How do we recognize happy people? ? A collective of ethnologists is leading the investigation, from neo-rural communities in the south of France to desert surveyors. The whole, although heterogeneous, lays the first milestones of an ethnographic approach to happiness as a social experience.
After having, yesterday, abandoned the Melanesian shores to invest the Breton coasts abandoned by modernity (Bretons of Plozevet by André Burguière), ethnologists are today interested in a new tribe present in our latitudes: happy people. We cannot blame them for such a perspective, which places ethnology in the broad research program on happiness in the human and social sciences. The authors also explicitly claim their integration into this “ concert » of research from all disciplines. They thus intend to jump on the bandwagon, and this argument, declined numerous times in theEthnology of happy peopleconstitutes the original justification. The volume finds its origins in a study day organized in 2006 by young researchers from the Anthropology Laboratory center “ Memory, Identity and Social Cognition » from the University of Nice − Sophia Antipolis. Soon to be formed into a Research Group for an anthropology of happiness (GRAB), they published their work in 2009, published by Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
When ethnology takes hold of happiness
Studying happiness and taking advantage of the disciplinary specificity of ethnology is, let us have no doubt, a laudable objective. Because if the social sciences have rather turned towards the study of unhappiness and social conflicts, it is now recognized that the study of the happy life offers important heuristic benefits. However, ethnological description seems one of the methods allowing the researcher to collect reliable data on happiness: far from quantitative questionnaires which pose serious interpretation problems for sociologists, the ethnologist could, thanks to long-term qualitative study breath, knowing how to detect the verbal and non-verbal signs of actors’ happiness. Also, when the reader learns that the objective is to find “ the basic forms of happiness » and to bring to light its “ ordinary events », he rejoices: the work will reveal a map of moments of happiness, a meticulous collection of happy experiences, the objective conditions which make them possible and the subjective judgments which transmit them.
However, careful reading of the thirteen articles, grouped into two parts, leaves him wanting more. The first part is not without unity, but the second turns into cacophony: two program articles without empirical material, a philosophical foray, another into cognitive sciences and an investigation among the Papuans, ethnological tradition obliges… As for the article on the happiness of the wine lover, it could have been fascinating ; but the empirical study, confined to guides for amateurs, seems impractical: the drinker’s pleasure and the evolution of his experiences over the course of his initiation are not addressed. This work therefore suffers from a lack of standardization of the materials studied and the points of view developed. By wanting to embrace the entire field of happiness, it lets slip the added value of the discipline: the precise observation and capture of elements inaccessible to other social sciences. It would undoubtedly have been preferable to focus on certain aspects of the theme in order to treat them in depth. This lack of calibration is, moreover, damaging because it prohibits any comparative and/or synthetic desire. Before the title should therefore have been placed the preposition “ For » which would have marked the programmatic character of the work. To exonerate the authors, we must recognize that this is often the law of the genre…
Fragments of happiness
The volume, however, has the qualities of its defect and marks out the emerging field of research. Above all, the bargain hunter will be able to unearth some gems there. Cyril Isnard’s article on neo-rural residents living in La Roudoule (Alpes-Maritimes) is one of them. Thanks to a solid field investigation, the author is interested in the construction of happiness and highlights one of the specificities of their personal novel: the importance of a negative belief – life in the city is hell – who acts by comparison and embellishes their experiences. This representation of the urbanity/rurality couple allows them to create happiness for themselves, despite the difficulties of everyday life. This article makes sense with the following, which takes as its subject vacations, considered by the majority of our contemporaries to be a time of happiness. Pierre Périer also underlines the strength of beliefs in the emergence of happiness, but this time, it is a positive belief: the one linking happiness to vacations potentiates happy experiences and improves vacationer happiness. In the absence of large-scale empirical studies on happy vacation stories, the author cannot, however, disentangle what emerges from an allegiance to the norm (to report an unhappy vacation is to admit a fault). and what comes from sincere satisfaction.
Likewise, the article on “ desert-collectors “, of endurance runners who cross the desert in extreme conditions, is extremely stimulating: starting from an object that some would consider anecdotal, Aude Mottiaux is interested in the stories of these ultra-marathoners and manages to highlight evidence certain processes which would authorize, coupled with other work, interesting increases in generality. Thus the relationship between happiness and physical pain, which runners manage to transmute into its opposite – pleasure – and which becomes an essential component of their happy personal novels. Or even the pleasure of identity constructed by this sporting practice which, for the participants, borders on the sacred, largely defines them and still gives them joy in the daily moments of their ordinary lives. This article leads towards the religious phenomenon and would call for many developments and comparisons: to what extent are pleasure and pain integrated into the constructions of happiness ? By which actors ? How does identity construction intervene in these processes? ?
Ultimately, this volume therefore leads to a mixed assessment: on the one hand, the researcher can legitimately congratulate himself on the insertion of ethnologists in the field of happiness. On the other hand, the reader’s aspirations – necessarily high, given such an object – are somewhat disappointed by the body of the work. If the preparation of the project is not to be questioned, should we see in this composite assembly the sign of an emerging field of research ? In this case, this work at least has the merit of allowing a measure of the road ahead: there is a long way between this milestone and a true ethnology of happy people.