The Anthropology of Loneliness: A Multiscalar and Ethnographic Examination

Loneliness is increasingly recognized as a public health crisis. In contrast to approaches that medicalize loneliness as an individual pathology, this review offers a multiscalar anthropological reframing of loneliness not as an individual psychological state, but as a social breakdown involving a deficit of the practices that establish empathy, belonging, and solidarity in collective life. Drawing from ethnography and theory, we trace the pathways of this deficit across three interconnected scales. At the micro level, we analyze loneliness as an embodied, temporal, and existential affliction of subjectivity—a felt sense of empathetic disconnection. At the meso level, we examine the contestation and breakdown of Kleinman's “local moral worlds” and the shared practices that sustain community belonging. At the macro level, we diagnose how political-economic forces such as colonialism, neoliberalism, and structural violence create empathy deserts and perpetuate the lonely society. We conclude with how interdisciplinary research might bridge these levels to illuminate the causes of systemic breakdown and inform interventions for culturally attuned and structurally aware cultures of collective action and care.