When people use the phrase, "the meaning of life," their language suggests the idea that there's one single meaning for every life. I'm not comfortable with that. Most anthropologists aren't. Instead, I'm interested in looking at the meanings in lives. Meanings don't come from outside and tell people what to do. They may shape our lives, but our lives shape those meanings, too.
I wrote a book about this.
I've been way from this site for a while now because I was finishing it. Narrative Practice and Cultural Change: Karma, Ghosts and Capitalist Invaders in Thailand will appear sometime soon with the Palgrave Macmillan imprint name somewhere on the spine.
This is my first book. It's based, as you might have guessed, on my time in Bangkok.
For a long time now, I've thought that we really didn't have a strong explanation for how people find meaning in their lives.
You can point to the things that give people meaning – family, love, charity, work, God. This is all true, but we've never had a good way of talking about the processes that people went through to God and family and work important enough to give life meaning. And we certainly lacked a good way to explain how all these things fill similar holes in people's lives.
But I think I've got a solution. I put it in a book, and now, it's done.
A Little Bit of Theory
Psychologist named Jerome Bruner realized that people remember their lives in the form of stories. Since you record what you know about your life in that form, to be human is, in an important way, to be a set of narratives. On top of that, people who live in the same cultural worlds tend to share a number of story forms – outlines that they can fit their own symbols into.
This is a good jumping-off point for thinking about the ways people use stories to get meanings into their lives.
Since the 70's, social scientists have seen meanings as coming from outside, being imposed on people by social forces. I'm arguing that the unique personal experiences people have also play in here – that social forces can't be overpowering because everyone ends up putting their ideas of the world together in slightly different ways. (I'm not the only person who thinks this, by the way – it's a common thought among phenomenological and moral anthropologists.)
So what I've tried to do here is to take Bruner's insights about stories and apply them to the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist who put individual experience at the center of cultural life. (A brilliant thinker whose sentences are often read like eating thistles – tasty, but you must chew very slowly, and sometimes end up wondering if it was really a good idea.)[1] Bourdieu decided that, although the meanings in life emerged from individual experience, people synched themselves up, and when individual differences came around, they tended to break the system of shared beliefs.
The thing is, though, if you take the idea that people build stories out of their own experiences, hanging them on shared story-forms like ornaments on a Christmas tree, then you can see how meanings can come out of individual lives while allowing people to go their own ways – at least a little bit.
(I've left out a bunch of steps here; this post is meant to be a quick read. The book explains the whole thing in about 300 pages, if you're interested.)
The Bigger Picture
So I thought these ideas were cool, and I don't know of any other anthropologists who've ever put them together quite like this. In fact, I'm not sure I know of any anthropologists who would have much of anything to say about the search for what we normally call "the meaning of life."
We'll see if it finds a place in the conversation.
I don't think there's much point in coming up with interesting ideas if they're only good for talking about with other anthropologists, though. For many of us here in the west, the search for happiness is a core part of the ways we make meaning, so I wanted to turn my attention to an application of the theory that doesn't rely on theoretical heavy lifting that goes on in Karma, Ghosts, and Capitalist Invaders. Now that that project has been put to bed, I can turn my attention back to my other project.
Impractically Happy is about happiness in the present – I'm using this site to make sense of what's going on in in the US today. In the next few years, I'm going to take what I learn about the present, and look at the ways those stories developed in the past. I'm working on the history of happiness in the US.
[1] I don't actually know if thistles are tasty.