German Eggs, Guatemalan Coffee, and the
Good Life: An Anthropological Look at Markets, Values and Wellbeing (my new manuscript) presents a
simple proposition: the ends of the economy, as well as politics, should be provisioning
the good life for people as they themselves conceive it. The rub is, of course, that while we may all
want to live the good life, we differ widely on just what that entails. The book examines wellbeing in two very
different cultural contexts, teasing out lessons for the good life and how best
to achieve it.
We
look to middle class German supermarket shoppers and to impoverished Maya
farmers in Guatemala, uncovering how they use the market as consumers and as
producers in pursuit of the good life.
In both places, the good life implies more than mere happiness: it
implies wellbeing, fulfillment, the meaningful existence Aristotle termed
eudaimonia. An adequate income is
absolutely necessary, but alone is insufficient, for overall wellbeing. As other research has noted, health and
physical security, family bonds and social relations are also important. But my research points to several additional key
elements of the good life that go beyond material standards of living:
·
Agency and
Aspiration:
Aspiration, a view of the future based on ideas about the good life, gives
direction to agency, the power to act and to control one’s destiny
·
Opportunity
Structures:
The will—agency—is alone not enough; there must also be a way, a set of
structures (social, economic, legal) that provide real opportunities to realize
one’s aspirations
·
Dignity and
Fairness:
The exact contours of “fairness” vary across cultures, but everywhere wellbeing
depends on how one is treated in relation to others, socially as well as
economically
·
Commitment to a
Meaningful Project:
Having a purpose that is larger than one’s self provides a crucial sense of meaning
to life; being a part of such larger projects is fundamental to wellbeing and
the good life
I
illustrate these themes through thick descriptions of German eggs and cars,
Guatemalan coffee and cocaine—things to which people attach their aspirations
and desires for a good life, both extraordinary and mundane.
Buying
eggs may be one of life’s more mundane tasks, something most of us do without
much thought beyond occasionally comparing prices. But egg shopping in Germany compels one to
make an explicit moral decision with every purchase, to lay bare the price one
puts on certain values. Since 2004 Germany
has required all eggs to carry a numeric code that denotes how the chickens were
raised. Among German shoppers we find a
broad concern with the moral provenance of eggs, which they explain in terms of
ecological conscientiousness and a salient cultural notion of social
solidarity. They see such consumer
choices as a way of pursuing their vision of what the world should look like,
of the good life for themselves and others.
While
you may not have spent much time thinking about where yours eggs come from,
there is a good chance that you have considered the origin of your coffee, if
only to order the Antigua mild or Colombian blend at your coffee shop. Much high-end gourmet coffee these days is
grown by poor, smallholding Maya farmers in the highlands of Guatemala. The high altitude lands to which they have
been relegated over the centuries turns out to be ideally suited for producing
the complexly flavored coffees preferred by today’s affluent consumers. These
Maya farmers have entered the coffee market in pursuit of something better for
themselves and their families, a productive if imperfect path for achieving
their own visions of the good life.
In
this book, we see how elements of wellbeing are expressed by German consumers
and Maya producers, what this means for their
visions of the good life, and what they can tell us about wellbeing.
To
understand what the good life could be calls for empirical study of how the
world works (the “is”), but also a critical analysis of how things got that way
and moral reflection about how the world might be different (the “ought”). I conclude by suggesting a “positive
anthropology” that works between the is and the ought, documenting the ways
people around the world conceive of and work toward wellbeing to glean
practical as well as theoretical lessons for approaching the good life.
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