AN INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF WELL-BEING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER, UK. The symposium aims to discuss and reassess some of the views prevalent in the academy today on the concept of well-being, as well as problematize some of the concepts upon which these are generally built (agency, personhood, freedom, health, the environment, wealth, capital, happiness, etc.).

An anthropological assessment of the notion of well-being seems a project of utmost relevance to our times. Worldwide protests and responses to ongoing processes of globalization, human migration and displacement, or scientific innovation, signal diverse and changing attitudes to ideas about what it means to live in the modern world, making it clear too that there are different modes of living in the world and different ways of organizing well-being. In the same line, recent concerns with religious fundamentalisms and environmental problems speak too about the temporal and spatial framing of our notions of well-being: the term is capitalized and stretched to include future or past generations, or to incorporate spiritual and ecological dimensions. Anthropology may thus contribute to the debate on well-being by re-scaling the questions posed by these and other issues, outlining how people rework their life-relations to the world in pursuing their own understanding of what it means to live a good life, and by disentangling the conceptual imaginaries (about personhood and community, the state and the economy, nature and the environment) that are brought to work in each context.

Speakers include: Eric Hirsch, Wendy James, James Laidlaw, Michael Lambek, Nigel Rapport, Laura Rival, Neil Thin