- Title
- Happiness in an Aboriginal Australian community: what it means 'to be well' and 'to enjoy life' in central-western New South Wales, Australia
- Creator
- Heil, Daniela
- Relation
- Happiness Across Cultures: Views of Happiness and Quality of Life in Non-Western Cultures p. 195-207
- Relation
- http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789400726994
- Publisher
- Springer
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- What does it mean for Aboriginal Australians to experience happiness, what are their understandings of happiness, and how have these understandings been constructed over time? As different cultural understandings of happiness cannot easily be translated from one setting to another, it is useful to start with elaborating an anthropological analysis from the standpoint of local people's perspectives. In this chapter, I provide an ethnographic account from the all-Aboriginal community of Murrin Bridge in central-western New South Wales. New South Wales is the Australian state in which Aboriginal people first experienced European occupation and have been participants in colonial encounters since 1788. I demonstrate how Murrin Bridge Aboriginal people have constructed their understandings of happiness or, as Murrin Bridge people say, 'to be well' and 'to enjoy life'. Anthropological fieldwork, literature-based research and ethnographic accounts assure that cultural differences are presented from the people's perspective, illustrating their understandings in acceptable and culturally safe terms. Hence, anthropologists are meant to be taking on the role of students, not teachers, learning from the people in whose lives they are participating and observing (Spradley 1980; MacClancy 2002).
- Subject
- Murrin Bridge; Aboriginal Australians; Aboriginal communities; happiness; ethnography
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1308068
- Identifier
- uon:21604
- Identifier
- ISBN:9789400726994
- Language
- eng
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