In this thesis, I offer a complex exploration of positive motivation and life evaluation in two adjacent villages in the Buganda kingdom of Central Uganda. Focusing primarily on the lives of five individuals, I examine the tensions and inconsistencies that arise in the day-to-day pursuit of a good life in these villages and argue that, while individual lives may differ, people everywhere face similar concerns in their desire to live well. Through these individuals, but drawing also on wider ethnographic insights, I explore five core themes, with a trajectory broadly moving from more material to more transcendental concerns. These are: making a living, aspiration, gratification deferral, the source of good things, and the importance of connectedness. Running through the thesis is the assertion that wellbeing is a relational and moral project as people’s efforts to live well are inextricably intertwined. A key underlying question is ‘How can we live well in a socially acceptable way?’ This research contributes to the fledgling field of the anthropology of happiness and wellbeing as well as regional scholarship on, for example, development, livelihoods, aspirations, and ‘modernity’. In addition, it speaks to interdisciplinary wellbeing research and I argue that the nuance and contextualisation offered by anthropological and ethnographic study can both augment and challenge the primarily quantitative research from other disciplines. Furthermore, I make a particular claim for the value of biographical approaches to the study of wellbeing.

Although economic growth has brought significant improvements in the standard of living in the UK over recent decades, there are still individuals living in poverty. Furthermore poverty in the UK is expected to rise. Although monetary poverty has wide ranging impacts such as poor health, low educational attainment and employability and reduced life expectancy, it does not (in the form of a poverty line at 60% of the median equivalised household income) appear to have an impact on wellbeing when the threshold was tested. Instead, multidimensional poverty – that purported by the Capabilities Approach – is a more individually relevant measure of poverty. Using a list, developed by Nussbaum, of core capabilities seen as essential for human life, capability measures were taken from the British Household Panel Survey. In analysis, some are found to be significant determinants of wellbeing, individually and in sum. Furthermore, individuals within the dataset experience loss aversion to capabilities. This thesis concludes that poverty measurement should be meaningful at the individual level, and to that aim, the Capabilities Approach provides a richer and more relevant evaluation of what poverty really means.

The main topic of the diploma thesis "Subjective wellbeing: approaches and evaluation in EU-15 and in the Czech Republic" is the subjective wellbeing and its conceptualization, especially the importance of this concept in the field of measurement and assessment of the progress and of the development of societies, which are sustainable. The thesis analyses the documents, which are published in the countries of EU-15 to cover the topic of the national strategies for sustainable development. The analysis considers the extent of the relevance of these documents from the perspective of including the concept of subjective wellbeing (with happiness, quality of life, satisfaction) in the texts and it also examines the wellbeig indicators, which are implemented in these texts and which are relative to the factors with certain influence on the level of personal or social wellbeing. The analysis is interested in the study of Czech documents relevant to this topic as well (The Czech Republic's Strategic Framework for Sustainable Development and Progress report). The aim of this particular study is to identify the expressed explicit and also implicit signs of the subjective wellbeing. The last part of the analysis tries to answer the question, whether the required data, which can be used for the construction of...