What is
Empathy?
The
story of ethnography is like the story of Adam and Eve. We bit into the textual
apple of the tree of the knowledge of experience and rhetoric, and now there is
no going back…
Broadly
speaking, empathy is the ability to share in another’s emotions and feelings.
It is not, however, as it tends to
be defined in Webster’s dictionary, a matter of projecting one’s own
personality into the personality of another to understand him or her better. More frequently, the reverse is the case. Empathy has to do with the projection, in the sense of impact, of the
other’s personality and culture on one’s own. The other’s personality and
culture create a happening in the open-minded or receptive researcher that
requires thoughtful exploration…
The
meaning of empathy is in fact more complex than that given above. It is also
more than the expectation that the anthropologist be “an unmitigated nice guy”
with “extraordinary sensibility, an almost preternatural capacity to think,
feel and perceive like a native,” as Geertz would have it (1983:56). And while
I would contend that field work is a journey of discovery, it is not quite the
quest story as satirized and dismissed by Geertz (1988:44–45). Let us look at
empathy more closely.
According
to T. Lipps (1851–1914), empathy assumes
a common humanity. This assumption is quite the opposite of that of
reflexivity which depends on cultural differences and distance (even when none
exist or are of minor importance) and is concerned with intersubjective
meaning.
Empathetic
researchers can experience themselves, in some manner, in the other’s
experiences and vice versa. As I converse or interact with the other, the other
and/or I will recognize things in accord with our respective inclinations and
needs.
It is not the case, as is often
assumed, that experiencing oneself in the other’s experiences and vice versa
makes for identity. Nor is it the case
that the experience is necessarily positive to be empathetic.
Lipps
distinguished between positive empathy
or pleasure and negative empathy or
pain. Positive empathy refers to agreement between the stimulus
derived from interaction with the other and one’s inner activity. Negative
empathy occurs when the suggestions implied in the interaction conflict
with one’s inner self. “Inner activity” or “inner self” refer to the complex
activity which involves thought, feeling, intuition, sensation, imagination, and
suspected or unsuspected attitudes. In
other words, we use all human faculties to make sense of other (and self) and
then translate these into written, oral, or visual media—if that is what we
want to do.
[Reference: Poewe 2018: 304-307]
