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An examination of the achievements and potential of applied happiness scholarship in diverse cultures and domains, arguing that progressive policies require a substantial and explicit consideration of happiness.

This title sets out to clarify the meaning of the "social" dimensions of development, with an emphasis on sustainability. It outlines a conceptual framework to facilitate better communication and understanding as a basis for improved policies, implementation strategies, and learning strategies. It reviews the concepts of social development as currently used in policy documents, operational work, theoretical texts, and monitoring and evaluation. The meaning of social development is related to core concepts of sustainable development, and to other specific concepts such as the economy and the environment as well as more closely related categories such as social sectors, social welfare and social security. It concludes that social development would be more useful as a category of policy and practice if it were relinked with the concept of society and with positive efforts to build or facilitate social progress. The analysis and examples draw on the author's recent research and advisory work on social development policy, poverty reduction strategies, human rights assessment, and evaluation and learning strategies.

This paper explores the contributions of sociology (and overlapping disciplines such as anthropology, social policy, and cultural studies) to happiness scholarship from the Enlightenment through to the present day. Pre-20th century thinkers whose work led to the formation of social science tended to take the theme of happiness seriously as a central challenge of social scholarship. Over the past century, sociologists have made important contributions to understanding happiness, although its absence from textbooks, encyclopedias, and conferences suggests that happiness has never been a major theme in mainstream sociology. The discipline's role in happiness scholarship could be greatly strengthened through more systematic and explicit approaches, especially in qualitative research. These will doubtless be developed soon, as sociology catches up with the other social sciences (most notably psychology and economics) that have already made great progress in convincing general publics and politicians that something so elusive as happiness can be analysed and assessed in robust and illuminating ways. A 'happiness lens' is recommended as a way of making sociology more transparent regarding its contributions to understanding and promoting good societies and good lives. This lens complements pathologism with positivity; insists on empathic effort to respect first-person subjectivity; and promotes holism and lifecourse perspectives.

The analysis of numerical data from happiness surveys has caught the attention of governments, corporations, and public media. It is questionable, however, whether the humanistic and empathetic aspirations of happiness scholarship can be well served by numerical reductionism unless this is more effectively complemented by ethnobiographical approaches which explore how self-ratings emerge from cultural contexts and self-narratives. Happiness is imagined, generated, and expressed both through quantification and through stories. In scholarship, as in everyday life, we count and recount our blessings. This somewhat neglected distinction between numerical and narrative representations of happiness applies to conceptual, experiential, and methodological issues. It may help us to understand the social construction of happiness in cultural contexts, in conjunction with other distinctions such as those between affective and cognitive appraisals, and between hedonic and eudaimonic versions of the good life. There are potential synergies between psychometric and ethnobiographical approaches which could help us to recover some of the core humanistic values of the 'happiness lens', namely: empathy (respect for subjectivity); positivity (attention to goodness); holism; a lifespan perspective; and consequentialist transparency (making progressive intentions and causal theories explicit). Anthropology has good potential to help strengthen these values, particularly by using ethnobiography to help us understand what numerical representations of happiness mean.

Everyday cheermongers spread positive emotion through social contagion. This capability is illustrated here through a portrait of Elizabeth, a 'Suzuki method' violin teacher in Edinburgh. Through this example, we can learn about the important ways in which children and parents alike rely on skilled and dedicated felicitators to help them through the difficult balance between enjoyable and sociable music-making on the one hand, and the pursuit of musical excellence on the other. After presenting the philosophical and practical aspects of Shinichi Suzuki's 'everyone-is-talented' approach to instrumental music instruction, this paper argues for recognition of the key roles of music in facilitating happiness, and explores cultural variety in the promotion of musicality. While also recognizing that music education needs a democratic 'no child left behind' approach, the argument is that the full benefits of music are better realised through active musical engagement and social music-making. When not treated simply as an optional leisure activity or as a means to other ends, music can be a pathway to self-transcendent 'peak experiences' that can be achieved not only via the extraordinary performances of elite musicians, but also by savouring the very imperfect musical sounds produced by children.

Fakes, forgery, counterfeits, hoaxes, bullshit, frauds, knock offs—such terms speak, ostensibly, to the inverse of truth or the obverse of authenticity and sincerity. But what does the modern human obsession with fabrications and frauds tell us about ourselves? And what can anthropology tell us about this obsession? This timely book is the product of the first Annual Debate of Anthropological Keywords, a collaborative project between HAU, the American Ethnological Society, and L'Homme, held each year at the American Anthropological Association Meetings. The aim of the debate is reflect critically on keywords and terms that play a pivotal and timely role in discussions of different cultures and societies, and of the relations between them. This book, with multiple authors, explodes open our common sense notions of "novelty," "originality," and "truth," questioning how cultures where deception and mistrust flourish seem to produce effective, albeit opaque, forms of sociality.

Fakes, forgery, counterfeits, hoaxes, bullshit, frauds, knock offs—such terms speak, ostensibly, to the inverse of truth or the obverse of authenticity and sincerity. But what does the modern human obsession with fabrications and frauds tell us about ourselves? And what can anthropology tell us about this obsession? This timely book is the product of the first Annual Debate of Anthropological Keywords, a collaborative project between HAU, the American Ethnological Society, and L'Homme, held each year at the American Anthropological Association Meetings. The aim of the debate is reflect critically on keywords and terms that play a pivotal and timely role in discussions of different cultures and societies, and of the relations between them. This book, with multiple authors, explodes open our common sense notions of "novelty," "originality," and "truth," questioning how cultures where deception and mistrust flourish seem to produce effective, albeit opaque, forms of sociality.