Xing fu kun jing ： dui Zhongguo he Riben dou shi zhong chan nu xing zhui qiu hun yin xing fu de tan jiu

There is an increasing anthropological interest in well-being and happiness in recent years. However, most anthropologists have not yet applied it to a specific area of human life. Based on my twenty-three-month ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, China and Tokyo, Japan, this thesis provides a “thick” understanding of “happiness” from the perspective of flesh-and-bone individuals, as they told their “(un)happiness” stories in a realm which continues to be considered by many contemporaries as the single greatest source of potential human flourishing—marriage—and yet one which all too often fails. Instead of asking what marital happiness is and offering yet another fixed definition or ideal or code of it as many other works have done, the primary question this thesis asks is: what does “marital happiness” do among my Chinese and Japanese interviewees?Part I of the thesis sketches out the historical stage on which this ethnography unfolds by delineating, respectively, how two married women—one Chinese living in Shanghai and the other Japanese living in Tokyo, now both in their late sixties—have variously experienced their marital life against the vicissitudes of the economic, political and sociocultural flux in the two societies since the postwar era. In Parts II and III, I turn to the younger generation. In Shanghai, I profile one woman who seemed to be ideally happy with her marriage, and another who thought of marriage as “slavery” but nonetheless relentlessly followed the dominant marriage ideal I call the “marital happiness recipe”. In Tokyo, a group of career-oriented mothers I interviewed deemed “conjugal equality” crucial to their sense of marital happiness and eagerly pursued it through the use of what they called the “Happy Share Board” through which household chores were negotiated between wife and husband. Housewives I interviewed held to conventional “women’s happiness” ideals and asked how it is possible for couples to stay “independently together”. Through telling the marriage stories of these middle-class Chinese and Japanese women who I interviewed in these two cities, I bring out the concept of “happiness impasse” to reveal how the same social mechanisms that generated the “marital happiness recipe” often impede at the structural level the very happiness they promise at the individual level. The Conclusion examines the affective and ethical dimensions of this “happiness impasse”. This thesis seeks, through an ethnographic lens, to provide a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the concept of “marital happiness” in Shanghai and Tokyo, and to capture the simultaneous anxiety and aspiration it casts upon its pursuers.近年來，人類學對於幸福的探究興趣與日俱增。然而，目前為止多數人類學家尚未將其對於幸福的研究聚焦於人類生活的某個特定領域。本研究將“幸福”這一概念置於一處一直被許多當代人視為潛在的幸福所在卻又時常追逐失敗的領域——婚姻。通過記述有血有肉的生命個體對“婚姻（不）幸福”的體驗，本研究旨在對“幸福”進行“深描”。與其如許多既存的研究一般探問“婚姻幸福”是什麼，並為其提供另一種固定定義或規範，本研究主要的著眼點在於：“婚姻幸福”這個被建構的理想話語能做（do）什麼？本研究的數據主要來自筆者在東亞兩大都市上海和東京所進行的為期二十三個月的田野調查。本文的第一部分通過講述兩位已年過花甲，分別居於上海和東京的已婚女性在戰後兩地動盪變遷的經濟、政治以及社會文化的歷史背景下的婚姻經歷，試圖搭建出本民族誌展開的歷史舞台。本文的第二和第三部分把焦點轉向年輕一代。在上海，筆者描繪了一位似乎活出了“理想”婚姻的女性，以及另一位一邊認為婚姻是“奴隸制”，另一邊卻仍然不懈地追求被筆者稱作“婚姻幸福處方”的婚姻理想。在東京，有一群事業心很強的媽媽們視“夫妻平等”為她們婚姻幸福的關鍵，並嘗試通過被她們稱作“幸福分享板”的實驗來實現家務育兒的公平分工。但同時，也有主婦們仍堅守傳統意義上的“女人的幸福”，並質疑夫妻如何可能做到“獨立地在一起”。通過講述兩地中產女性們的婚姻故事，筆者進而提出了“幸福困境”（happiness impasse）的概念來揭示建構出“婚姻幸福處方”的社會機制如何同時阻礙個體實現其允諾的幸福。本文的結尾將從情感和道德維度討論“幸福困境”。本研究試圖通過民族誌，在上海和東京的語境下，為“婚姻幸福”這一概念提供更豐富和細緻的解讀，並且希望能捕捉住其帶給追逐者們的那份並存的焦慮和希冀。Sun, Lin."December 2020."Ph.D. Chinese University of Hong Kong 2021.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 351-366).Abstracts also in Chinese.Title from PDF title page (viewed on October 25, 2022).Sun, Lin