Wellbeing in a World of Want

My chapter explores how Kuranko people in rural Sierra Leone construe wellbeing (kendeye)—a concept that covers physical, moral, personal, and social modes of existential viability. I focus on how Kuranko construe the good—or as they say, what makes life ‘sweet’ or ‘hard’ for them—and how they understand the relationship between external constraints and personal dispositions. To invoke a Kuranko adage, life is like a headload, the weight of which depends on how you carry it and with whom you share it. By implication, a constellation of objective and subjective, as well as individual and communal, elements are always at play when one asks what makes life worth living, and this is echoed in Amartya Sen’s perceptive remarks on the paradoxes of wellbeing: ‘You could be well off, without being well. You could be well, without being able to lead the life you wanted. You could have got the life you wanted, without being happy. You could be happy, without having much freedom. You could have a good deal of freedom, without achieving much.’