Well-Being Within and Beyond the Body: Toward Careful Planetary Engagements

Abstract

Discourses of well-being can direct attention beyond individual bodies, toward mental health and wider social relationships. Paradoxically, these discourses are also applied in contexts where living well is understood in terms of individual responsibility and agency, entangled with the neoliberal optimization of health. Anthropologists have recently argued that it is now crucial to move beyond the conceptualization of well-being as pertaining primarily to individuals. Such a conceptualization, though welcome, can have undesirable practical and political consequences. In this review, I show how well-being intersects with recent work in the anthropology of ethics, how it is embodied and emplaced, and how it is closely intertwined with (rather than simply opposed to) suffering. Furthermore, while experienced as embodied, well-being is deeply affected by the suffering of others—and not only human others. As such, it could fruitfully be understood as a form of affective common. In contexts of complex environmental challenges and changes, inequality, and conflict, I suggest that studies of well-being call for a focus on experience beyond the individual: an affective enlargement entwining forms of care, maintenance, and repair.