Happiness is an A3 page and a sharpie. I have made a start on mapping various theorists I’m reading against disciplinary areas. Two distinct camps are emerging: those that look at gratitude as a form of capital (the Maussian ‘gift’ literature, Bourdieu) and those that see moral generosity as a refusal of reciprocity (Levinas, and to some extent Bakhtin). The first camp sees gratitude as a form of accrual and the second a form of sacrifice. The ‘accrual’ camp as being quite cynical about gratitude: it is characterised as self-interested (although not always consciously). In contrast, those that view generosity as a form of moral perfectionism for which the recipient need not enact gratitude are very idealistic.
In parallel, I’m reading Goffman’s ‘Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’ as a way of thinking about gratitude as performative. Given that so much of the language that surrounds medical settings is suffused with acting metaphors (‘perform’ procedures, take on ‘roles’, operating ‘theatre’, ‘how is the patient acting?’), Goffman articulates the art of impression management very well.