Page 20 - C.A.L.L. #43 - Winter 2017

Does living together make

us happier?

Canadian anthropologist Catherine Fisher is studying intentional communities in
Vancouver and Japan to find out

Tobin Resnor; EQWnews.com

Catherine Kingfisher, professor at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, recently published an
anthropological study of urban collective living, and her study outlines a metric by which to discern that
collective living may actually contribute substantially to making people happier in general. This comes
amid an inundation of happiness studies trending throughout the social science fields. More and more
researchers are examining happiness as a state of mind, as an affective social attitude, and even as a
state of nature. One other study on the forefront of this research trend looks at the correlation between
popularity in high school and happiness in adulthood.

“Happiness became a really popular topic in popular culture and also academia,” Kingfisher said in an
interview with Jennifer Keene on Calgary Eyeopener. “There was a rise of happiness economics and
positive psychology.” Kingfisher also added her empirical perspective, saying, “As an anthropologist […]
one of the things I noticed was that happiness studies were overwhelmingly focused on the individual,
which made sense since it emerged from positive psychology […] but it’s incomplete from an
anthropological perspective because we live in social systems. We are social animals.

“So I got interested in the idea of looking around to see what kind of models for well being are out there
that are not focused exclusively on the individual, that actually locate happiness and well being—at least

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