Browsing by Author "Aunela, Hilja"

This thesis is a study about Portuguese people who were learning mindfulness meditation in order to overcome stress. The primary question the thesis reflects on is: How do people attach value to what they are doing in situations where there is no clear set of criteria? The research is based on a 10-week ethnographic fieldwork which was conducted in Lisbon, Portugal during spring 2015. The data consists of material gathered by participant observation in two mindfulness meditation centers, combined with interviews and informal talks. By analyzing accounts of the research participants, the study identifies stress as an inherently social experience, and caused by an excess of work and a constant requirement to multitask. The study analyzes these notions by applying Marxist-influenced anthropological analyses of time and combines these with the anthropologist Marilyn Stathern’s (1992) concept of postpluralism. Building upon these theories, the study identifies stress which the research participants reported to be related to the logic of time within neoliberalism. The study observes that being mindful is experienced as a way to live with stressful situations, even though the practice does little to challenge the initial circumstances that caused the research participants feel stressed. Thus, the study suggests that mindfulness teaches the practitioners to recalibrate their values, offering the capacity to give less value to issues the practitioners found stressful. In this vein, mindfulness meditation is interpreted to respond to a particular Western problem in contrast to the Eastern (Buddhist) origins of the practice. The study however pays also attention to contradicting ideas of good life within the West, namely in gendered Portuguese expectations on how much time one should give for others in contrast to the individualistically oriented practice. Thus, the study highlights certain ambivalences present. On one hand, mindfulness responds to stress, as the practice helps keeping the contradictory logics of work and kinship separated. On the other hand, the practice is a retreat from the social and thus does not necessarily ease the initial problem the research participants had. As a conclusion, the study argues that the mindfulness practitioners feel the strain that neoliberal flexibility causes. It is however pointed out that people are not governed by the neoliberal logic and find ways to remove its logic from their own values.