Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that anthropologists should engage with the burgeoning debates on wellbeing. It uses mixed method research in Adivasi villages in India to describe how universalist approaches to wellbeing are challenged by local ways of understanding and narrating the self.

Paper long abstract:

On 20 April 2011 The Economic Times reported that India had been ranked 71 out of 124 countries in a global study of wellbeing. This touched a raw nerve, not least because Pakistan came in at No. 40! Such surveys are increasingly common, and tend to be dominated by economists and psychologists. This paper asks whether anthropologists should aim to be part of the debate and what it might mean if they were. Three arguments are put forward for engagement. First, the wellbeing agenda treads on classic anthropological territory - people's perspectives on their own lives. Second, it is increasingly intertwined with policy, making it potentially the basis on which decisions about resource allocation are used. Third, anthropology has a clear contribution to make to the thinking of psychologists and can itself learn from cross-disciplinary exchange.

The paper has three main sections. The first reviews existing literature on well-being in India and asks how it represents the challenges to standard approaches that this location involves. The second introduces our own ongoing mixed method research on wellbeing in Adivasi villages in Chhattisgarh, India. We describe the challenges of using a qualitative methodology to derive a quantitative survey. We then discuss some of the difficulties we found in asking people about their wellbeing: preference for the concrete over the abstract; ambivalence in speaking of the future; resistance to direct questions about the self or family relationships. The final section considers the implications of our experience for the contribution of ethnographic research to the understanding of wellbeing in India and what more attention to the contextual grounding of wellbeing might offer to mainstream approaches.