Language and happiness: Cultural epistemologies and ideological conflicts in Finnish online discourses on the causes of happiness

Abstract

This article approaches “happiness” as a discursive construct. We examine different understandings of happiness as socially transmitted, linguistically formulated epistemological models by which humans reflexively evaluate and rationalize their experiences and identities. Our data consists of a set of Finnish online discourses that discuss the causes of happiness. We examine media platforms that mass-mediate popular discourses of happiness to individuals and allow individuals to voice their “indigenous” understandings. We analyze the linguistic, interactional, and interdiscursive characteristics of such views of happiness and show how they emerge and circulate in society disseminating mutually competing epistemologies of happiness. We also aim to show how the cross-cultural and culture-internal variation of these models becomes linked to ideological conflicts and politics of identity. On the one hand, our examples echo the kinds of individualistic, depoliticized views of happiness that have been seen as characteristic of modern media. On the other hand, they show that smaller-scale, local views of happiness tend to be more varied and attract explicit identity-political debates.