The Anthropology of Joy

I am developing a new research agenda on the anthropology of joy. My vision for this begins from the hypothesis that the quality of our engagement with the world is itself a significant and complex component of complex systems. While crisis might be a ‘structural signature of modernity’, the experience of crisis today is characterised by complex systems themselves in crisis, interacting with each other in unpredictable ways. This sense of ‘metacrisis’ is ubiquitous and enduring, reflected in but not limited to the shift in geological time from Holocene to Anthropocene, transformations in information systems designed to generate addiction and attentional capture, runaway AI, climate collapse as the precursor to mass migration, food scarcity, and bio-precarity, as well as gross inequality, economic fragility, pending nuclear war, a pandemic, a global market downturn and political polarisation. Research in or on this metacrisis implicates scholars as much as the people with whom we work. It calls on scholars to account differently for how people relate to the world, and, in so doing, to relate differently to the world ourselves, to support and to model effective action.

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The implications of anthropological work on joy for these conditions of contemporary life are far reaching. The heuristic of joy acts as a complement to critical scholarship charting the rise of an affective cultural economy as a key signature of contemporary capitalism and politics. Taking joy as a heuristic for the social sciences does not deny that life is woven though with pain and imperfection, but it allows us to examine the emotional complexity of life, providing analytic space for difficult and often contradictory emotional experiences. An analytic focus on joy (1) provides an opportunity to engage with people as complex creatures in the ways in which they navigate the worlds and crises in which they find themselves and (2) it provides a political response to the metacrisis of modernity, offering the possibility of moving beyond crisis. It highlights the many and multiple ways in which people move from numbness to action, and from despair to hope.

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My argument for and approach to the anthropology of joy rest on the principle that the global challenges that we face give us an opportunity and impetus to contribute constructively to the world. A focus on joy is both reflexive and relational. The heuristic of joy offers a new way of looking at social life, one that embraces human emotional complexity (both as an epistemological assumption and as the focus of our ethnography) as an important component of complex systems. In so doing, my vision for the anthropology of joy is one that committedly holds open the possibility of hope in relation to wider social, environmental, and structural forces by contributing to metanarratives of human connection and flourishing. It assumes that it is only by embracing the complexity of human emotional life, even in contexts of iniquity and injustice, that we have any chance of moving through this moment of crisis. The word ‘crisis’ derives from the Greek, krinein, to decide; it connotes as much a moment of opportunity as of catastrophe. The self-transcendence and social connection that characterise joy point to the possibilities of emotional and intersubjective connection in complex worlds.