspectives and understandings of what it means to
live well with others and the skills required to do so. Rather than
a state or achievement, wellbeing comes into view here as an
ongoing process that involves human and nonhuman others. It does
not pertain to the individual alone, but plays out within the
relations of care that constitute people, moving and thriving in
circulation through affective environments.
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.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|