Chikako Ozawa-de Silva | Anthropology | Emory University
Loneliness is everybody’s business. Neither a pathology, nor a rare affliction, it is part of the human condition. Severe and chronic loneliness, however, is a threat to individual and public health and appears to be on the rise. In 2018, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May said, “Loneliness is one of the greatest public health challenges of our time,” and appointed the country’s first ever Minister for Loneliness. Contemporary scholarship is therefore focusing on loneliness not as merely an individual matter, but as a public health issue that negatively impacts both physical and psychological health, even increasing the risk of mortality. This talk examines what is and is not loneliness, conditions of the “lonely society” and the role of culture in loneliness. Based on my long-term ethnographic studies, I point to how society itself can exacerbate experiences of loneliness. One of the most important messages of this talk, is that the anatomy of loneliness is not the anatomy of a single individual, but of a type of society.
