Ambivalent happiness and virtuous suffering

Abstract

This article advances an analysis of those affective, mooded, and worldly happenings that define the limits, contingencies, and possibilities of happiness. More specifically, drawing from sustained ethnographic research, ambivalent orientations to experiences of happiness are examined in Yapese communities in the Federated States of Micronesia. For many, happiness is experienced as an ambivalent object of concern inasmuch as it stands in tension with local ethical modalities of being that emphasize virtuous forms of suffering.