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Economics and Subjectivities of Wellbeing in
Rural Zambia1
Author’s accepted copy.
Please quote from published version: Chapter 5, pp 118-143 in S.C. White with
C. Blackmore (ed.) (2015) Cultures of Wellbeing: Method, Place, Policy.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137536440. DOI: 10.1057/9781137536457
Sarah C. White and Viviana Ramirez
[A] Introduction
As described in chapter one, the call to go ‘beyond economics’ is central to the
wellbeing agenda. One dimension of this is to go ‘beyond GDP’ in measuring
national progress. Another is the extended debate on the theme of ‘does money
make us happy?’ which has animated the new field of ‘happiness economics’
(Graham 2011). While the tenor of that debate is strongly positivist, defining itself in
terms of ‘what we know’2, it can also be read against the grain as a discourse on
Western cultures of wellbeing, using statistics to debate the relative importance of
income, wealth, inequality, human rights, health, employment and family
relationships to ‘good lives’ and ‘good societies’. Continuing the well-worn pattern of
‘modernity’ seeking to know itself in contrast to ‘tradition’ (Grossberg 1996), this
questioning about wellbeing has also looked to ‘other cultures’ for inspiration, as less
materialist, more spiritual, more holistic. Buen vivir and allied approaches have
inspired significant mobilisation for cultural and political rights in Latin America.
However, their celebration in the West also indicates the particular place of
2
indigenous worldviews as a cultural mirror for self-questioning Western modernity.
But this is only one side of the picture. The contradictory dynamic within Western
modernity is to generalise its own patterns of thought as universal (Mazrui 2001).
For current discourses of wellbeing and their preoccupation with subjective
experience and ‘happiness’, informed by the psychological and affective ‘turn’ across
the social sciences (e.g. Craib 1994, Moore 2007, Kahnemann 2012), this means
the export of a psychological subject, projected onto the peoples of the world.
This chapter presents mixed method research in Chiawa rural Zambia in which
people resisted the attempt to render them psychological subjects, and instead
foregrounded the economic in their representations of self. It begins with a brief
discussion of the key terms, economics and subjectivity. It then describes the
research design, location and methods. The following sections present a number of
different vantage points which demonstrate the centrality of the economic to
wellbeing. These begin with the emphasis people place on material sufficiency in
their accounts of what wellbeing means to them. This is followed by statistical
analysis, first of the relationship between subjective economic confidence and overall
happiness, and second of the relationship between measures of objective economic
status and subjective dimensions of wellbeing. This leads into further questioning of
the form of association between economics and subjectivities, with qualitative data
suggesting a more internal relationship of co-constitution than the external causative
relationship usually envisaged by quantitative methods. Three snapshots are
presented: the role of economic capacity in forging (male) gender identities; the
emphasis on reciprocity and a moral economy; and the use of economics as an
expressive idiom in speaking of the self.
[B] Economics and Subjectivities
3
The definition of the economy and the economic is a matter of major debate. Within
economic anthropology the main divisions concern those who identify the economy
in substantive terms, involving the social organisation of, for example, production,
consumption and exchange, and those who see it in terms of a logic of decision-
making, the ‘rational’ ‘choice to allocate scarce resources to different possible ends.’
(Wilk and Cliggett 2007: 35). Amongst economists there is a further difference
between those who accept that social norms, institutions and obligations influence
behaviour and those who believe that these motivations are merely incidental to the
‘rational’, maximising motivation. In this chapter we adopt the first, descriptive
approach, classifying as ‘economic’ any reference to work, production, wealth or
assets, income, consumption, material provisioning and exchange of goods or
services. While Chiawa operates within a market economy, norms of reciprocity
have a powerful influence on behaviour and provide an important idiom for social
exchange. Individual decisions are made at the interface of moral intuitions, social
obligations and calculations of self-interest, sometimes, as shown below, quite
explicitly so.
The emphasis on the subjective in contemporary constructions of wellbeing is
paradoxically marked by a widespread failure to theorise subjectivity. Where such
theorisation does appear, it is amongst the critics, rather than the advocates (e.g.
Ahmed 2010). The mainstream subjective wellbeing (SWB) literature is
extraordinarily naïve, assuming that people know their own thoughts and feelings,
that they can abstract and generalise from these to assign an overall number, and
that they are ready to give an accurate report to strangers. There is some admission
that society and culture may have some effect on scores (e.g. Graham 2011, Diener
and Suh 2000). However, the subject who is the author of these results remains
unexplored, an abstracted point of cognition and affect such that even the individual’s
4
state of health is represented as an external factor whose correlation with happiness
is a matter to be investigated (e.g. Graham 2011: 67).
The slimness and simplicity of the subject in the SWB literature is in marked contrast
to the breadth and multiplicity emphasised in the literature on identity and subjectivity
in feminist, sociological and cultural studies. The focus on subjectivities grew out of
work on identity, which had built a critique of any claims that identity (often in the
context of gender and/or ethnicity) could be seen as naturally given or unitary (e.g.
Hall and du Gay 1996). This led to talk of people identifying themselves through a
process of identification(s) which are always multiple and relational, rather than fixed
identities, complete in and of themselves. The notion of subjectivity combines an
understanding of people becoming subjects of their lives, with the recognition that
they are subject to powers and circumstances that are not of their choosing. The
stress on multiple subjectivities recognises that there are many different ways in
which people identify and experience themselves. But these ‘ways’ are not random,
they are reflective of a particular place and history. Mama (1995: 89) provides a
powerful statement of this, as she describes subjectivity as:
constituted, socially and historically, out of collective experience. I theorise
subjectivity not as a static or fixed entity but as a dynamic process during
which individuals take up and change positions in discourses. I further
propose that these discursive positions can be located in the collective
history of the social group in question.
This renders the subject social, rather than psychological; fluid and complex, rather
than stable and unitary. Like the psychological subject it is somewhat disembodied,
discursive rather than corporeal. It does, nevertheless, provide a basis for exploring
the range of ways in which people represent themselves, which we begin to explore
in the later sections of the chapter. First, however, we explain the concept of
5
wellbeing used in this study, the methods of research, and introduce the location in
which it took place.
[A] Methodology and Research Design
[B] The Inner Wellbeing Approach
Inner wellbeing is a psychosocial approach which explores what people think and
feel they can be and do. In some ways, therefore, it has conceptual affinities with
Sen’s capability approach (see chapter one) although its methods are quite distinct.
In the categories established in chapter one, its underlying model is relational
wellbeing. It was developed through primary research in two rural communities, one
in central India (Sarguja district, Chhattisgarh state) and one in Chiawa, Zambia,
2010-13. Unease with the fact that standard approaches to subjective wellbeing had
been developed in such different contexts to those of our research, coupled with the
wish to explore in a more substantive manner how people were thinking and feeling
about their lives, led us to develop our own concept and methods of assessment.
Inner wellbeing comprises seven domains: economic confidence, agency and
participation, social connections, close relationships, physical and mental health,
competence and self-worth, values and meaning. These bring together dimensions
identified as important in the psychological wellbeing literature (e.g. autonomy,
competence and relatedness, Ryan and Deci 2000) and in the literature on
empowerment and social development (e.g. Rowlands 1997). For example, one of
the items in the social connections domain is, ‘Do you know the kind of people who
can help you get things done?’ This reflects the fact that in many societies in the
global south people’s access to key resources depends on personal brokerage (e.g.
Devine 2002), and the importance of social capital more broadly (Putnam and
Leonardi 1994). Two previous research projects were particularly influential in
6
developing the inner wellbeing approach. The first was Wellbeing in Developing
Countries (WeD), which identified three interlinked dimensions of wellbeing: the
material – what people have or do not have; the relational – how people relate to one
another; and the subjective – what people think or feel (Gough and McGregor 2007;
White 2010). The second was the Colombo-based Psycho-social Assessment of
Development and Humanitarian Intervention (PADHI) and their ‘social justice
approach to wellbeing’ (PADHI 2009). This provided five of the seven domains in the
inner wellbeing model. To these were added two more (on close relationships and
values and meaning) which had been shown to be important in WeD and in a project
on religion and wellbeing, respectively (Devine and White 2013).
Each of the domains is assessed through five questions for which answers are
provided corresponding to a five-point scale. These items, and the domains
themselves, were forged through an extensive process of reflection, grounding and
piloting and statistical testing. The inner wellbeing model is represented by the star in
Figure 5.1. The circle which encompasses the star indicates the broader environment
within which people experience wellbeing. Although we had to ‘fix’ inner wellbeing as
a set score for the purpose of assessment, we do not view it as something stable that
people ‘have’. Rather we see the experience of wellbeing as something that happens
in interaction, between the domains, between people, and between people and the
broader environment (see also White, Gaines and Jha 2014; White and Jha 2014a).
7
Figure 5.1: Inner wellbeing
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[B] Methods
The research on which this paper is based took place in two rounds of four months’
fieldwork in Chiawa, Zambia, August-November, 2010 and 2012. The main
instrument was a survey, which combined objective (self-report) questions about
livelihoods, education, health and social support with subjective questions about
satisfaction and inner wellbeing. We talked to husbands and wives (interviewed
8
separately) and women heading households. In almost all cases these women had
previously been married and were single as a result of widowhood, desertion or
divorce. Respondents were asked in all cases to speak as individuals, so for
example their main source of livelihood should reflect their own activity, not the main
income to the household as a whole. The field research was led by the project
research officer (Shreya Jha) who was supported by a team of three local peer
researchers who acted as interpreters and undertook much of the survey work
themselves. The project director (Sarah White) visited for shorter times, including all
piloting at the beginning of each fieldwork period.
For statistical analysis we draw only on the second fieldwork period. This involved
surveys with 370 people, including 52 women heading households. 358 of these
respondents were also interviewed in 2010. In the qualitative analysis we draw on
data from both fieldwork periods, comprising notes from 54 survey interviews and
verbatim transcripts of 40 open-ended life history interviews and one focus group
discussion.
Surveys were conducted in Goba, Nyanja or English language. If an international
member of the research team was present they were translated into English
simultaneously, otherwise they were undertaken solely in the language in which the
interviewee was most comfortable. Responses were recorded on a survey form in
English and inputted into Excel, then translated for analysis into SPSS. Qualitative
interviews and the focus group discussion were either in English or translated
simultaneously. We have coded and analysed qualitative data by hand and using the
NVivo qualitative data analysis software. All direct quotes are identified by type of
respondent (MM = married man; MW = married woman; SW = single woman) with
the respondent number. Where we quote at length from a particular individual, we
give him or her a fictive name.
9
[B] Chiawa
Chiawa lies in Kafue district of Lusaka province. To the south and southeast Chiawa
is flanked by two major rivers, the Kafue and the Zambezi; to the north by the
Zambezi escarpment. To the southeast it borders Zimbabwe and to the east the
Lower Zambezi National Park. Chiawa was declared a Game Management Area in
1991.
Most of the population of 10,929 (Zambia census 2010) lives in villages along the line
of the rivers. Local amenities are basic: a primary health centre, an agricultural
extension office, a community development office, schools and churches. There is no
public transport, so most people have to walk, cycle or rely on private pick-ups and
small lorries which run along the main route providing transport to work or the ferry in
the mornings and evenings. Chiawa has four primary schools and one (primary)
community school plus two high schools. A single police station has very limited
resources and a traditional court was not operational during our research. Most other
official business requires people to travel to the district capital of Kafue, and for
hospital care to the nearest town of Chirundu. In both cases this has meant crossing
the river by ferry. The other significant government presence is the Zambia Wildlife
Authority. Governance of Chiawa is in the hands of the Chieftainess, who appoints
the headmen who lead each village.
Major economic activity is concentrated in large plantations or safari lodges which
occupy most of the best land along the river. Farming remains a mainstay of village
livelihoods, often in combination with other activities. In 2012 25 per cent of
respondents stated farming as their main source of survival. The main implement
remains the hoe and mechanised irrigation is rare – only 23 households report
having a water pump. Shockingly, although 70 per cent of people reported planting
10
maize in 2012, only half of them (37 per cent) managed to harvest any. This reflects
the extremely precarious nature of local livelihoods, hit that year through a
combination of drought and crop damage from wild animals. Asked how many
months they were able to eat their own maize, only 29 per cent answered 10-12
months, 34 per cent saying 4-6 months, and 30 per cent 3 months or less. Almost 30
per cent of our respondents had gone hungry over the past 12 months, including 22
per cent of married men, 32 per cent of married women and 43 per cent of single
women.
After farming, three other activities tie for next place as most common source of
survival, each being reported by 9 per cent of respondents. The first is safari lodge
employment, which involved 22 per cent of men but no women. The next, petty
trading, has a markedly different gender profile, involving 21 per cent of women
heading households, 12 per cent of married women and only 1 per cent of married
men. Many of these enterprises are extremely marginal. The third is piecework,
which comprises various kinds of casual labour, and shows no significant difference
by gender/marital status. 4 per cent overall report commercial farm work as their
mainstay. This was proportionately more common amongst women heading
households (10 per cent).
Chiawa stands on the brink of change. Despite being only 70 miles from Lusaka, it
has been relatively isolated with poor quality roads and a daytime only ferry across
the Kafue river. In 2014, however, a new bridge was completed, and a new road is
also being built. While the improved transport infrastructure has been eagerly
awaited, it also carries dangers. Economic development so far has provided some
benefit in the shape of jobs, but has also threatened local lives and livelihoods
through the growing number of wild animals since it was declared a Game
Management Area, and privatisation of the customary land on which local people
depend. This has resulted in sporadic social and political protest over the past 20
11
years, but with little sign of positive action to protect local people’s tenure. The fear is
that the new road and bridge could raise local land values and accelerate
dispossession, pushing local people out of agriculture and into increasingly marginal
and precarious activities.
[A] Findings
[B] Economic sufficiency is a major preoccupation
Given the harsh conditions and material scarcity of village life in Chiawa, it is not
surprising that economic sufficiency is the first thing that people mention when you
ask about wellbeing. The following comment is typical:
Most essential thing I want to say is that one must be able to have sufficient
food for him and also his family (MM 13).
Many emphasised the importance of land and farming as the basis of their livelihood.
For some this was everything. An elderly man put it like this:
Wellbeing is all about if you have everything that you want, you are able to
farm and harvest whatever is supposed to be harvested and also when
things go according to plan and then even other people will also say ‘I think
he is wellbeing’ (MM 28).
For others, though, farming was the basis around which other activities might take
place. A school teacher talked about his hopes for retirement:
Yes just buy a plot of a farm and just locate myself there. I can do some
other things, but meanwhile I have the farm (MM 107).
A married woman in her thirties whose husband had worked in a safari lodge,
explained:
12
I think that is not only the money that makes a better life because even
when you are in the home you don’t fight and we are able maybe to farm,
get a good harvest, get enough food even without money that would still be
a good life (MW 54).
In fact, when asked about almost anything, the economic continually intruded. We
had real difficulty finding questions for the self-worth domain in particular, as items
that are commonly used in wellbeing surveys to gauge self-worth or levels of social
trust were interpreted by respondents in economic terms. Asked if they had achieved
what they had hoped to in life, people would speak about their limited means; asked
if neighbours were helpful, people would say that they did not have the means to
help; asked about harmony in the home, they would say how could there be harmony
when they were worried about survival?
The most obvious interpretation of this is Maslow’s (1954) ‘hierarchy of needs’ in
which he saw physical and material needs as having to be met before social or
psychological needs came into play. In contrast to this, however, it was not that
people did not talk about other parts of their lives, including what Maslow classified
as his highest category, of ‘self-actualization needs’. Rather, the way they talked
about them was more embodied, such that the material was intrinsically interwoven
within these other dimensions.
[B] Economics and inner wellbeing: statistical analysis
In this section we present our quantitative analysis of the relationship between
economic status and subjective dimensions of wellbeing within our sample. Fierce
debates regarding the Easterlin paradox notwithstanding (see chapter one), there is
now quite widespread agreement amongst economists about the general patterns of
relationship between economic status and subjective wellbeing. Confirming
13
Easterlin’s (1974) initial observations, most agree that there is little change in
happiness scores within a country as GDP rises over time (Graham 2011: 16).
Graham (2011: 17) shows that those in OECD countries tend to report higher scores,
but amongst countries with lower GDP there is no discernible relationship between
GDP and SWB. Stevenson and Wolfers (2008) argue against this, that there is a
consistent relationship across countries between GDP and SWB. Within countries
the picture is clearer. Most studies find that wealthier people report themselves as
happier than do poorer people and there is a ‘basic needs’ threshold. For very poor
people, the relationship between income and SWB is much stronger than it is for
wealthier people (Graham 2011:17). In economists’ terms, the marginal utility of
income is seen to fall as incomes rise. Where income is seen to continue to have an
effect on SWB amongst wealthier people, in seems to be relative income that matters
(the level of my income compared with others around me) rather than the amount of
income in absolute terms (e.g. McBride 2001).
Differences in findings reflect at least to some degree the use of different datasets,
different techniques of analysis, and different measures of wellbeing (Graham 2011).
Stevenson and Wolfers (2008), for example, employ the Gallup World Poll measure
of life satisfaction, which is widely found to be the measure which correlates most
strongly with income (Kahneman and Deaton 2010). It is also now recognised that
life satisfaction measures in general correlate more closely with income, compared to
measures of emotion or affect (Diener et al. 2010, Graham 2011). The way that
SWB and happiness are used interchangeably, with either term being used to refer to
empirical measures of life satisfaction or affect or a combination of the two, makes it
difficult to get clarity.
In order to test the significance of economic dimensions in quantitative analysis of
our dataset, we needed first to ensure that we had statistically robust measures for
our wellbeing domains. This involved a procedure called Factor Analysis (FA) which
14
tests whether people’s responses to the items which we have assigned to each
domain in fact behave in the systematic way we would expect them to, to show that
they all correspond to the same underlying factor (or domain). The analysis
validated six domains, with economic confidence emerging as the strongest, first
factor. The analysis validated four items for the economic confidence and social
connections domains and three items for agency and participation, health,
competence and self-worth, and values and meaning.3 These items were thus used
in calculating our domain scores.4 They are shown in Table 5.1. We were not able
to validate the close relationships domain. This reflects the difficulty we found in
designing items which could track the quality of close relationships in a reliable way,
given the strong social pressure to project family harmony (see also Jha and White,
this volume). While we recognise the importance of close relationships to wellbeing,
we have therefore had to exclude this domain from further analysis in this chapter.
Table 5.1: Items from Factor Analysis that measured six domains of inner wellbeing
Economic confidence
1. How well would you say you are managing economically at present?
2. If guests come do you feel you can look after them in the proper way?
3. Do you feel that people around you have got ahead of you?
4. How well could you manage if something bad were to happen (e.g. illness in the family)?
Agency & Participation
1. If there is a village meeting do you have an opportunity to voice your opinion?
2. If official decisions are made that affect you badly, do you feel that you have power to change
them?
3. Do feel that you are heard? (Beyond family)
Social Connections
1. Do you know the kind of people who can help you get things done?
2. When do you get to hear about events in the community?
3. Do you feel there are people beyond your immediate family who you’ll be able to count on
even through bad times?
4. What proportion of people in the community are helpful (to you)?
Health
1. Do you ever have trouble sleeping?
2. How often do you feel too weak for what you need to do?
3. Do you suffer from tension?
Competence & Self-worth
1. How far do you feel you are able to help other people?
2. To what extent do you have faith in yourself?
3. To what extent do you tend to doubt the decisions that you have made?
15
Values & Meaning
1. To what extent do you feel that life has been fair for you?
2. How far would you say you feel peace in your heart at the end of the day?
3. To what extent do you feel that life has been good to you?
Having produced reliable measures for the six domains, we then wanted to test the
relationships between these and our single happiness question (‘Taking all things
together, how happy would you say you are these days?’), which is a standard
subjective wellbeing measure. The way quantitative analyses such as correlations
and regressions are generally used would envisage the relationship between the
IWB model and SWB either in terms of determinants (IWB causes SWB, or SWB
causes IWB) or components (IWB domains comprise elements of SWB). Our view is
that these two approaches reflect distinct concepts and measures of wellbeing, but
they are not entirely different. We therefore would expect some overlap between
them and are interested in exploring the extent of this.5
The mean scores for the happiness item and the six inner domains are given in
Table 5.2. These show that people scored happiness above average (3.5, when 3.0
would be the mid-point). The only other scores above the mid-point are those for
health and self-worth.
Table 5.2: Descriptive statistics: happiness and IWB
Mean
Std. Dev
SWB
Happiness
3.50
0.932
IWB
Economic Confidence
2.82
0.686
Agency and Participation
2.65
0.770
16
Social Connections
2.67
0.720
Physical and Mental Health
3.09
0.732
Competence and Self-worth
3.26
0.689
Values and Meaning
2.96
0.709
We next wanted to assess the overlap between the IWB domains and the global
happiness question though correlations analysis. This simply explores the strength of
the association between the two measures of wellbeing, without any view as to
whether there is a causal relationship between them, or if so, in what direction.
Table 5.3 presents the coefficients. As expected, the results show that all IWB
domains have a positive and significant linear association with happiness. The
significance is strong at (p < 0.01)6. The domains with the highest correlation are
economic confidence (0.341) and values and meaning (0.313). This level of
correlation is usually considered moderate. In contrast, the correlations with the
domains of agency, social connections and health are low to moderate.
Table 5.3: Pearson correlation inner wellbeing and happiness
IWB
Happiness
Economic Confidence
0.341**
Agency and Participation
0.187**
Social Connections
0.174**
Physical and Mental Health
0.176**
Competence and Self-worth
0.210**
Values and Meaning
0.313**
** p-value < 0.001, * p-value < 0.05
17
We then wished to assess the relative effect of the different domains on happiness,
when all of the domains were taken into account together. We therefore undertook
linear regression analysis with happiness as the dependent variable and the IWB
domains as the independent variables. As before, it is important to be clear that we
do not envisage IWB domains as either determinants or components of SWB.
Rather, we simply wanted to assess whether the degree of overlap for some
domains and global happiness is greater than for other domains, when all the
domains together are taken into account. As Table 5.4 shows, when all of the IWB
domains are entered into the analysis together, the domain of economic confidence
remains the most strongly related with happiness, closely followed by values and
meaning. The domain of health also shows a statistically significant relationship with
happiness. In other words, in this sample greater overall happiness is most strongly
related with economic confidence, followed by the sense of values and meaning and
physical and mental health. Relationships between happiness and the other domains
were not significant. The R-squared score indicates that IWB helps to explain 18 per
cent of the variability of the happiness of participants.
Table 5.4: Linear regression analysis of happiness over inner wellbeing
Happiness
Constant
1.068**
Economic Confidence
0.292**
Agency and Participation
0.041
Social Connections
0.019
Physical and Mental Health
0.137*
Competence and Self-worth
0.101
Values and Meaning
0.235**
R-squared
0.176
18
** p-value < 0.001, * p-value < 0.05
Having considered the relationship between happiness and the way people felt about
their economic positions, we then wanted to explore whether there was any
association between IWB and their ‘objective’ economic status. We constructed two
indicators of economic status. The first, to give a proxy for income, combined a five-
fold categorisation of people’s main source of livelihood with the amount of maize
they harvested.7 Maize is the staple crop in Chiawa, and using it in this way to
moderate the category of main source of livelihood enabled us to distinguish, for
example, between very poor and more wealthy farmers who would otherwise have
appeared in the same category. The second indicator, to give a proxy for wealth,
was formed through Principal Components Analysis (PCA) on the variables of
housing, source of electricity, type of cooking fuel, and assets (farm animals,
transport, technology).8
Having produced these proxies for wealth and income we undertook similar analyses
as before. First, we tested for correlations between the measures of economic status
and the IWB domains. The results are presented in Table 5.5. This shows that
almost all of the domains have positive and significant correlations with both
economic status indicators. The one exception is a lack of relationship between
wealth and health. The size of the correlations ranges from moderate to low.
Table 5.5: Correlation of economic status indicators and IWB domains
Livelihood
Wealth
Economic Confidence
0.255**
.418**
Agency and Participation
0.267**
.271**
19
Social Connections
0.202**
.302**
Physical and Mental Health
0.188**
0.080
Competence and Self-worth
0.230**
.240**
Values and Meaning
0.225**
.305**
** p < 0.001, * p < 0.05
Finally, we wished to explore the relationship between objective economic status,
inner wellbeing and happiness, after controlling for other personal characteristics of
participants such as age, gender, marital status, and years of education. Table 5.6
presents the results. This shows that the livelihood variable loses much of its
significance once the control factors are introduced, while the significance of wealth
remains. This could suggest that personal characteristics such as age, education and
marital status are driving much of the variability captured by the livelihood variable.
The most significant finding is, however, that the influence of economic status on
people’s inner wellbeing goes beyond their economic confidence, significantly
predicting their wellbeing outcomes in almost all domains such as their sense of
agency and participation, competence and self-worth, values and meaning, and the
perceived quality of their social connections. As with the two previous tables, the
domain of health is the only one not significantly associated with wealth, though it
does show marginal significance (p = <0.1) with livelihood. Overall, the R-square
values show that happiness is the subjective variable least explained by this model,
at under 10 per cent. This is in line with the wider findings discussed above.
Dwarfing the effect of all other variables is the fact of being a woman heading a
household alone. This is captured in the dummy variable Unmarried. Because of the
way we constructed our sample of married couples and single women, this variable
mainly reflects the gendered effect of being a single, divorced or widowed woman.9
For economic confidence, this is significant at p = <0.01, with a coefficient of -0.368.
20
The next highest effect is again negative, and again for single women, in relation to
health (-0.249 at p = <0.05).. No other coefficient is above 0.2 and most cluster
around 0.1 or below. This result does not undermine the significance of economic
factors, but demonstrates how they can be compounded by other social dimensions.
Results not reported here showed that single women were significantly poorer than
married people (Baertl-Helguero et al. 2014). This dummy variable thus captures the
mutli-dimensional social and economic marginality experienced by women heading
households alone.
Table 5.7: Regressions of IWB domains over economic status and control variables
Economic
Agency
Social
Health
Self-worth
Values
Happiness
Wealth
0.142**
0.107**
0.099**
-0.014
0.085**
0.128**
0.105**
Livelihood
0.058†
0.075†
0.045
0.075†
0.081*
0.077*
0.076
Controls
Male
-0.024
0.061
0.023
0.113
0.126
-0.077
-0.03515
Age
-0.007*
0.014**
-0.001
-0.011**
0.006
0.004
-0.004
Years of
education
0.019†
0.033*
0.027*
0.017
0.009
0.031*
0.033*
Unmarried
-0.368**
-0.159
-0.158
-0.249*
-0.039
0.088
-0.100
Remarried
-0.125
-0.176†
-0.102
-0.065
-0.012
0.065
0.010
Household
size
0.012
0.012
0.011
0.003
0.018
0.004
0.006
Constant
2.423**
1.343**
2.117**
3.259**
2.355**
2.035**
2.939**
R-squared
0.269
0.178
0.126
0.102
0.114
0.131
0.095
** p-value < 0.01, * p-value < 0.05, † p-value < 0.1
21
In sum, then, the statistical analysis strongly supports the contention that economic
concerns have a major effect on subjective dimensions of wellbeing beyond
economic confidence itself. Within the subjective, it is people’s economic confidence
that has the strongest association with how happy they say themselves to be. In
turn, proxies for objective wealth and income are significant predictors of inner
wellbeing – and indeed happiness – with wealth having by far the greater effect once
other control variables are introduced. The strongest effect of economic status is on
economic confidence, which in turn we have seen to be the domain which correlates
most strongly with happiness. However, the effect of economic status stretches
beyond economic confidence into almost all other domains of inner wellbeing. This
seems to suggest that pursuing a multi-domain approach to subjective dimensions of
wellbeing can capture better the effects of various ‘objective’ factors on how people
are thinking and feeling about different aspects of their lives than depending on a
single happiness item.
[A] Re-thinking Economics and Subjectivities: Qualitative Perspectives
Our statistical results demonstrate the great importance of economics to subjective
dimensions of wellbeing, but they cannot tell us how this importance is configured.
The whole logic of the tests we have undertaken assumes an external, causative
relationship between an ‘independent’ and ‘dependent’ variable (see also Ramirez
forthcoming). This is the kind of relationship that often appears as the ‘social
determinants of’ health or wellbeing.
Our qualitative data, however, suggest a rather different kind of relationship, one that
is more internal and constitutive, with economic identities implicated in the production
22
of the self. This resonates with the theorising of WeD mentioned above, that
wellbeing is comprised of intertwined material, relational, and subjective dimensions.
There is not space within this chapter to develop the argument in detail, but we
present three snapshots that may take it some way forward. The first is the way that
notions of love and material provision are intertwined within (male) gendered
identities around ‘taking care.’ The second is the centrality of reciprocity and the
sense of a moral economy. The third is the suggestion that people use economics as
an expressive idiom in talking about the self.
[B] Gendered identities in ‘Taking Care’ – Love and Provision
The notion of ‘taking care’ is a very powerful one in Chiawa. It arises most
immediately in the context of parental and marital relationships, but extends into
broader, mainly but not exclusively kin-related, responsibilities. Being the provider,
the one who ‘takes care’ is particularly central to adult male gender identities.
Consider how this man describes how his moral and social identity is built through
his giving of care to his family:
I am taking care of my wife; I am taking care of my son; and also I am taking
care of my mother; my own brothers and sisters who are in the village. I buy
my mum some clothes, some blankets, I also send some money there and
even there in the village most people really seek to say that ‘this mother’s
son is taking good care of her. He must be a loving and caring son’. So I do
take care of my mother and my brothers and sisters and also of my wife and
my own son. At least other people are able to tell themselves that this
person is a ‘father’ to his family (MM 145).
23
Iris, whose husband’s poor mental health meant he had been unable to provide for
her or their children, similarly chose to emphasise a man’s duties as the way things
ought to be:
What I can say for somebody to be living a good life is when one is in a
marriage; first of all, your husband must stand up and say ‘I have a wife
whom I need to take care of.’ Second also, one must be ready to bear
responsibilities on his children. Also one must be ready to send his children
to school so that if things fail you can say that things failed because of this
reason, it’s not that you neglected them. I am also saying things might be
different on how people view it from the community and I don’t know how
they view it but the way I see things someone must really love and
appreciate what he has in his life (MW 90).
While this could be read as quite a conventional patriarchal script, in the context of
the interview as a whole it becomes clear that this would over-simplify. Her
husband’s mental illness had meant that Iris had to take on all the responsibility for
running the household, and within her means she was ably providing for herself and
her children. Her statement here thus stands as part resistance and critique, part
grief and longing for the more supportive relationship she would have liked to have.
Beyond Iris’s personal circumstances, however, her statement also signifies how
marriage – especially when ‘in the home you don’t fight’ – is central to
understandings of wellbeing in Chiawa. Here again the relationship is seen in active
voice, it is not something inert or static but realised through the mutual giving and
receiving of care. This association of marriage with wellbeing has material
dimensions. As mentioned above, as a group, single women are doing worse than
married people on virtually every economic indicator. In life history interviews single
24
women also talked a great deal about the social marginality that they felt,
experiencing suspicion and hostility from married women and sexual predation from
married men. Interestingly, the issue of ‘taking care’ was a strong theme in single
women’s explanations of both why they might, and why they would not, seek to
marry again. While some hoped for a new husband who would look after themselves
and their children, a larger number stated that they would not re-marry, in the belief
that another man would never take care of their children as his own.
[B] Reciprocities and Moral Economy
The emphasis on taking care is part of a broader vision of a moral economy. People
did not envisage themselves, for the most part, as self-interested, individual rational
economic actors. Rather, the purpose of wealth was not to accumulate as an
individual, but to provide for and share with others. While caring for one’s immediate
family might be common across most, if not all, human societies, the web of care that
people envisaged in Chiawa stretched far more widely. As one man powerfully
summed up:
Well, if one is to live a good life in our community…I think first of all one
must have enough food for his family… for himself and his family. And must
also have something to share with the community, because like you don’t
just say, “No, this is for my family alone”, but you’ve also got some other
relatives, some friends who can come and ask for things (MM 54).
The modal form of exchange, therefore, is not the market transaction, but the gift.
This is not to romanticise economic relationships, or to suggest that Chiawa operates
as a ‘traditional’, pre-capitalist economy. Rather, the point is that the primary
25
emphasis remains on the relationship between people, instead of, as in neo-classical
understandings of the economic subject, between people and things. As economic
anthropology has argued, however, there is within gift-giving a ‘euphemized’
(Bourdieu 1977) transactional element which is hidden by the passing of time
between gift and return. In Chiawa, this intervening period may be extraordinarily
extended – one man told us how as a child he lived for ten years with an uncle to
fulfil a deal made with his father years before his birth.
A critical aspect of this moral economy is the sense of generalised reciprocity – that
what goes around, comes around. Within this the material and the relational are
again closely intertwined. The following statement expresses this well:
By helping both the sides I was not looking at my direct personal benefit
because they being relatives, I felt maybe at one point that you never know
who is going to help whom; because maybe if I helped my relatives maybe
at some point they also help me or my children, or maybe their children who
help my children. My wife’s relatives also look at me as being a good
person. Also, you never know who is going to be helped between my
children and them (MM 132).
This statement mixes together moral action and self-interest, in a way that
emphasises the voluntary nature of participation, and thus re-inscribes the speaker’s
agency in his conformity. Other statements, however, bring out some of the tensions
between the moral injunction to ‘take care’ and the material capacity to do so. The
statement below was given in the context of describing how it is determined who will
take on responsibility for children after their parents have died. In theory at least,
moral considerations should trump material ones. When the elders sit to decide who
should take the place of the mother or father, they consider the personal qualities of
the individual, not his or her material circumstances. The critical thing is to be (seen
26
to be) someone with a heart for others. In straitened times this can set up a real
tension between moral and relational considerations on the one hand and financial
capacity on the other. The sense of tension between what is felt inside and what it is
felt possible to express socially is palpable:
It is quite tricky in the sense that support becomes difficult even if you have
one child you are taking care of especially looking at the economic situation
especially here in Chiawa. And then eventually you are not prepared, you
are given these children so somehow it becomes difficult although we say it
is easy. It is quite difficult to say it is difficult because you feel people might
say that you don’t want to look after the children so even though the difficulty
is there you say it’s ok because you want to let people see that you want to
keep the children but inwardly you feel that you can’t look after the children
(MM 124).
[B] Economics as an Expressive Idiom
We mentioned above the way that people would often respond in terms of their
economic circumstances to questions we had intended to capture their social
relationships or self-worth. This tendency to speak of the self in economic terms was
evident in qualitative interviews also. One explanation might be that people were
producing themselves as ‘poor’, in response to their perception of our identities as
rich potential sponsors or donors. There is no doubt that many people did indeed see
us in this way. However, the predominance of economic references spread far
beyond such contexts. Consider the following two descriptions by older, now single,
women of their marriages. In the first case Gertrude is reminiscing about her early
days of marriage and the happiness she experienced.
27
G: At that time [my husband] would go away [to work] for maybe a month
without returning home.
Shreya: And you would be alone all through this time?
G: Yes.
S: How did that make you feel?
G: I was happy because I knew that he was out there looking for money that
was going to help us (SW 38).
The second woman, Hattie, is describing how she divorced her husband after being
unhappily married for many years:
Shreya: Okay… you had divorced him. Was it easy to take that decision?
H: It wasn’t hard for me to take the dowry back because I had played
through thick and thin through good 16 years. I didn’t even have a
chitenge10; I would do piece work for me to get one. I just started living on
piecework as (if) I had no husband until it just came to my mind after 16
years ‘this is too much and I cannot withstand it any longer’. So I decided to
do that and drop him (SW 39).
In each of these interviews the experience has been described in emotional terms
and in each the context (early married life, the breakdown of a marriage) would seem
to lend itself to a psychological or emotional reflection. When the interviewer seeks to
28
explore this further, however, the respondents take an unexpected turn: they
foreground the economic aspect of their subjectivity, rather than the affective.
There are a number of possible ways to interpret this. As mentioned above, in
line with Maslow (1954), it could be that these women were simply so poor that
the material and economic inscribed the horizon of their worlds. Alternatively, it
could be that people in such contexts are simply unused to speaking directly of
their feelings, and/or that norms of propriety, self-deprecation, or a wish to retain
privacy made them unwilling to speak in a more intimate way. To resolve these
questions would require more detailed research. It is worth noting, however, that
both these potential explanations locate the constraint within the Chiawa context.
There are two alternatives, which problematise instead our initial point of entry.
First, within social psychology there is a syndrome called the ‘fundamental
attribution error’ (Ross 1977). This refers to the tendency to over-attribute others’
behaviour to their personal intentions or character, rather than recognise the
situational factors that might be responsible. This is in contrast to the tendency
to emphasise external factors when explaining one’s own behaviour. For
example, when other people arrive late for a meeting people attribute it to their
lack of concern for others, but when they are late themselves they blame the
traffic. Miller (1984) found that this tendency was not evident in her studies in
India, suggesting that the error may be characteristic of cultural settings that
emphasise individualism rather than others. This opens the possibility that the
psychological subject of subjective wellbeing might be an aspect of a Western
‘culture-based syndrome’11: an over-emphasis on the individual and mental
leading to an under-evaluation of the material and situational dimensions of life.
Second, Scheper-Hughes (1992: 185-6) emphasises that for people ‘who live by
and through their bodies in manual and wage labour’, ‘socioeconomic and
29
political contradictions often take shape in the “natural” contradictions of sick and
afflicted bodies.’ Following Boltanski (1984), she contrasts this with the fact that
‘In the middle classes personal and social distress is expressed psychologically
rather than physically, and the language of the body is silenced and denied.’ It is
this middle-class idiom that has been normalised within bio-medicine, psychiatry,
and anthropology, labelling as ‘somatization’, the manifestation of social ills in
bodily dysfunction, which is seen as an indirect, more primitive means of
expression. While this paper has concentrated on the way people in Chiawa talk
of their economic circumstances rather than their bodies, the materiality that is
common across the two cases again gives pause for thought about the biases
‘we’ bring to the field, assuming that a psychological form of expression
constitutes the norm.
[A] Conclusion
For these communities in Chiawa where material hardship is common, economics
provides a primary reference point when people talk about wellbeing. This is evident
in the ways that people respond when asked what wellbeing means to them. Beyond
this, however, economic capacity (or the lack of it), economic provision (or the lack of
it) and economic endeavours are mentioned frequently even when the topic of
conversation apparently relates to some quite different sphere of life. This seems,
then, to confirm the findings of the literature on economics and subjective wellbeing,
that for poorer people their economic status is a strong predictor of how they
evaluate their lives. Our statistical analysis reinforced this. Across the sample as a
whole, we found that amongst the inner wellbeing domains, economic confidence
had the strongest association with happiness. The analysis also showed that
30
objective economic capacity had a significant effect on both inner wellbeing and
happiness, even when other demographic variables were taken into account.
The main purpose of this chapter, however, is to re-focus from this familiar argument
over numbers, to consider the kind of subjects that are being presented. Our
suggestion is that in Chiawa at least, people often express their subjectivities in
economic terms. This is in marked contrast to the rather disembodied, psychological
subject generally assumed in psychological and subjective wellbeing discourses.
Mixed methods were used to explore economic subjectivities. Quantitative and
qualitative data and analysis were found to strongly reinforce one another, both
pointing to the importance of economic capacity to subjective dimensions of
wellbeing. This overall congruence notwithstanding, the ways that qualitative and
quantitative methods represented the relationship between economics and subjective
dimensions of wellbeing were quite distinct. While the statistical analysis has the
strength of being able to quantify results across the whole sample, it also has the
weakness of having to construct relationships in external terms. As argued in
chapter one, its tendency is to objectify. The qualitative analysis is weaker in being
grounded in the experience of particular individuals rather than the group as a whole,
but is stronger in being more sensitive to the ways that people seek to express
themselves and how they understand their lives. This again emphasises the
economic, but suggests that it cannot be separated out as an external influence on
wellbeing, but rather is integral to people’s understanding of relationality and
personhood, a key element in the constitution of wellbeing itself.
In terms of policy and practice, the clear implication is that a commitment to basic
economic and social rights should remain at the heart of development intervention.
But it does not imply surrender to analytical approaches which would privilege a
narrow understanding of the economic as simply concerned with the market or the
31
‘rational’ allocation of scarce resources amongst individualised actors. Rather, it
suggests that we should follow economic anthropology and the nascent
anthropological literature on happiness and wellbeing within Africa to bring
economics, the body, the mind and materiality more clearly into the social world. We
close with two examples of this. In the first place, Jackson (2011: 59) describes how
not having enough to eat is linked for the Kuranko in Sierra Leone to moral and
ethical breakdown:
Without rice, people say, they starve. But hunger is also a metaphor. First, it is a
metaphor for what is most difficult in life, and for the tenacity and strength of
suffering. Hence the ironic response to the question “Are you well?”… “I am as
well as hunger”, meaning I am very hale and hearty. Second, the hungry time
signifies any situation in which generosity goes by the board. It suggests an
ethically compromised situation, characterized by self-interestedness and
regressive behavior, when adults behave like children.
In the second place, James Ferguson (2006: 72) describes on a broader canvas the
intertwining of moral and material, economic and social:
the production of wealth throughout wide areas of southern and central
Africa is understood to be inseparable from the production of social
relations. Production of wealth can be understood as pro-social, morally
valuable “work,” ‘producing oneself by producing people, relations, and
things’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 143). Alternatively it can be
understood as anti-social, morally illegitimate appropriation that is
exploitative and destructive of community.
[A] Acknowledgements
32
This chapter would not have been possible apart from the work of many others.
These are: Shreya Jha, who led the fieldwork on which it reports, and Stanley O.
Gaines Jr. who provided the statistical analysis that validated the inner wellbeing
model. Thanks are also due to Andrea Baertl-Helguero who undertook the initial
analysis of the field data. In Chiawa, special thanks are due to Joseph Kajiwa, who
was the lead local researcher in both rounds. He was supported by Goodson Phiri in
both rounds, and Kelvin Matesamwa in 2010 and Stephen Kalio in 2012. Our thanks
also to other members of the field team, Susanna Siddiqui (2010) and Jonnathan
Mtonga (2012). We are also grateful to Uma Kambhampati (University of Reading)
for very helpful comments on an earlier draft.
[A] Notes
1"This work is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council/Department for
International Development Joint Scheme for Research on International Development (Poverty
Alleviation) grant number RES-167-25-0507 ES/H033769/1.
2 This is the title of a chapter in Graham (2012) for example.
3 Further details on the Factor Analysis procedures followed are available from Viviana
Ramirez on request.
4 The domain scores were calculated through a regression method, that weighted each item
according to the strength with which it loaded onto the factor in the factor analysis."
5 See Ramirez (forthcoming) for a similar analysis with data from two communities in Mexico.
6 This means that there is less than a 1 per cent chance that this association has occurred by
chance.
33
7 For details on this categorisation, see Baertl Helguero, White and Jha (2014:37)
8 For more details on the types of assets see Baertl Helguero, White and Jha (2014:35)
9 This variable also reflects a very few unmarried men, who had been divorced or widowed
since the first round of our survey in 2010.
10 Wrap that women wear over their skirt or trousers.
11 This term is used within medical anthropology to describe disorders which are recognised
in particular local contexts but cannot easily be translated into Western bio-medical
categories.
34
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