Call for AAS2025 penalists: From excellence to good-enoughness: On living a good life in everyday China
What is a good life? Scholars often attempt to answer this question by examining people’s ideals. Exemplified by Joel Robbins’ call of “the anthropology of the good,” anthropologists are encouraged to make ethnographic inquiries into qualities that are “imaginatively conceived” to be desirable and even “outstripped” the immediate realities (2013, 457). In other words, the scholarly examination of the “good life” has long been domesticated in the realm of thoughts and beliefs, insulated from that of the lived experiences.