Toward an anthropology of loneliness - Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, Michelle Parsons, 2020
Toward an anthropology of loneliness
Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, Michelle Parsons*First Published October 20, 2020 Editorial Find in PubMed
https://doi.org/10.1177/1363461520961627
Abstract
Loneliness, which is increasingly recognized as a public health concern, is not just a matter of individual psychology or cognition, but inherently social, cultural, and relational. It is an affective, subjective, and intersubjective reality, distinct from the physical reality of social isolation. This introduction to the thematic issues of Transcultural Psychiatry argues that the social and cultural nature of loneliness is an important area of study that requires interdisciplinary approaches and can particularly benefit from ethnography. Contributors explore concepts and expressions of loneliness in Japan, Kenya, Mexico, North Africa, Palestine, Russia, and the US. Cross-cutting themes include the importance of cultural expectations, practice, place, and recognition in the experience of loneliness. Loneliness is a culturally shaped experience that is problematized and medicalized across cultures, but it may also be fundamental to the human condition.
Keywords
anthropology, ethnography, loneliness, place, practice, recognition, subjectivity
Introduction
What is loneliness? Perhaps the most common image that comes to mind is a solitary individual. Yet, as the contributions to this issue of Transcultural Psychiatry show, loneliness is not just an individual psychological matter, but inherently social, cultural, and biological. It is not just the state of a few people, but rather a recurring condition of human social life with developmental, evolutionary, and cultural roots. As such, it deserves a great deal more attention from researchers. This special issue illustrates that the social and cultural nature of loneliness is an important area of study that requires interdisciplinary approaches and can particularly benefit from ethnography.
The idea for this special issue originated in the guest editors’ separate research on suicide among youth in Japan (Ozawa-de Silva, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2017, in press) and on midlife mortality in Russia (Parsons, 2014). Independently, and in distinct cultural contexts, we noticed the expression of “being unneeded” among our interlocutors. We began to talk about forms of relational lack and their connection to loneliness. In 2017, we organized a session at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting to bring together scholars who think about loneliness from anthropological and ethnographic perspectives. This issue includes some of our session presenters and others interested in experiences of loneliness. The articles explore loneliness from a variety of perspectives and in multi-faceted ways. Some engage the concept of loneliness explicitly, while others explore implicit aspects of loneliness, manifestations of loneliness, and lonely experiences.
In recent years, loneliness has been increasingly recognized as a social issue, a public health concern, and even a global epidemic. Public health officials have collected data suggesting that loneliness is at least as serious a risk to human health as are obesity and smoking (Hafner, 2016; Harris, 2015; John, 2018). Former Prime Minister of the UK, Theresa May, noted that: “Loneliness is one of the greatest public health challenges of our time,” and appointed the first UK Minister for Loneliness. Loneliness is also strongly associated with mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, and may even alter gene expression in ways that make the body less healthy and more susceptible to illness (Beutel et al., 2017; Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008; de Jong Gierveld, Van Tilburg, & Dykstra, 2018; Hafner, 2016; Hammond, 2018; Peplau & Perlman, 1982; Perry, 2014). We therefore start from the recognition that a growing consensus frames loneliness as a public health issue.
In this special issue, we go beyond the public health perspective to advance an understanding of loneliness as a social phenomenon that affects everyone. The feeling of being lonely, of being left behind, and the fear of abandonment and social rejection are all part of the human experience. Recognizing that loneliness affects a large number of people, as in the public health perspective, is a first step, but this population level perspective is different from recognizing that loneliness is a structure of sociality that impacts everyone – that loneliness is “everyone’s business”. Even if we cannot recall a time in recent memory when we have felt lonely, we certainly felt loneliness as infants and children, when we cried for someone to comfort us and let us know we were not alone. Our need for social connections is genetically hardwired, for we are social animals that require groups to survive (even in maturity, social isolation puts one at great risk) and that require maternal care to be born (something we have in common with all mammalian and bird species) (De Waal, 2010). Thus, it should be no surprise that even into adulthood we tend to look upon social rejection and social exclusion with disfavor, unhappiness, and even fear. Although experiences of loneliness may be transitory, and although different people may experience different degrees of loneliness, there is strong evidence from developmental, comparative, and evolutionary psychology that the underlying structures that make loneliness a common recurring feature of our lives are universal because they are linked to our basic need for affiliation and mutual recognition (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008; De Waal, 2010; Ozawa-de Silva, in press; Rochat, 2009). This does not mean that loneliness is experienced in the same way everywhere. As the papers in this issue amply illustrate, culture shapes expectations, experiences and expressions of loneliness. Our subjectivity is always in dialogue with our environment and with the subjectivity of others.
Loneliness is inherently social and we need to avoid dualistic notions of individuals as separate from society. This does not mean that we should study the social dimensions of loneliness instead of individual psychology. If we look to the work of Ortner (2005), Luhrmann (2006) and Biehl, Good and Kleinman (2007), we find arguments that society itself is the product of collective subjectivity, or the “first-person experience and the structures that shape that experience” (Ozawa-de Silva, in press). Our subjectivity is shaped by the environments in which we are born and live, in turn shaping our social interactions, our sense of self, and our sense of others. Because subjectivity is inherently social, ethnographic studies of loneliness can shed light on the cultural shaping of loneliness experiences and expectations.
In recent months, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted our need for social connection. Technology has allowed many of us to connect even when we are physically remote. Our need to connect with others is the very thing that creates the potential for loneliness. For this reason, loneliness should not be pathologized as a disorder, but rather seen as a natural expression of what it means to be a social being, born into and existing within a society. However, this does not mean that we should or can do nothing to address the spreading pandemic of loneliness, which is as real a threat to human happiness and flourishing as any infectious disease.
Cultural conceptions of loneliness
In the previous section, we advocated for a shift from seeing loneliness as an individual experience to a public health issue, inherently social and culturally shaped. In this section, we want to tease apart the notion of loneliness. The articles in this issue and earlier work by these authors reveals the multi-faceted nature of loneliness. Some forms of loneliness are constructive and conducive to creativity (Ozawa-de Silva, 2007; Rasmussen, 2020), while others are debilitating. For example, Parsons (2020) notes that existential philosophers such as Weiss (1973) and Moustakas (1961) have suggested certain typologies of loneliness that include both constructive and negative forms. Similarly, Ozawa-de Silva (2007; in press) uses the term afflictive loneliness to describe a particular negative manifestation of loneliness, a topic she explores in depth in her forthcoming book on loneliness and suicide in Japan. In their own way, the authors in this special issue address the presence of multiple conceptualizations of loneliness in different cultures.
In their article, Pike and Crocker (2020) conclude with O’Nell’s (1996) definition of loneliness as “an idiom that seeks to reclaim the very relationships and identities it heralds as missing, that encompasses both the meaning and the meaninglessness of pain and loss” (O’Nell, cited in Pike & Crocker, 2020, p.668). Others in this issue propose convergent specifications. But it is not necessary or even perhaps desirable to collectively propose a single unified definition of loneliness. Instead, the contributors explore how loneliness is conceptualized in different cultures through local idioms. Still, it is important to clarify the analytic use of the term loneliness. First, it is important to differentiate between being or feeling alone, on the one hand, and being or feeling lonely. It is a common conflation to think that physical or social isolation is synonymous with loneliness. This conflation can be seen both in popular magazine and newspaper articles as well as in some academic research.
Some studies on loneliness are in fact studies of people who are physically and socially isolated; however, not all individuals who are socially isolated experience loneliness, nor are all those who experience loneliness in fact socially isolated. Loneliness must be understood as an affective and subjective reality, while social isolation is a physical and social reality. Even if physical isolation may be more likely to induce loneliness, conflating the two can be problematic. For example, long-term meditators who isolate themselves to reflect on lovingkindness, for example, may end up feeling less lonely. Many have experienced this phenomenon during the COVID pandemic, becoming socially more connected through digital technology to people with whom they share limited interactions in ordinary times. Conversely, young people who experience extreme afflictive loneliness are quite often surrounded by peers and family, despite feeling completely alone. Leading researchers on loneliness have long argued that loneliness is a state of perceived social isolation, rather than actual physical isolation (Cacioppo, Fowler, & Christakis, 2009; de Jong Gierveld et al., 2018).
Similarly, loneliness should not be conflated with depression, although the two can certainly co-exist. In this issue, Jenkins, Sanchez and Olivas-Hernández (2020) highlight the need to differentiate between loneliness and depression. Depressed people are not always lonely (Peplau & Perlman, 1982), nor are lonely people always depressed. The American Psychiatric Association views depression as a medical illness; its symptoms include a sad or depressed mood, loss of interest or pleasure in activities once enjoyed, feeling worthless or guilty, difficulty in thinking, and thoughts of death and suicide (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). On the other hand, loneliness is relationally oriented and derives from a desire to be connected with someone and not be alone (Cacioppo et al., 2009; Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008; de Jong Gierveld et al., 2018). As such, loneliness is both more specific and broader than depression.
Ozawa-de Silva’s (2020) article focuses on the close connection between loneliness and the “need to be needed” based on her long-term ethnographic work with suicidal and non-suicidal youth in Japan. Studying online suicide discussion boards and interviews with college-aged youth in Japan, Ozawa-de Silva identifies loneliness as a recurring subjective experience alongside “not being needed” and an absence of “meaning in life” (ikiru imi). Similarly to the online users of suicide websites, college students expressed an anticipated loneliness and fear of loneliness through their strong “need to be needed”. She argues that such strong fears of loneliness and a need to be needed can be seen as a manifestation of loneliness, as it represents an insecurity around one’s social connections. Similarly, the college students predominantly understood meaning in life relationally, and specifically as being needed by others. Ozawa-de Silva concludes that loneliness is the subjective appraisal of a lack of relational fulfilment, which is conditioned by cultural expectations of what relational fulfilment might look like (in this case, “being needed”). Furthermore, “meaning in life” should not be reduced to a cognitive understanding, but must include relational dimensions, since the lack of fulfilling relationships (and specifically of feeling needed) is clearly associated with a lack of meaning in life.
Parsons’ (2020) article draws on ethnography in post-Soviet Moscow, Russia where older individuals similarly spoke of “being unneeded”. Her article also attends to relational lack but focuses on social exchange as key to the experience of being unneeded among midlife Muscovites. Drawing on the anthropology of emotions and exchange, Parsons interprets “being unneeded” as ethical commentary on the transformation of everyday patterns of Soviet social exchange (blat, or the provision of goods and favors to others). Parsons’ analysis links large scale social transformation to subjective experiences through the concept of mutual recognition (Honneth, 1995; Ricoeur, 2005). For midlife Muscovites, a diminished ability to offer goods and favors to others results in a lack of social recognition. At the same time, the expression of being unneeded may secure an alternative form of recognition from others. Being unneeded therefore serves as both ethical commentary and action on post-Soviet economic and social relations. Loneliness, as an experience of relational lack, may also be related to social exchange practices. Parsons suggests that the experience of loneliness is culturally variable and may, in some contexts, implicate social practice more than mutual understanding.
Based on over 35 years of ethnographic work in North Africa, Rasmussen’s (2020) article explores loneliness among semi-nomadic Tuareg in northern Niger and Mali in the context of regional droughts, war, and the dispersion and return of labor migrants and political refugees. Through selected travel narratives, Rasmussen shows how mobility is related to loneliness, depression (tamazai), and unrequited love (tarama). Travel involves leaving a familiar space, causing rupture in everyday activities. This rupture can result in an imbalance in health. Travelers crossing borders may be caught in liminal zones, alienated from both home and travel destinations. Loneliness exists along a continuum that includes possession, the soul (iman) wandering into the desert/wild (essuf), and insanity. But Rasmussen also warns readers that solitude and sociality are not necessarily opposed; loneliness can be brought under control if there is sociality in its expressions, for example, in song and poetry. Rasmussen points to the importance of mobility through both social and symbolic space in the experience of loneliness. In this way, individual subjectivities are forged within larger cultural configurations.
Pike and Crocker (2020) also address loneliness among displaced persons – Mexican immigrants in southern Arizona and Turkana pastoralists in Kenya – where loneliness is wrought from cultural expectations of connection and structural violence. Mexican immigrants are separated from extended family and often spouses and children. As a result, they cannot fully participate in networks of community and care, missing life events such as birth, illness, and death. Furthermore, poverty, liminal citizenship, discriminatory legislation, and targeted policing hinder social integration into new communities. Pike and Crocker’s focus on the displaced reveals how loneliness is more than connection to other people, but connection to land and place. Among Mexican immigrants, restricted movement severs connections to land and nature. Similarly, the Turkana experience a loneliness shaped by the loss of animals, livestock exchange, wild foods, watering holes, and landscapes in the context of land rights politics and low intensity violence. As such, structural violence disrupts culturally specific social relations. Pike and Crocker remind us of the complexity of defining loneliness, a subjective experience that is always also social, and its connection to displacement and structural violence.
Jenkins, et al. (2020) contend that current approaches to loneliness are overly reliant on psychological surveys and lack attention to social context. The authors argue for the importance of differentiating between loneliness and depression. They also warn against reducing loneliness to a social epidemic or byproduct of medicalization. Instead, they illustrate the importance of addressing loneliness as lived experience that requires thick ethnographic work. There is a need for studies of loneliness that foreground subjective experience and cultural processes, in addition to the multiple perspectives of family, peers, and providers. Drawing from their research among 35 high school students and their families living under conditions of social adversity in Tijuana, B.C., Mexico, the authors provide a case study of one 15-year-old adolescent girl. Despite not asking explicit questions about loneliness, soledad, or an absence of love and affection among family and friends emerged as a common theme in semi-structured ethnographic interviews. Social conditions contribute to the experience of soledad, as violence and criminal activity restricts adolescents’ ability to spend time outside of their homes. In this instance, loneliness requires relational, cultural, and contextual analyses of subjective experiences across the lifespan. As such, Jenkins, et al. recommend interdisciplinary methodological approaches.
Nazzal, Cruz, and Neto (2020) use survey data to investigate the effect of life satisfaction, perceived social support, and psychological problems on loneliness among Palestinian university students in the West Bank. Their results indicate that young men, under considerable pressure to establish their futures, report more loneliness than young women. Students who report more loneliness also have more psychological problems. Accounting for psychological problems, students who report less life satisfaction and less social support from friends are also more likely to report loneliness. The authors suggest that universities should create programs to increase wellbeing and social support among students. Participation in extracurricular activities and community service may positively influence life satisfaction and the perception of peer social support. The study highlights the importance of gender and life course expectations in the social patterning of loneliness. This study shows how social expectations and social pressure play crucial roles in subjective experiences of loneliness.
Returning to the Japanese context, Ismail’s (2020) ethnographic research is at New Start, a non-profit organization offering care for people practicing hikikomori (social withdrawal). Individuals with hikikomori are understood to experience and seek out long-term loneliness and social isolation from their peers and parents undergirded by an anxiety of being unable to perform in Japan’s competitive capitalist-oriented society with its social expectations. Ismail suggests that the medicalized category of hikikomori serves both to guide people into recovery and subsequently into positions of precarious employment. These positions, while not the elite white-collar occupations that Japanese parents often desire for their children, do fulfill some expectations for gendered labor productivity. Using three individuals’ experiences, Ismail shows how categories such as hikikomori and NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), offer variable affordances and are strategically used in response to affective, social, and material circumstances. With his ethnographic study of individuals known as hikikomori, Ismail shows that not meeting the expectations of social accomplishments (e.g., good education, good employment) has rendered hikikomori and NEET national maladies. Similar to Pike and Crocker, Ismail’s article shows how expectations play a crucial role in loneliness.
Gagné’s (2020) study shows the intimate connection between displacement and loneliness. The author focuses on the context of post-disaster northeastern Japan, where the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Reactor displaced more than 400,000 people. As a result of complex recovery politics, residents were still living in temporary housing seven years after 3/11. These residents lived in a state of “zoned liminality”, a spatiotemporal bracketing where longstanding community relationships were disrupted. This article focuses on temporary residents in Natori City who spoke of “temporary housing syndrome” (kasetsubyō). Yet citizen-based volunteer movements alleviate loneliness and offer some hope for humanistic and participatory approaches to loneliness and social isolation. At teatime gatherings and group calisthenics, survivors of the disaster, or persons directly involved (tōjisha), created naturalistic and humanistic psychosocial care, in contrast to more depersonalized clinical care. Although Gagné’s research does not directly address the COVID-19 experience per se, his ethnographic work, like Pike and Crocker (2020) and Rasmussen (2020) in this special issue, shows the psychological and social effects of prolonged dislocation and social isolation when ongoing lives are put “on hold”. A key to increased positive mental well-being and resilience is gaining a sense of agency through social, rather than psychological, rehabilitation.1
Psychologists have called for a more inductive approach to loneliness, in which experiences and expressions of relational lack, including those not necessarily referred to as loneliness, are explored (Stein & Tuval-Mashiach, 2015). Together, the articles in this special issue introduce readers to emic experiences of relational lack in Asia, Africa, North America, and Europe among youth, the middle-aged, and the elderly. Experiences of relational lack are not always directly conveyed, but often alluded to euphemistically or metaphorically, particularly in societies where indirect expressions of emotion are valued. Authors in this issues explore concepts and expressions of soledad (loneliness) among youth in Tijuana (Jenkins, et al., 2020); nikomu ne nuzhni (being unneeded) among midlife post-Soviet Muscovites (Parsons, 2020); ikiru imi (meaning in life) and ikigai (what makes life worth living) among Japanese college students (Ozawa-de Silva, 2020); essuf (the wild, solitude, and nostalgia), tamazai (depression), and tarama (unrequited love) among semi-nomadic Tuareg in North Africa (Rasmussen, 2020); the epayane (loneliness) of losing wives and having too few children among Turkana pastoralists in Kenya (Pike & Crocker, 2020); and cultural categories of NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) and hikikomori (social withdrawal) (Ismail, 2020), kasetsubyō (temporary housing syndrome) (Gagné, 2020), kodokushi (solitary death) and muen shakai (de-relational society) in Japan (Ozawa-de Silva, 2020). These articles suggest there may be differences in the experience of loneliness across societies, as expectations of sociality and senses of selfhood vary. Despite this variation, loneliness is consistently the result of discrimination, abandonment, rejection, deportation, or violence, whether directly or through the indirect action of withdrawal as individuals attempt to mitigate fear of these very forces. In short, loneliness is a subjective experience that is problematized and medicalized across cultures, but it may also be fundamental to the human condition.
Cross-cutting themes
A number of themes connect these articles, including considerations of cultural expectations, practice, place, and recognition. In the most general sense, loneliness is culturally variable and particular to place, implicating social practices, cultural expectations and experiences, and particular configurations of politics and violence. In a more specific sense, loneliness is tied to particular longed for landscapes and places populated not only by other humans, but also animals and things.
Cultural expectations configure experiences of loneliness. These expectations may vary by gender, race, class, and age. Nazzal, et al. (2020) find that, among Palestinian university students, men reported more loneliness than women and suggest that these young men, at a particular stage of life when they are expected to establish themselves, are under considerable social pressure. Perceived social support from peers mitigates loneliness. Jenkins, et al. (2020) connect the subjective experience of soledad among high school students in Tijuana to “feeling precluded from the possibility of achieving culturally valued relationships of family and friendship in the context of a transitional period of adolescence” (p. 679). There is a mismatch between cultural expectations and experience. Both their articles and Pike and Crocker’s (2020) illustrate how culture shapes expectations of social connectedness and how structural violence impedes the fulfillment of these expectations.
Many of these articles configure loneliness as an everyday social and relational practice. Tea gatherings, group calisthenics, shopping, exchanging goods and favors, trading livestock, caring for a sick family member, celebrating a new birth – these everyday activities are the pattern and substance of social lives. However, social participation does not necessarily entail deep intersubjective understanding with others, but co-presence and social participation with others. As Gagné (2020) points out, Japanese temporary housing residents at tea gatherings may not verbalize their trauma narratives – as they would do in clinical settings – but participating in these practices offers social, not psychological, rehabilitation, which alleviates loneliness. Midlife Muscovites connect being unneeded to not being able to offer goods and favors to others (Parsons, 2020). Japanese youth report “doing everyday small things that can then pile up and eventually become ikigai” (Ozawa-de Silva 2020, p. 627) – what makes life worth living. They speak of going on vacation, enjoying a fine dinner, doing their jobs, being part of a family, helping others, and being needed. Meaning in life is constituted through these everyday practices, rather than in more abstract or conceptual ways. Meaning is relational, and everyday relational practices, rather than mutual understanding or a life philosophy, shape loneliness. Of course, these relational practices are gendered, raced, classed, and aged: not fulfilling expected social roles can result in loneliness. Some of these practices bring individuals into interaction not only with other humans, but with non-human things like livestock, plants, water, food, or a table at a community center, which are also important to a sense of social connection.
Everyday practices give rise to cultural experiences and expectations of social connection, but these practices are not static. They are transformed by history, politics, economics, drought, disasters, war, violence, poverty, policing, discrimination, displacement, and migration. Neoliberal economic reform dismantled the Soviet centralized economy and the family-corporate system in post WWII Japan, affecting social exchange in Russia and social roles in Japan, respectively (Parsons, 2020; Ozawa-de Silva, 2020). Well-intentioned disaster recovery policies have unintended consequences for social connection in a vulnerable population (Gagné, 2020). Poverty and crime mean adolescents cannot spend time outside in their neighborhoods (Jenkins, et al., 2020). Immigrants are separated from extended family and hindered from integrating into new communities (Pike & Crocker, 2020). People lose access to neighborhoods, nature, wild foods, traditional medicine, and watering holes (Jenkins, et al., 2020; Pike & Crocker, 2020; Rasmussen, 2020). Culturally specific forms of social exchange – blat in Soviet Russia (Parsons, 2020) and livestock exchange among Turkana pastoralists (Pike & Crocker, 2020) – are transformed or restricted. In short, relational practices are embedded in larger material configurations. Similarly, it is important to consider the way certain social and economic practices – migrant and precarious labor, for example – may in fact incite loneliness, even as jobs and economic productivity are configured as interventions to address it.
Pike and Crocker’s (2020) and Rasmussen’s (2020) articles further help to develop the theme of place as they attend to loneliness among the displaced, who are at higher risk of reporting loneliness. As they demonstrate, loneliness is sometimes a longing for natural spaces, for freedom of movement, or for particular landscapes, animals, and plants that may be tied to healing, food, and cultural knowledge. Liminal citizenship status, discrimination, and targeted policing restrict access to physical space among Mexican immigrants in southern Arizona (Pike & Crocker, 2020). Land politics, inter-community violence, and punitive state reprisals result in the loss of livestock and livelihood among Turkana pastoralists in Kenya where pastoralism is imbricated with land, kinship, and social organization (Pike & Crocker, 2020). A young Turkana woman remembers: “[W]e used to gather and sing well into the night for weddings, for births, but now we hide in our houses with no fire to avoid those men with guns” (Pike & Crocker, 2020, p. 8). Rasmussen (2020) illustrates how travel among North African Tuareg disrupts everyday activities as travelers are caught in a liminal zone, alienated from both home and destination. This liminality is both literal and metaphoric: desert wilderness, unfamiliar places, and incomplete spiritual crossings evoke loneliness. Geographic and spiritual mobility are related to loneliness, which exists along a continuum with creative inspiration, possession, and insanity. Similarly, Japanese residents of temporary housing live in a “zoned liminality”, a spatiotemporal bracketing of lives due to literal bureaucratic disaster zoning and a subjective feeling of experiences bracketed off from the flow of time before and after the disaster (Gagné, 2020). These liminal experiences are an estrangement from familiar places. When individuals can no longer access these places or these places are fundamentally altered, they may experience loneliness. Loneliness entails the haunting of places once enlivened by people (Rasmussen, 2020), a nostalgia for an imagined past or “remembered connections” (Pike & Crocker, 2020), even “salubrious longing or desire” (Jenkins, et al., 2020).
Another central theme is the importance of recognition, a concept used in developmental psychology (Rochat, 2009) and moral and political philosophy (Honneth, 1995). For Rochat, mutual recognition is a “basic affiliative need”; fear of social rejection is a fundamental part of the human experience. Thus, loneliness may be thought of as a condition of existence, rather than a condition of pathology. Honneth delineates three forms of mutual recognition which span intimate, social, and political relations. Social recognition depends on the recognition of individual qualities which are important ‘‘for the life of others’’ (Honneth, 1995, p. 202). It requires integration into “a network of different relations of recognition” (Honneth, 1995, p. 175). Ricoeur (2005) emphasizes the importance of giving in the process of securing recognition. The psychology of loneliness has also found that giving intergenerational support is more beneficial to older generations than receiving it across cultural contexts (de Jong Gierveld, Dykstra, & Schenk, 2012). Among Japanese university students, being needed by others is the foundation of meaning in life (ikiru imi); among older post-Soviet Muscovites, being unneeded, or having nothing to offer others and society, is commentary on a perceived lack of recognition by others and the state (Ozawa-de Silva, 2020; Parsons, 2020). In both instances, everyday social practices intersect with networks of recognition, contributing to the prevalence and experience of loneliness. These patterns are cultural in the broadest sense, implicating neoliberal reform and economic recessions, land rights, discrimination and immigration policy, poverty and violence, gender, race, class, and age. Interventions to address loneliness can span relations of recognition from intimate gatherings such as teatime to political action.
These themes of cultural expectations, practice, place, and recognition are salient in the current coronavirus pandemic, also a form of spatiotemporal bracketing in which ongoing lives are on hold. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (2020) noted that in a survey of Australians, loneliness was cited as the most common stressor during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of us are still able to connect with others via technology, but our full spectrum of relational practices and places are disrupted. We do not eat together, play games together, exchange gifts, or shop together in the same ways. Our access to outdoor natural spaces may not be as severely curtailed, but access to other places of social connection – basketball courts, grocery stores, markets, watering holes – is limited. Loneliness and the longing for sociality is not just verbal and visual connection to others, but also proximate, physical connection made through particular social practices and places, which may not be populated by intimate others. As part of our evolutionary heritage, even our system of touch, which includes discriminative touch for feeling objects, contains a separate pathway for affective touch – what it feels like to be touched by another social being. Notably, a significant body of research explores the health implications for receiving affective touch, especially in infants. In this special issue, Jenkins, et al. (2020) argue that persons with little or no face-to-face contact with others are objectively at risk for a variety of poor health outcomes. Furthermore, the nine-country International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia (WHO, 1979) found social isolation to be the most predictive factor for poor course of illness and outcome. This attention to practice and place is unique in social science studies of loneliness, a topic otherwise dominated by psychological accounts that approach loneliness as a fundamentally cognitive phenomenon.
These themes also have implications for loneliness interventions that are not only clinical, cognitive, or behavioral, but political and social. Gagné’s (2020) work on post-disaster housing points to the importance of egalitarian social relationships among “persons directly involved” (tojisha), in contrast to interventions by medical and social experts. In other words, physical participation with peers may be more important than verbalization with professionals. Peers are not necessarily familiar or intimate, but anonymity can free people from emotional entanglements (Gagné, 2020; Ozawa-de Silva, 2008). Nazzal, et al. (2020) suggest that Palestinian universities’ student associations and community service programs may alleviate loneliness by improving peer social support and life satisfaction. Still, interventions may have unintended consequences. For example, recovery politics in northeastern Japan translate to extended periods of aloneness for post-disaster elderly (Gagné, 2020). Ismail shows how a hikikomori recovery program facilitates the reproduction of precarious labor, treating loneliness as a pathology of economic productivity and reinforcing ideas of a “good” Japanese citizen, even as the program also provides individuals with alternative modes of fitting into existing social relations. Muehlebach (2012), in her work in Milan, shows how the Italian state incites and then co-opts loneliness to promote private volunteerism, which supplants state welfare programs. This volunteerism appears to contradict neoliberal market logics which individualize, when it actually abets them. As Jenkins, et al. (2020) write: “[A]ttention to loneliness can hold potential for awareness, recognition, and care, on the one hand, or possible misrecognition, obfuscation, and abandonment, on the other” (p. 4). Nonetheless, political and economic logics, social categories, medicalized conditions, and treatment modalities offer affordances and may be used strategically in unpredictable ways. As such, politics can both exacerbate and alleviate loneliness. In southern Arizona, grass-roots and immigrant-led groups offer solidarity, support, and social justice training (Pike & Crocker, 2020). These groups address structural inequalities and create alternative networks of social participation and recognition. As Parsons (2020) notes, loneliness is a potential critique of society, an ethical commentary on prevailing political economic circumstances and an alternative means of securing social recognition. Rasmussen (2020) also sees the potential for loneliness to be agentive, creative, and empowering, attracting social support and inspiring poetry, music, and song. Thus, loneliness may be an impetus for alternative forms of social participation.
Conclusion: The need for an anthropology of loneliness
Loneliness lends itself to anthropological analyses which address the entanglements of subjectivities, cultural expectations, and political economy. This thematic issue suggests that loneliness is experienced and expressed differently across and within cultural settings, significantly expanding the possibilities of identification, interpretation, and intervention. Scholarly accounts of loneliness have tended toward the cognitive, framing loneliness as a lack of mutual understanding, lack of meaning in life, or negative social cognition. These articles frame loneliness as an emergent relational process tied to social practices and places, themselves embedded in political economy, structural violence, and cultural expectations which are gendered, raced, and classed. The individualization and medicalization of loneliness runs the risk of eliding the historical, political, and economic circumstances that conspire to exclude individuals and communities from meaningful social participation and social recognition. Anthropology significantly expands the study of loneliness and the range of possible interventions beyond the individual and beyond the clinic.
To date, there has been a lack of research in non-Western contexts on loneliness. Furthermore, the English term loneliness and its direct equivalents are not the only terms through which we can explore feelings of not being socially connected or of feeling abandoned. Loneliness can be both political critique and a strategy to secure social recognition (Parsons, 2020) or resources (Ismail, 2020), just as loneliness and related terms can be medicalized or appropriated and co-opted by the state (Muehlebach, 2012). Furthermore, loneliness can incite both care and neglect (Jenkins, et al., 2020).
An anthropology of loneliness must also be an anthropology of subjectivity, because loneliness involves subjective perception and appraisal, not simply physical or social isolation. But attention to subjectivity, especially by anthropologists, does not involve attention to only individual subjectivity. Thus far, loneliness has been studied as a “quintessential individualistic experience” (Cacioppo, et al., 2009, p. 9), rather than a relational and social experience. We need ethnographic explorations of the intersubjective experiences of loneliness in different contexts to better understand the historical, political economic, and sociocultural contours of loneliness. Anthropology can and should play a key role in the study of loneliness, as cultural expectations (Pike & Crocker, 2020) and subjective experiences (Jenkins, et al., 2020) are not only integral to loneliness, but also require interdisciplinary and ethnographic approaches. Lastly, anthropology is well equipped to recognize that the study of loneliness is not merely the study of lonely individuals. It is also the study of the structures of society that promote loneliness, abandonment, isolation, marginalization, and neglect, rather than meaningful, life-affirming and life-giving social connections.
Notes
1See also Ozawa-de Silva, in press.
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Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, D.Phil., is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory University. She was a NEH recipient and her academic vision is to contribute to cross-cultural understandings of health and illness by bringing Western and Asian perspectives on the mind-body, religion, medicine, therapy, and health and illness into fruitful dialogue. Her publications include a monograph, Psychotherapy and religion in Japan: The Japanese introspection practice of Naikan (Routledge, 2006), and numerous peer-reviewed articles on psychotherapeutic practice, suicide, mind-body relationship and Tibetan medicine. For the past ten years her research has focused on loneliness, meaning-making, suicide and resilience. Her most recent book, The anatomy of loneliness is scheduled to come out in late 2021 from the University of California Press.
Michelle Parsons is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University and author of Dying unneeded: The cultural context of the Russian mortality crisis (2014). She is currently the Principal Investigator of a National Science Foundation funded ethnographic case study of midlife US mortality. Dr. Parsons is a sociocultural medical anthropologist with a background in global health. Her work applies ethnography to issues of mental health, population health, and global health practices and policies.
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Spirituality, Mind-Body, Gender, Ecology, Ageing, Peace, Scrapbook (in English and Korean)
