Introduction to Anthropology of welfare and well-being

Abstract

Until recently, there was only a disparate, fragmented literature about the anthropology of welfare, which had not been collated and theorized distinctively. However, the relative paucity of jobs in academia in the 1970s and 1980s meant that many anthropologists in Britain and the US went into ‘soft ’, more applied fields such as social work and community health. In the last ten years or so, these scholars have started to publish innovative work in this field, work that has led to interesting new perspectives on issues that have sometimes worn stale in fields such as sociology, psychology or social policy. The research aims at introducing this field of knowledge (Anthropology of welfare) and its relationship to the concept of well-being by definition the most important contemporary academic studies in this area, and the importance of research geared towards the definition of those studies trends and what subjects that worked on the discussion.