How are you, anthropology? Reflections on well-being and the common good

Abstract

The articles that compose this special issue of Economic Anthropology represent a sample of the work presented and discussed at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology on the topic of well-being and the common good. I trace the roots of this conference theme in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and its connections to the literature on the “anthropologies of the good.” I then unpack three themes that emerge across the articles in this special issue: the value of tacking between objective measures and subjective meanings, the productive tension produced by investigating across scales, and patterned variation from which we can build an anthropological theory of the good.