A Sociology of Happiness?
September 27th, 2009 |
Yesterday I attended a provocative conference entitled “Manufacturing Happiness: Investigating Subjectivity, Transformation, and Cultural Capital.” Some of the research included:
- How medical practices mitigate the unhappiness associated with languishing in waiting rooms using TVs and handheld computers, while simultaneously shaping patients to serve the practices’ own interests.
- How a large technological corporation offering countless benefits (I wonder what company that could be…) affects employee behaviors and attitudes.
- How self-help books articulate a model of happiness that is an internalization of Foucault’s panopticon, in which “the gaze of the anonymous other [is] reanimated in the mirror.”
- How those with pessimistic outlooks are exploited by so-called “indie” films that reinforce these beliefs, producing a “euphoric fatalism” in the consumer.
- How participants in the unconventional lifestyle of open marriages construct happiness through their deviant behavior.
It was a somewhat disjointed, but generally interesting series of presentations. Some recurring themes seemed to emerge:
- Happiness is usually constructed as external to the individual. The favorite culprit is money, but other externalities (family, health, time) are also equated with happiness.
- This happiness-as-external meme is relentlessly encouraged and exploited by producers, institutions, and organizations, financially as well as emotionally.
- Resolving tension between the personal self and the social self is conceived as a prerequisite for happiness. While some methods suggest that the key to happiness is to improve one’s social presentation skills (e.g., personal branders), other methods suggest that modifying one’s personal self to be more concordant with the social self is the answer (e.g., self-help gurus).
Throughout, I kept wondering what a sociology of happiness might look like. Though we imagine happiness to be an internal state, it seems that even happy people–whether they are genuinely so or merely report themselves as such–consider certain modes of social engagement (or lack thereof) to be a necessary component. It would be an interesting compliment to the nascent field of positive psychology to determine what social behaviors, interactions, and interpretations are associated with happiness, and to what extent the internal state is dependent upon the external stimuli. I imagine that many studies have addressed these questions indirectly, but I wonder if anyone has situated them in this context specifically.
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