The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies 9780857451033

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
The Anthropology of Empathy: Introduction
PART I History and Fieldwork as Lenses on Empathy
1 Empathy, Ethnicity, and the Self among the Banabans in Fiji
2 The Boundaries of Personhood, the Problem of Empathy, and “the Native’s Point of View” in the Outer Islands
PART II Universal and Particular Aspects of Empathy
3 Empathy and “As-If” Attachment in Samoa
4 Empathic Perception and Imagination among the Asabano: Lessons for Anthropology
PART III Personhood, Morality, and Empathy
5 Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia
6 Do Anutans Empathize? Morality, Compassion, and Opacity of Other Minds
7 Bosmun Foodways: Emotional Reasoning in a Papua New Guinea Lifeworld
PART IV Vicissitudes of Empathy
8 Vicissitudes of “Empathy” in a Rural Toraja Village
Empathy and Anthropology: An Afterword
Notes on the Contributors
Index

Citation preview

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF EMPATHY

ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology General Editor: Rupert Stasch, Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego The Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) is an international organization dedicated to studies of Pacific cultures, societies, and histories. This series publishes monographs and thematic collections on topics of global and comparative significance, grounded in anthropological fieldwork in Pacific locations.

Volume 1 The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies Edited by Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop Volume 2 Big Men and Big Shots: Reciprocity, Disaster, and Conflicts about “Custom” in New Britain Keir Martin Volume 3 Rethinking Homeland and Diaspora: Women, Wealth, and Tongan Tradition Ping-Ann Addo

The Anthropology of Empathy Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies

Edited by Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop

Berghahn Books NEW YORK • OXFORD

First published in 2011 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

©2011 Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The anthropology of empathy : experiencing the lives of others in Pacific societies / edited by Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop. p. cm. — (ASAO studies in pacific anthropology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-102-6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Empathy—Social aspects—Fiji. 2. Empathy—Social aspects—Oceania. 3. Ethnopsychology—Oceania. 4. Self psychology—Oceania. 5. Other (Philosophy)— Oceania. 6. Oceania—Ethnic relations. 7. Oceania—Social conditions. I. Hollan, Douglas Wood. II. Throop, C. Jason. DU600.A67 2011 152.4’1—dc22 2010050323

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN: 978-0-85745-102-6 (hardback)

In memory of O. Roger Hollan and Jean Evelyn Rogers

Contents



Acknowledgements

ix

The Anthropology of Empathy: Introduction Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop

1

Part I. History and Fieldwork as Lenses on Empathy

Chapter 1. Empathy, Ethnicity, and the Self among the Banabans in Fiji Elfriede Hermann

25

Chapter 2. The Boundaries of Personhood, the Problem of Empathy, and “the Native’s Point of View” in the Outer Islands Maria Lepowsky

43

Part II. Universal and Particular Aspects of Empathy

Chapter 3. Empathy and “As-If ” Attachment in Samoa Jeannette Mageo Chapter 4. Empathic Perception and Imagination among the Asabano: Lessons for Anthropology Roger Ivar Lohmann

69

95

Part III. Personhood, Morality, and Empathy

Chapter 5. Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia C. Jason Throop

119

Chapter 6. Do Anutans Empathize? Morality, Compassion, and Opacity of Other Minds Richard Feinberg

151

viii Contents

Chapter 7. Bosmun Foodways: Emotional Reasoning in a Papua New Guinea Lifeworld Anita von Poser

169

Part IV. Vicissitudes of Empathy

Chapter 8. Vicissitudes of “Empathy” in a Rural Toraja Village Douglas W. Hollan

195

Empathy and Anthropology: An Afterword Alan Rumsey

215

Notes on the Contributors

225

Index

227

Acknowledgements



This project has unfolded over several annual meetings of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania and beyond. We are grateful to the ASAO for sponsoring our sessions and to all of those who contributed to our discussions. We are especially grateful to our contributors for their fine work and for their patience, and to our series editor, Rupert Stasch, for his encouragement of this volume and for his many helpful suggestions. We also thank the many academic audiences that have offered helpful comments and feedback over the course of this project: the Mind, Medicine, and Culture group at UCLA, faculty and students in Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, and the Department of Anthropology and Psychodynamic Seminar at UCSD. Finally, we would like to thank all the people and communities in the Pacific region who contributed their time, effort, and energy to the various projects that make up this volume.

1 The Anthropology of Empathy: Introduction DOUGLAS W. HOLLAN and C. JASON THROOP

After a period of relative academic neglect, empathy has been “rediscovered” (Stueber 2006) in a number of fields, including philosophy (Kögler and Stueber 2000), medicine (Halpern 2001), evolutionary science (de Waal 2009), neuroscience (Decety and Ickes 2009), psychology (Farrow and Woodruff 2007), and psychoanalysis (Bohart and Greenberg 1997). This newfound interest and enthusiasm has in significant part been fueled by the recent discovery of “mirror” neurons in the brain, those motor neurons that fire, without causing movement, merely upon observation of another’s actions, in a mirror-like, imitative way (Iacoboni 2008). The discovery of this previously unimagined and remarkable capacity to participate, indirectly and passively, in the movements and actions of others has led researchers in all quarters to begin rethinking what we know, or think we know, about the biological, social, cultural, and experiential bases of human sociality and cooperativeness, the hallmark of our species. What role does empathy play in this sociality? How central or peripheral is it to social functioning, and how is it related to other forms and modes of social knowing? Some neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists, and researchers of social cognition, intentionality, and “theory of mind” now hypothesize that biologically based, embodied forms of imitation and attunement, including empathy and recognition of facial expressions, are far more central to human culture and behavior than we had previously imagined. It is the relative quickness and automatic nature of such evolved capacities, in contrast to languagebound conscious or rational calculation, that allow humans to evaluate and adjust to one another’s behavior so efficiently and quickly. We see the rapid breathing, flushed face, and squinted eyes of others and “know” they are angry without having to think about it. And we make this same rapid assessment of many other emotional and intentional states as well. And yet these claims remain largely untested, since we know so little about how empathy manifests itself in everyday forms of behavior around the world. Indeed, as we discussed (Hollan and Throop 2008) in a recent special issue of

2

Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop

the journal Ethos, empathy remains a woefully understudied and unanalyzed form of behavior even in a field such as anthropology, in which face-to-face, participant observation plays such an important role in the collection of data. The purpose of this book is to contribute to the study of empathy in context, as it emerges in everyday interactions. Only through such ethnographically grounded work can we begin to determine which aspects of the empathic process people share everywhere, biologically based or not, and which are more culturally shaped and determined. Our introduction unfolds in four parts. In the first part, we give a working definition of empathy, though we emphasize why a precise definition is so difficult to agree upon, noting that philosophers remain divided over the extent to which empathy-like capacities are mediated (or not) by historical, cultural, and other contextual knowledge. Second, we briefly summarize the major findings of our Ethos volume, including its plea for a more explicitly focused, cross-cultural study of empathy. Third, we compare and contrast the contributions to this book. We draw on these chapters to outline the contours and vicissitudes of empathy in the Oceanic region, from eastern Indonesia to Samoa. Using a regionally focused comparative method, our intent is to provide a culturally, linguistically, and historically coherent and detailed body of data about empathy that can be compared with similar data collected elsewhere. Finally, we conclude by identifying several culturally preferred orientations to self-other encounters in the Pacific, which we hope might eventually be compared and contrasted with other such orientations from elsewhere in the world.

What Is Empathy?

In her recent book, From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice (2001), Jodi Halpern, drawing on an intellectual tradition running from Aristotle through Heidegger (1962), Lipps (1979), Stein (1964), Schutz (1967), and contemporary psychoanalysis (see also Throop 2008), defines empathy as a first person–like, experiential understanding of another person’s perspective. For Halpern, empathy is a type of reasoning in which a person emotionally resonates with the experience of another while simultaneously attempting to imaginatively view a situation from that other person’s perspective (2001: 85). It is a type of understanding that is neither purely cognitive and imaginative nor purely emotional, but a combination of both. The emotional and experiential part of the response guides and provides an emotional context for what the empathizer imagines about the other’s experience, much the way emotion seems to guide and link the images, thoughts, and imaginings in a dream (2001: 91–92).

Introduction

3

Halpern’s discussion of empathy is useful for several reasons. First, she makes clear why empathy is important for understanding others: because it enhances our ability to discern what is salient or otherwise difficult to recognize in another person’s emotional communication. It helps us understand, for example, not just that a person is angry, but how and why that person is angry. In so doing it may also bring our attention to aspects of the interaction or environment that are more or less salient given the emotional stance that is taken up by the individual with whom we are attempting to empathize. Second, Halpern makes clear what empathy is not. It is not a third-person observer’s detached insight or pure theoretical knowing or predictions and forecasts, however accurate. All of this might tell us that a person is in a certain kind of emotional state, but not what is salient for the person from within that emotional state nor what that emotional state might feel like from a first person–like perspective. Nor is empathy solely an affective merging, identification, or attunement with another, as some psychoanalysts have argued. One may begin to laugh or cry with someone and yet have little understanding about why the other is laughing or crying, a phenomenon that is more accurately termed “emotional contagion” (see Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson 1994). Third, Halpern reminds us—although she does not develop the idea much—that empathy is a process that requires ongoing dialogue for its accuracy. This concern with accuracy, the willingness, indeed the necessity, to alter one’s impression of another’s emotional state as one engages with the other and learns more about his or her perspective, is what distinguishes empathy from simple projection—the attribution of one’s own emotional reactions and perspectives to another (cf. Margulies 1989). Projections may sometimes coincide with the other’s emotional state and therefore resemble empathy in certain respects. But more often they will not coincide and may themselves become a major source of misunderstanding among people, being instead interpreted as evidence of the lack of empathy. Halpern’s definition captures what many would consider the core of the empathy concept: the idea that through empathy, we gain a first-person perspective on another’s thoughts and feelings, as if we were experiencing and understanding the world from his or her vantage point. And yet the exact means through which this simulation of the other’s perspective is achieved, and the extent to which it can be achieved, remains controversial, especially among philosophers and psychologists. For some, these simulations occur so rapidly and frequently in human life that they must be based on embodied capacities that have evolved over long periods of time, and that we likely share with other socially oriented species. We understand others’ emotional and intentional states so well, according to these so-called “simulation theory” proponents, because we innately enact and approximate the perspective of others by means

4

Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop

of our embodied senses and perceptions. Such capacities for simulated empathy are centrally based on the axiom that others have minds and bodies much like our own that tend to react in similar ways in similar situations. Which in fact they do, according to these theorists. And yet, how is this possible, when we know behavior varies so much across cultures, individuals, and time? We may know from the rapid breathing, flushed face, and squinted eyes that someone seems angry, but depending on where we are and when, that anger might be motivated by fear, hostility, shame, frustration, or any of a number of other possible emotional states (cf. Menon and Shweder 1994). We can sort through these various possibilities only by knowing a great deal about the angry person’s historical and cultural background—who she is, where she comes from, how she expects to be treated versus how she is being treated, etc. Such background knowledge is essential to knowing and understanding people. For this reason, so called “theory theory” proponents argue that first-person perspective taking must necessarily involve more rational calculation and cognitively mediated processing than most simulation theorists would admit. Historically, these competing theories grow out of long-standing debates concerning the appropriateness of verstehen (understanding) and erklaren (explanation) in the human sciences. Indeed, they replay some of the most persistent disagreements in philosophy, history, and the social sciences concerning the possibility for gaining access to the experience of others, whether these others are contemporaries, predecessors, or successors (Kögler and Stueber 2000; Schutz 1967). As anthropologists, we take the view that much more basic ethnographic data needs to be collected and analyzed before we can possibly begin to resolve these disputes about the composition and function of empathy in human life. But for our purposes here, we do adopt Stueber’s suggestion (2006) that empathy be conceived of as a complex process involving both “basic” and “reenactive” parts. For Stueber, basic empathy comprises all those sensory and perceptual mechanisms, including the newly discovered mirror neuron system, that allow us to determine that another person is angry, sad, elated, or in some other emotional or intentional state. These mechanisms “have to be understood as mechanisms that underlie our theoretically unmediated quasiperceptual ability to recognize other creatures directly as minded creatures and to recognize them implicitly as creatures that are fundamentally like us” (Stueber 2006: 20). “Reenactive empathy,” on the other hand, refers to all other cognitive, emotional, and imaginative capacities that allow us to use our own first-person, folk-psychological knowledge and experience as actors to model and understand the experience of others. The modeling on our own actor-infused experience is critical because empathy requires “recognizing that folk psychol-

Introduction

5

ogy is not a conceptual and explanatory framework that has been adopted from the detached perspective. Rather, it has been adopted from the engaged perspective, in which we try to explain the actions of other rational agents who, like us, act for reasons” (2006: 219–220, emphasis added). Only from this “engaged” perspective can we “conceive of agents as situated in certain environments and as responding in a rational manner to the demands of this environment” (2006: 216). Significantly, the concept of reenactive empathy emphasizes the double culturally and historically bound nature of empathic awareness and knowledge: that is, the fact that the subjects of our empathy are people who think and feel and act in very specific culturally and historically constituted moral worlds while we ourselves, as empathizers, are similarly bound and constrained. Given the challenges this poses for accurate anticipation and interpretation of others’ behavior, especially in a cross-cultural context, Stueber discusses at some length the fallibility and limitations of empathic knowledge and indicates why it can never be as rote and automatic as some “hardcore” simulation theorists would suggest (2006: 195–218). Yet he does not waver in his claim that first-person perspective taking must be considered a primary, rather than a secondary, form of social knowing and awareness. While the distinction between basic and reenactive empathy is only heuristic, it is helpful to us here because it draws attention to the ways in which “basic,” evolved capacities to attend to and attune with other people and minds become culturally elaborated and expressed or suppressed and inhibited, which is the primary focus of this book.

Whatever Happened to Empathy (in Anthropology)?

Elsewhere, we have noted the relative dearth of focused research on empathy in anthropology, despite a resurgence of interest in other fields and despite the fact that anthropologists have long used face-to-face, participant observation as a primary research tool (Hollan and Throop 2008). We speculated that this lack of attention could be related to the conceptual overlap and confusion between empathy and other topics of anthropological interest, including intentionality, intersubjectivity, agency, and the moral sentiments of sympathy, compassion, and pity. But we also noted how anthropologists, dating back at least as far as Boas, have seemed ambivalent about empathy and its uses, on the one hand often presuming it to play an important part in social life and in successful fieldwork, but on the other hand fearing that its limitations and inaccuracies could lead to serious mischaracterizations of people. In recent times, it is Clifford Geertz (1984) who has been most explicit in this critique of the empathy concept, arguing that those who presume they are being “empathic”

6

Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop

are merely projecting their own thoughts, feelings, and experiences onto the unsuspecting subjects of study, thereby misrepresenting and misunderstanding them in the process. Geertz’s argument was a powerful and influential one, and with just a few notable exceptions (see Frank 1985, 2000; Kracke 1994; Lebra 1976; Rosaldo 1989; Shimizu 2000; Watson-Franke and Watson 1975; Wikan 1992), it put a damper on anthropological discussions of empathy for many years. While we are heartened to see that in recent times a few anthropologists have engaged in more explicit treatments of empathy (see Beatty 2005; Gieser 2008; Skultans 2007; Strauss 2004), there are still relatively few studies that take empathy as a central topic of ethnographic investigation. Regardless of the underlying conceptual and historical reasons for this lack of attention to empathy in anthropology, its consequence is that important ethnographic, conceptual, theoretical, and methodological questions about empathy have gone unaddressed or unanswered. These questions include: … keeping in mind Anthony Wallace’s observation (1961) that much of social life goes on without intimate knowledge of others’ motives and intentions (through habit, routine, common expectation, and widely shared rules of social engagement and etiquette), when and why does first person-like knowledge of others become important and when does it not (cf. Robbins and Rumsey 2008)? When it is important, how is this knowledge gained and how does it differ from other kinds of social knowing? What resources or capacities—biological, psychological, cultural, experiential, or otherwise—enable people to understand and have empathy for others? What are the social, cultural, political, and economic conditions that foster the development and use of empathy and what are the conditions that suppress its development and use? What are the varieties of local idioms through which empathy is manifested and deployed? And so on. (Hollan and Throop 2008: 385–386) Though existing research does not allow us to answer many of these questions definitively, it does enable us to make some preliminary observations as well as identify a number of issues for further discussion and research. One thing that is clear from the limited anthropological literature currently available is that first person–like knowledge of others is rarely, if ever, considered an unambiguously good thing—despite the many positive connotations empathy has in the North American context. While such knowledge may be used to help others or to interact with them more effectively, it may also be used to hurt or embarrass them. Because of this, people all over the world seem just as concerned with concealing their first-person subjective experience from others as with revealing it (see Robbins and Rumsey 2008).

Introduction

7

Everywhere, we find complex concepts of personhood that convey what is appropriate to know about people and what is not, that sketch out how porous or impermeable the boundaries of the self should be ideally, and that hint at the damage done when psychic integrity (however defined) is breached (see Stephen 1996). What this suggests is that empathy must always be studied within the much broader context of the ways in which people gain knowledge of others and reveal, allow, or conceal knowledge of themselves. It also seems clear that in actual ethnographic practice, it is often quite difficult to distinguish empathy from other attitudes and behaviors, both caring ones such as “sympathy,” “compassion,” and “pity,” and more hurtful, aggressive styles of interaction (see also Briggs 2008). And this is true in the contributions that follow as well. Once anthropologists do begin to focus more explicitly on “reenactive” forms of empathy, it is to be expected that they will find much semantic and behavioral variation—no matter what the biological underpinnings of empathic awareness turn out to be. Like any other form of complex human behavior, empathy emerges in an intersubjective field, partially determined by the evolved, highly social characteristics of the human species, but significantly constituted and structured as well by social, cultural, linguistic, and developmental variables. Another significant aspect of empathy is that it may function as a type of metacommunication among people that can reinforce or undermine other forms of communication and interaction, including social and political structures and hierarchies. That is, empathic processes never unfold in a political or moral vacuum. Rather, they are encouraged and amplified in some contexts and discouraged and suppressed in others. Capturing and representing accurately this variation in the expression of empathy should be one of the primary goals of the ethnographic study of empathy. Related to this last point, it seems that empathy is ubiquitous and yet limited in social life. Even in places like Yap (Throop 2008, this volume) and the Maya areas of Mexico (Groark 2008), where empathic awareness is often mistrusted or curtailed, we find evidence of its marked or unmarked presence. Indeed in many such places, people seem acutely aware that every attempt to conceal or hide emotions and motives is at the same time a subtle way of revealing them, if one but knows how to hear and see (cf. Rumsey 2008). This leads us to hypothesize that “marked” forms of empathy, such as those we find in patient-doctor relationships and in healing and religious rituals of various kinds, emerge at just those times and places in the social fabric where more direct, explicit forms of understanding are limited by politics, anxiety, fear, or ignorance. A corollary hypothesis is that many marked forms of empathy will involve the cultivation of unusual forms of discernment, such as dream interpretation, spirit possession, or arcane diagnosis, that will help people to decipher and comprehend the veils of ignorance and deception around them. That

8

Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop

there may be differing experiential modalities and sensory registers through which empathy is enacted in such specialized forms of discernment is again something that should motivate further explicit ethnographic examination and theoretical reflection. The Maya case seems to be a clear example of the significance of looking for possible alternate experiential modalities of empathetic attunement when investigating the varieties of empathy in cultural context (Groark 2008). But we think there are definite limits to empathy as well, even when it is culturally marked and encouraged (see Hollan 2008; Throop 2010a, 2010b). Empathy is an ongoing, dialogical, intersubjective accomplishment that depends very much on what others are willing or able to let us understand about them. It can be challenging to make accurate empathic assessments of others even under the best of circumstances, such as are provided by some psychotherapeutic contexts (Hollan 2008). Part of the difficulty here is that even the people we are attempting to empathize with may not know why they think, act, or feel the way they do, or even what they think or feel at certain times. Of course, one of the interesting things about empathic encounters is that they sometimes allow people to know and understand things about themselves that they would not know or understand alone. In such instances we might think of empathy as distributed in the intersubjective field within which it emerges. But the fact that people’s motives are often conflicted and less than conscious ensures that empathic understanding always will be elusive and uncertain. This is one of the reasons why Kirmayer (2008) argues that to maintain empathic openness and cordiality in the face of all the obstacles to understanding requires an ethical stance as well as an emotional and intellectual one. And indeed, without such an ethical stance, we know all too well how fleeting empathy can be and how easily it can be replaced by hostility and violence (Daniel 1996; Das 2007; Hinton 2005; Kleinman et al. 1997; Scheper-Hughes 1992). We think these observations are noteworthy, but we make no bones about the fact that they are preliminary, based on extremely limited data. One of our central conclusions from our previous work (Hollan and Throop 2008) is that not much headway can be made in resolving debates about the significance and role of empathy in human life and in fieldwork until anthropologists begin to focus on empathy as a central topic of research rather than a tangential one. We argue that the time has come to accept Geertz’s thirty year-old challenge (1984) to be explicit about what we mean by empathy and about how it relates to other forms of perception and knowledge. This book is an attempt to answer this challenge. All the chapters here grew out of a series of Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) annual conferences in which we asked contributors to examine empathy in places where they had been conducting long-term fieldwork. The ASAO format, in

Introduction

9

which the same participants meet over several years, allowed us to consider a common set of background readings on empathy, to develop a common set of research questions, and to cross-reference one another’s work. The regional focus of this collection is important because it allows for more thoroughly grounded and finely tuned ethnographic and cultural comparisons than is usually possible in anthropology, thereby enhancing its conceptual power and plausibility, we think. In the next section, we begin to sketch out regional patterns in the experience, enactment, recognition, and limits of empathy that differ from those found in other parts of the world and that are not readily captured by prevailing social scientific, philosophical, or neuroscience theories of empathy. Such findings can be used not only to help us better understand the underpinnings and limits of the biological and existential processes that make any form of empathy possible, but also the ways in which such processes can be shaped and patterned by social and cultural life.

“Empathy” in the Pacific

Because there are nuances of both similarity and difference in the rich ethnographic accounts that follow, we do not attempt an exhaustive summary of them here. Indeed, such an effort would risk undermining one of the primary benefits of the ethnographic approach: its attention to context, complexity, and contingency and to the details of qualitative description and analysis. Nevertheless, we do attempt to sketch out for readers a set of themes that emerge throughout the chapters and that tie them together conceptually and ethnographically. We emphasize again that the following outline is purposefully rough and incomplete, needing to be filled in with details that can only come from close reading of the individual chapters. The “Opacity” of Other Minds?

One of the reasons why the Pacific region is such an interesting place to study empathy is the widespread belief there that it is often difficult, if not impossible, to know another person’s heart or mind (cf. Petersen 1993). Indeed, in a recent issue of the journal Anthropological Quarterly (Rumsey and Robbins 2008), a number of anthropologists debated what this doctrine about “the opacity of other minds” could possibly mean. For example, does it indicate that people really do avoid acting upon, or even speculating about, other people’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions, if these are not expressed directly and consciously (Robbins 2008)? Or is this doctrine not so much a strong epistemological claim—to the effect that one cannot know the mind of another—as

10

Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop

a political, linguistic, and moral one about what is proper to say or publicly acknowledge about another’s unexpressed feelings and intentions (e.g., Duranti 2008; Keane 2008; Rumsey 2008)? As Keane puts it, “The problem is not psychological, or at least not epistemological. The problem concerns a person’s capacity to hide their inner thoughts from others. It is not that inner thoughts are inherently unknowable, but that they ought to be unspeakable. Or at least, it matters greatly who gets to speak about those thoughts” (2008: 477). All of the contributions here touch on this issue. None support the idea that the opacity doctrine is an actual claim about the fundamental unknowability of other minds. Rather, with the exception of von Poser (this volume), who reports that the Bosmun make no claim that others’ minds are opaque or difficult to understand, all our contributors demonstrate how people, for various reasons and in various contexts, may be reluctant or wary to speculate openly about another’s thoughts and feelings, and yet nevertheless do so, often quite successfully and accurately. Sometimes the reluctance is explicitly marked and morally salient, as in Yap (Throop, this volume), in which case the assessment of another’s state of mind is usually fairly indirect and secretive. In other cases, the assessment, in at least some contexts, is not only allowed, but actively encouraged, as in Toraja (Hollan, this volume). But in all cases, we see a respect for others’ autonomy and privacy, however defined, and a concern not to hurt, offend, or embarrass others, at least without the intention to do so. Interestingly and somewhat paradoxically, this concern with others’ privacy and public “face” might itself be considered a form of empathy, as several of the contributors here and in the Robbins and Rumsey issue (2008) suggest. Again as Keane puts it, “It might be taken as an assertion of the right to be the first person of one’s own thoughts, and acknowledgement of others’ right to be the first person of theirs” (2008: 478). “Love-Compassion-Concern-Pity” as a Core Cultural Virtue

Despite the attention recently paid to the opacity doctrine, it is equally important to remember that throughout the Pacific we find a strong cultural value placed on developing and maintaining emotionally positive and loving ties among people, especially among those designated as kin. While none of the contributors here claims to have found a local word that is the direct equivalent of the English word “empathy,” they all find a word or phrase that overlaps significantly with its meaning and that is usually glossed with the English terms “love,” “compassion,” “concern,” or “pity,” or some combination of these. Feinberg, for example, notes (this volume) that some version of the Anuatan term designating such positive feeling and concern, aropa, is found throughout Polynesia, including aloha (Hawaiian), aroha (Maori), alofa (Samaon), and ‘ofa (Tongan).

Introduction

11

Although the fact that this idiom is so widespread indicates its historical depth, Hermann, Feinberg, and Mageo (this volume) all suggest that it is as salient as it is at least partly because it has been reinforced and magnified throughout this same region by the spread of Christianity, a religion that also emphasizes that one should have love and compassion for others, especially those who suffer. Hermann in particular argues that we cannot understand Banaban concepts and expressions of “pity” without recognizing how they have grown and developed in response to encounters with Christianization and colonization. She argues that notions of empathy emerge as products of transculturation, and as such are always intimately related to political and historical processes of various kinds (see also Mageo, this volume). This pan-Pacific emotional idiom of “love-compassion-concern-pity” does seem to overlap significantly with the empathy concept. For example, several of the contributors (Lohmann, Feinberg, Hollan, Throop, Mageo) note that local vocabularies emphasize a blending of thought and feeling in the expression of love and concern for others, much as Halpern does (2001) in her formal definition of empathy. And yet there are noteworthy differences here as well. For example, Hollan finds that in Toraja, “empathy” implies more than its usual definition as the mere understanding of someone from a first-person perspective. Rather, “[i]t implies a non-erotic love, compassion, pity, and concern for them as well, all of which usually entail further feelings of moral obligation towards these others. Conversely, a lack of empathy in Toraja implies not only that one does not understand others’ thought and feelings, but that one is not moved by their plights, feels no need to intervene in them, and does not oneself feel diminished or hurt by them.” This entailment to “do” something for the subject of empathy moves empathy beyond a more neutral concept of understanding. As we noted in the Ethos issue, such semantic and behavioral shadings are significant because they suggest how both the antecedents and consequences of first-person perspective taking can be shaped differently by various cultural settings. As Hollan notes, such shadings “should encourage us … to reexamine our own ways of defining empathy and how it differs (or not) from other closely related concepts and experiences, such as love, compassion, and sympathy.” This is the only way we can avoid ethnocentric bias and work toward the development of a more truly valid cross-cultural, “etic” perspective on the conceptualization and study of empathy (see Lohmann, this volume). The “Doing” of Empathy

The case of Toraja introduces another important aspect of empathy in the Pacific: the fact that it is expressed more as a doing or a performing than an as a passive experiencing, and that material exchange of various kinds, including

12

Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop

the exchange of labor and service, plays a large part in such doing (Mageo, Throop, Feinberg, all this volume). All of the contributors note the importance of exchange for the development and maintenance of social and familial relations in the Pacific, but it is von Poser who focuses most centrally on this, especially on the exchange of food, as a site of empathy and related emotional expression (see also Throop, this volume). She notes that for the Bosmun, food is inextricably linked to the negotiation and communication of social and emotional matters and meanings, and that empathy and its withholding find their consummate expression in food giving and taking. One prepares and gives food to those one loves, pities, and is concerned for, and one withholds food as a sign of reproach and lack of concern. Much the same could be said for every other group discussed here. This emphasis on the pragmatics of empathy, literally its material consequences and effects, is of a piece with a larger ethnopsychological constellation in the Pacific in which the cultural focus is on action and effects, not internal mental states and motives (cf. White and Kirkpatrick 1985). As Throop (this volume) notes for the Yapese, There are in fact, a number of important ways in which Yapese ethnoepistemologies are oriented, as Shore (1982) similarly claims for Samoa, to an emphasis upon “effects” and not “causes.” In this sense, Yapese epistemologies tend to value pragmatic (in the Peircian and Jamesian senses of the term) orientations to social action and personality structure inasmuch as it is the perceptual effects of an act and not its hidden roots that are often the preferred orientation of social actors in judging or describing the behavior and personalities of others. In other words, in much of the Pacific the proof of one’s empathic response is in one’s actions or inaction with regard to the subject of empathy, not in one’s mere understanding of the other, no matter how accurate or sensitive that understanding might be. As we noted above, this is different from the idea of empathy as a form of neutral understanding. The implication that one will “do” something with one’s understanding of another is one of the reasons why people fear empathic knowledge as much as they encourage it at times, since such knowledge can be used in hurtful, manipulative ways as well as in caring ones (Throop, Hollan, this volume). Empathy, Social Boundaries, and Identity

One of the major points several of the contributors here make is that empathy creates bonds with certain people and boundaries with others, and is therefore implicated in the creation and maintenance of social structures and identi-

Introduction

13

ties. Mageo (this volume) argues, for example, that empathy for others in Samoa and elsewhere initially grows out of, and is modeled upon, attachment responses to parents and other close kin and caretakers. As one grows older, one is encouraged to extend these bonds of attachment, concern, and affection outward, across the boundaries of self, to other persons and groups who are approved socially and by the family, while withholding them from groups and persons not so approved. Such models of attachment and empathy are not only shaped and informed by culturally patterned forms of personhood, caretaking, and etiquette, but are also subject to change over time, for example as a result of colonization or missionary efforts (see also Hermann and Feinberg, this volume). The notion that empathy tends to flow along, and support, boundaries of kinship and other intimate social relations finds support in all of the cases presented here. And conversely, they all indicate how flows of empathy can be started and/or expanded by engaging in social exchanges of various kinds, including feasting, fictive kin exchanges, patron-client or service relationships, and religious networks of universal brotherhood or family. And yet this pattern clashes with the common understanding that empathy is a neutral form of knowing or understanding of others, one that theoretically could or should be applicable to all people. Hermann hints at the less-than-ideal side of empathic flows when she notes that among the Banaban such flows suggest a hierarchy between those giving empathy and those receiving it (see also Mageo, Throop, Feinberg, and Hollan, this volume): When the Banabans compare themselves with others, when by their behavior toward the stranger they show that they understand him and feel with him, they do not however equate themselves fully and entirely with him. Rather they can relate to him as they do only because he and they are differently placed in the scheme of things.… Empathy for the other, therefore, also says something about positioning: the Banaban self is socially and economically better positioned vis-à-vis the stranger (or traveler), who is solitary and needy. This implies, despite points of sameness, the existence of hierarchy between where they are positioned and where he is. In other words: concealed in the conditions for the possibility of compassion is their own difference. Though Hermann is discussing here a prototypical example of compassion directed toward a stranger that helps Banabans create an image and identity of themselves as compassionate people, the point about empathy creating both difference and hierarchy has more general import. Is it inevitable that empathy will be contaminated with the feelings and attitudes that English speakers associate with “pity”? Is it possible that empathy is an attitude that only the relatively better off and more secure can afford (Hollan, this vol-

14

Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop

ume; cf. Scheper-Hughes 1992)? Does the very existence of empathic flows in a community suggest inequality and power differentials of various kinds? In the Yapese case an individual’s ability to take up a compassionate stance or not is necessarily an indication and enactment of an elevated position in the social hierarchy. To be compassionate in the face of another’s suffering is to be placed, through the modality of one’s very feelings, in a position of higher status in relation to the sufferer (Throop, this volume). It is also interesting to note in this regard that though Banabans are proud of their heritage as generous, compassionate people, they view themselves at the same time as people worthy of pity and compassion from others, given their history of loss and displacement. This illustrates not only how one’s status as an empathy giver or receiver can be integrated into identity, but also how complex and dynamic that identity making process can become. Imagination and Empathy

Halpern (2001) argues that empathy requires imagination as well as affective attunement. After emotionally engaging with another, an empathizer must begin to imagine how and why the other acts or feels the way he or she does. This imaginative process is guided by the empathizer’s emotional engagement, activating an associational network of memories, images, and meanings in his or her mind, which in turn are mapped onto the experiences and perspectives of the other in an attempt to understand them. While all of the contributions here illustrate how this imaginative process unfolds and is given shape and specificity within particular cultural settings, Lohmann takes it as a central focus of his ethnographic discussion and relates it to sensory perception as well (see also Feinberg, this volume). He argues that [e]mpathy exists at the interface between sensory perception and imagination. One draws on sensed indicators of the other person’s inner state and one’s own memories, thoughts, and feelings to build a semblance or a representation of those attitudes in one’s own mind. This representation may be more or less accurate than one thinks. Information about the environment obtained by the senses, though enmeshed in cultural and situational contexts and partly subjective, includes empirical facts. But empathy is brought to life through the imagination’s placing oneself in the other person’s shoes, as the expression goes. The Asabano, according to Lohmann, employ bodily based empathic imagination in at least two ways. In “heart-togetherness” (sosati), knowledge of one’s own mentation and perceptions is related to another in order to give clues about the actual condition of the other. This is “an imaginary leap, an

Introduction

15

educated guess, or an estimate; it is an image, not a percept.” By contrast, in “bodily empathy” one uses sympathetic physical indicators in one’s own body to know the state or experience of another, as when predicting the arrival of a exhausted traveler based on one’s own armpits becoming involuntarily sweaty. This type of embodied empathy is also evident in Throop’s account of Yapese experiences of so ulum (goose bumps) that arise upon discerning another’s inappropriate expression of emotion. A key point Lohmann makes is that empathic imagination can be directed toward any being or entity one presumes to be mind-bearing, including other animals and spiritual and ancestral figures of various kinds (cf. Hollan, this volume). Feinberg makes a similar point, noting that Anutans traditionally “might imagine themselves in the position of a spirit and attempt, on that basis, to predict how spirits are likely to react to various stimuli.” But most often, “their concern was to persuade spirits to empathize (and sympathize) with them,” by “performing worship ceremonies, offering food and drink, and speaking to spirits in ways that emphasized, even exaggerated, their own pitiable state. The hope was that the gods or spirits would use their superhuman power to assist the worshippers by ensuring health, prosperity, and safety from foreign invasion.” Similar attempts to empathize with spiritual beings, or to imagine them empathizing with humans, are common throughout the Pacific (Mageo and Howard 1996). Lohmann points out that any imaginatively based form of social knowing must inevitably lead to inaccuracies and mischaracterizations at times, though he is at pains to suggest the ubiquity and significance of empathy in social life. Hollan takes up this issue of the fragility and fallibility of empathy directly, discussing a variety of contexts in Toraja in which empathy-like awareness is avoided, fails, or is used to hurt rather than to help. He notes that while many of these misunderstandings and mischaracterizations of others are unintentional or can be related to hardships or constraints on people that limit their willingness or ability to empathize (cf. Scheper-Hughes 1992), others are deliberately provoked and utilized to embarrass others or to create scapegoats of various kinds. Such evidence of the fallibility of the empathic imagination and of its uses to harm leads him to argue that caring expressions of empathy, however culturally patterned and valued, are always contingent, varying not only by social and economic conditions, but also by age, gender, status, and life experience. Gender and Empathy

Although none of the contributions here take gender as their primary focus, they all touch on how gender is related to the experience and expression of empathy, at least implicitly. In all of the societies discussed here, and through-

16

Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop

out much of the Pacific, important aspects of social life are segregated by gender. Gender influences with whom one works, eats, sleeps, and gossips, and also how status, rank, and privilege are publicly acknowledged and enacted. It thereby influences how one learns empathy and from whom, and the people to whom one’s empathy is most likely to be directed. Of course such gender segregation has also affected how and from whom this volume’s contributors collect their data on empathy. For example, one of our peer reviewers notes that though von Poser discusses how exchanges of foods of all kinds may be used to express empathy and concern among the Bosmun, her many references to cooked foods, as opposed to fish, game, or raw foods, probably comes from the fact that she spent much of her time with women, the primary cooks and food preparers in Bosmun society. But the same point could certainly be made about all the other cases presented here: what we know and what we do not know about empathy in our respective field sites has been very much affected by our gender and how it conditioned our range of informants and our access to both public and private behavior. Our knowledge has also been affected by the forms of empathic attunement that may be deemed appropriate in the context of interactions within and across differing genders. While it is clear that gender segregation, among other factors such as status or rank, influences whom one spends time with and whom one empathizes with on a daily basis, none of the groups discussed here make strong claims that the capacity for empathy differs by gender. Hollan touches on this issue directly when he notes that though it is Toraja women who most obviously tend the needs of others, since it is considered women’s work to offer food and drink and other concrete signs of concern and respect, … men were just as likely to feel love/compassion/pity toward others as women. Indeed, while most men would be embarrassed to assume directly the woman’s role of preparing food or drink for someone, they are often the ones who initiate such offers or orchestrate them from behind the scenes. And it is often men to whom children and other relatives turn when they have complaints about mothers or other women being too harsh or unfeeling. This apparent lack of belief or ideology in the Pacific that gender conditions the capacity for empathy is interesting, especially given the folk psychological belief among some Americans and Europeans, even among some professional psychologists (Baron-Cohen 2003), that women have a greater inherent capacity for empathy than men. Yet there may still be important differences in gender-based expectations for emotional expressivity and social comportment that have important bearings for understanding the dynamics of empathy in Pacific communities. In the Yapese case, for instance, there is a prevalent assumption that women are

Introduction

17

more likely to express emotion overtly by comparison to men (see Throop 2010a). It is women and not men who are expected to perform heart-wrenching laments for the deceased at funerals. Men, by contrast, gather in a space of mourning that is separated by some distance from the laments, and they are expected to maintain their emotional composure at all times. In Toraja as well, it is thought that women more easily experience and express certain feelings such as sadness and grief (Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994: 89). Accordingly, we could imagine that such expectations would have an important impact on the extent and limits of empathy between genders and within specific genderdelimited social spheres. Fieldwork and Empathy

All of the contributions here illustrate the importance of ethnographic work for the study of empathy, not only by documenting how and to what extent empathy varies by cultural and historical context, but also by showing what can be learned about it by engaging in long-term fieldwork and participant observation. Fieldwork studies, especially those conducted by non-native anthropologists, dramatically illustrate both the possibilities for and limits of empathy. The very fact that anthropologists are able to move into and form attachments in communities of which they may initially know almost nothing, is a measure of people’s abilities, hosts’ and guests’ alike, to ascertain each other’s needs, concerns, and intentions, at least at their most basic level. But as intimacy and perspective grows over the course of time, fieldworkers almost inevitably are confronted with their own misunderstandings, if not downright ignorance, of others’ motives and behaviors (see especially Briggs 1970, 2008). This slow, groping struggle for knowledge and understanding, as a fieldworker becomes aware that people consciously and unconsciously conceal as many things about themselves as they reveal, illustrates experientially the ways in which “reenactive empathy” is built up incrementally and refined through time and space. The fieldwork experience illustrates well the fallibility, and person and context dependency, of empathic awareness as well. Both Lohmann and Lepowsky (this volume) discuss at length the relationship between empathy and fieldwork. Lohmann emphasizes that it is through empathy, no matter how difficult to establish or partial it may be, that anthropologists gain some of their most interesting data and perspectives on human life. Lepowsky stresses that it is through narrative and storytelling—the relating of when, where, why, and how people act and behave—that all people, including anthropologists, help develop and communicate empathy for others and for themselves. Both contributors help us better understand why we cannot do without empathy as a way of understanding people, but also why we must always keep in mind its limits and incompleteness.

18

Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop

Conclusion

All of the essays here support the distinction we drew at the beginning between “basic” and “reenactive” empathy: they support the idea that humans everywhere have the capacity and motivation to assume a first-person perspective on others, despite the strong value placed on privacy and autonomy in the Pacific cultural region and the reluctance to speculate openly and publicly about others’ thoughts and feelings. But the different cases collected here also illustrate how empathic awareness is shaped by social, cultural, and historical processes, and so reinforce the idea that empathy emerges within an intersubjective field (cf. Hollan 2008; Kirmayer 2008) in which self-other orientations may be differentially marked, elaborated, or suppressed (see also Throop 2008, 2010). We have seen, for example, how the Toraja encourage people to communicate very explicitly about their inner thoughts and feelings at times, in a “self-revealing way,” while in Yap the cultural inducements are often in the opposite direction, toward “self-concealing,” involving active efforts to hide knowledge of one’s subjective experience from others. In the settings our authors discuss where social hierarchies are valued and promoted (Samoa, Yap, Toraja, Banaba Fiji, Anuta), and even in more egalitarian settings where it is mutual respect and aid that are valorized, such exaggerated orientations are often complemented or replaced by more nuanced ones in which people may be encouraged to privilege others’ thoughts and feelings over their own, in “self-effacing” ways, or to communicate information about one’s own subjective states only in very subtle, nonverbal, “self-projecting” ways. Specific cultural settings may and usually do at times encourage complementary orientations between people. For example, a self-revealing stance in Toraja might be complemented by an “other-approaching” one in which one is keenly attentive to the subjective states of others. A self-concealing stance in Yap may be complemented by a “other-respecting” one that feigns ignorance of or disinterest in others’ internal thoughts and feelings. Or a self-projecting stance in Bosmun might be complemented by an “other-anticipating” one that attempts to detect very subtle, indirect signs of others’ thoughts and feelings and needs. Yet we must remember that in real-time interaction, depending on circumstance and interlocutor attitude, people may shift among stances rapidly. For example, a self-revealer who begins to feel threatened or vulnerable may quickly become a self-concealer. Similarly, a person assuming an otherrespecting stance might become an “other-interrogator,” if he feels he is being deceived or manipulated in some way. Also, some people, because of either temperament or life experience, may cling to some stances more rigidly than others, no matter what the preferred cultural orientation might be. Hollan (this volume) provides several examples of this among the Toraja.

Introduction

19

These culturally preferred and structured orientations to self-other encounters are varied, and as we have just noted, they can be interactionally combined and shuffled in highly complex and dynamic ways. But even so, they are not unlimited. This is why we think their identification in this sample, and in others like it, can help us specify how social and cultural processes both enable and inhibit the expression of empathy. We end this introduction where we began, with a call for more ethnographic studies of empathy in context. The studies here help us identify the contours and inflections of empathy in the Pacific region much more clearly than before. These include people’s hyper-awareness of empathy’s fallibility and limitations, which can make them reluctant to speculate too openly or publicly about others’ subjective experience. But we need many more such studies from other parts of the world before we will be able to answer more definitely what is truly “basic” about empathy, and what is more culturally shaped and varied. Bibliography Baron-Cohen, Simon. 2003. The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the Truth about Autism. New York: Basic Books. Beatty, Andrew. 2005. “Emotions in the Field: What Are We Talking About?” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11 (1): 17–37. Bohart, Arthur C. and Leslie S. Greenberg. 1997. Empathy Reconsidered: New Directions in Psychotherapy. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Briggs, Jean. 1970. Never in Anger. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2008. “Daughter and Pawn: One Ethnographer’s Routes to Understanding Children.” Ethos 36 (4): 449–456. Daniel, E. Valentine. 1996. Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropology of Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Das, Veena. 2007. Life and World: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Decety, Jean, and William Ickes. 2009. The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Duranti, Alessandro. 2008. “Further Reflections on Reading Other Minds.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 483–494. Farrow, Tomm and Peter W. R. Woodruff, eds. 2007. Empathy in Mental Illness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frank, Gelya. 1985. “‘Becoming Other’: Empathy and Biographical Interpretation.” Biography 8 (3): 189–210. ———. 2000. Venus on Wheels: Two Decades of Dialogue on Disability, Biography, and Being Female in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1984. “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.” In Culture Theory, ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

20

Douglas W. Hollan and C. Jason Throop

Gieser, Thorsten. 2008. “Embodiment, Emotion, and Empathy.” Anthropological Theory 8 (3): 299–318. Groark, Kevin P. 2008. “Social Opacity and the Dynamics of Empathetic In-Sight among the Tzotzil Maya of Chiapas, Mexico.” Ethos 36 (4): 402–426. Halpern, Jodi. 2001. From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Hatfield, Elaine, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson. 1994. Emotional Contagion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row. Hinton, Alexander. 2005. Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hollan, Douglas. 2008. “Being There: On the Imaginative Aspects of Understanding Others and Being Understood.” Ethos 36 (4): 475–489. Hollan, Douglas, and C. Jason Throop. 2008. “Whatever Happened to Empathy? Introduction.” Ethos 36 (4): 385–401. Hollan, Douglas W. and Jane C. Wellenkamp. 1994. Contentment and Suffering: Culture and Experience in Toraja. New York: Columbia University Press. Iacoboni, Marco. 2008. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Keane, Webb. 2008. “Others, Other Minds, and Others’ Theories of Other Minds: An Afterword on the Psychology and Politics of Opacity Claims.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 473–482. Kirmayer, Laurence. 2008. “Empathy and Alterity in Cultural Psychiatry.” Ethos 36 (4): 457–474. Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds. 1997. Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kögler, Hans Herbert, and Karsten R. Stueber, eds. 2000. Empathy and Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Human Sciences. Boulder: Westview. Kracke, Waud. 1994. “Reflections on the Savage Self: Introspection, Empathy, and Anthropology.” In The Making of Psychological Anthropology, ed. Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, George Spindler, and Louise Spindler. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace. Lebra, Takie S. 1976. Japanese Patterns of Behavior. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Lipps, Theodor. 1979. “Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense-Feelings.” In A Modern Book of Esthetics, ed. Melvin Rader. 5th ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Mageo, Jeannette, and Alan Howard, eds. 1996. Spirits in Culture, History, and Mind. London: Routledge. Margulies, Alfred. 1989. The Empathic Imagination. New York: W.W. Norton. Menon, U., and R. A. Shweder. 1994. “Kali’s Tongue: Cultural Psychology, Cultural Consensus and the Meaning of ‘Shame’ in Orissa, India.” In Emotion and Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual Influence, ed. H. Markus and S. Kitayama. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Petersen, Glen. 1993. “Kanengamah and Pohpei’s Politics of Concealment.” American Anthropologist 8 (2): 214–245. Robbins, Joel. 2008. “On Not Knowing Other Minds: Confession, Intention, and Linguistic Exchange in a Papuan New Guinea Community.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 421–430.

Introduction

21

Robbins, Joel, and Alan Rumsey. 2008. “Introduction: Cultural and Linguist Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 407–420. Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage: On the Cultural Farce of Emotions.” In Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon. Rumsey, Alan. 2008. “Confession, Anger, and Cross-Cultural Articulation in Papua New Guinea.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 455–472. Rumsey, Alan, and Joel Robbins, eds. 2008. Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds. Special Issue of Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2). Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schutz, Alfred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Shimizu, Hidetade. 2000. “Japanese Cultural Psychology and Empathic Understanding: Implications for Academic and Cultural Psychology.” Ethos 28 (2): 224–247. Skultans, Vieda. 2007. Empathy and Healing: Essays in Medical and Narrative Anthropology. London: Berghahn Books. Stein, Edith. 1964. On the Problem of Empathy. Washington, D.C.: ICS. Stephen, Michele. 1996. “The Mekeo ‘Man of Sorrow’: Sorcery and the Individuation of the Self.” American Ethnologist 23 (1): 83–101. Strauss, Claudia. 2004. “Is Empathy Gendered and if So, Why? An Approach from Feminist Psychological Anthropology.” Ethos 32 (4): 432–457. Stueber, Karsten R. 2006. Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: MIT Press. Throop, C. Jason. 2008. “On the Problem of Empathy: The Case of Yap, Federated States of Micronesia.” Ethos 36 (4): 402–426. ———. 2010a. Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2010b. “Latitudes of Loss: On the Vicissitudes of Empathy.” American Ethnologist 37 (4): 281–282. Throop, C. Jason, and Douglas W. Hollan, eds. 2008. Whatever Happened to Empathy? Special Issue of Ethos 36 (4). de Waal, Frans. 2009. The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York: Random House. Watson-Franke, Maria-Barbara, and Lawrence C. Watson. 1975. “Understanding in Anthropology: A Philosophical Reminder.” Current Anthropology 16 (2): 247–262. White, Geoffrey, and John Kirkpatrick. 1985. Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wikan, Uni. 1992. “Beyond Words: The Power of Resonance.” American Ethnologist 19 (3): 460–482.

PART I History and Fieldwork as Lenses on Empathy

1 Empathy, Ethnicity, and the Self among the Banabans in Fiji ELFRIEDE HERMANN

Introduction

This chapter will focus on the culturally specific conceptualization of empathy among the Banabans, a people originally from west-central Oceania (“Micronesia”) who have been living in Fiji since 1945. In my representation of how they conceptualize empathy, I will explore in particular their emotion discourses on compassion and pity (deeming the latter to have a religious dimension), since these are central components of the empathy concept they deploy. This does not mean that the Banabans associate empathy only with feeling and not with thinking. The Banabans do not, in fact, separate feeling and thinking to the extent found in certain Western conceptions (on Western conceptions see, e.g., Barbalet 2001: chap. 2, 2002, 2004; Lutz 1988: chap. 3; Rosaldo 1984). For the Banabans, compassion and pity for another involve understanding that other and imagining oneself as being in the position of the other. Such a concept may indeed be deemed to constitute empathy if we agree with Douglas Hollan and Jason Throop “that empathy is a first-person-like perspective on another that involves an emotional, embodied, or experiential aspect” (Hollan and Throop 2008: 391–392). I will show that among the Banabans, empathy thus understood indeed plays an important role in how they constitute self and ethnicity.1 In the past two and a half decades a gamut of insightful studies have appeared on various aspects of person, self, and emotion, also (and indeed especially) bearing on Oceania and Indonesia. Thus, Geertz (1977) stressed the necessity of picking up on the cultural variability of ideas of the person, and proponents of ethnopsychology such as Catherine Lutz (1985, 1988), and Geoffrey White (1985, 1992; see also the contributions in White and Kirkpatrick 1985) have offered subtle analyses of indigenous conceptions of the person, self, and emotion. Whereas some of these studies did touch on local notions of compassion and pity, the issue of empathy remains rather under-

26

Elfriede Hermann

researched in anthropology, as Doug Hollan and Jason Throop (2008: 385) have pointed out. While I take my point of departure from insights of ethnopsychology that have opened up stimulating perspectives for me, I wish to stress how important it is not to construe today’s concepts of empathy as timeless notions that have been transported unchanged and in unbroken continuity from the past to the present. Rather, my point is that empathy discourses and their attendant social practices need historical contextualizing, as do, in turn, emotions and emotional discourses (cf. Hermann 1995, 2005). Current concepts of empathy in a particular society should be seen as having been historically constituted in interaction with political, economic, religious, social, and ethnopsychological transformations. In this connection, it is crucial to study how members of a society construe empathy in terms of their culturally specific historicity. “Historicity,” as Trouillot (1995: 22–29) defines it, includes both a “sociohistorical process” and “narrative constructions about that process” that are produced by members of a society reflecting on their history and their identity. As I employ the term here, historicity is not meant to imply that a manifestation is historical. “Historicity,” rather, “is the manner in which persons operating under the constraints of social ideologies make sense of the past, while anticipating the future,” as Hirsch and Stewart (2005: 262) have cogently put it. In light of the above, I shall show that, drawing on their historical experience, the Banabans have shaped and formed a concept like empathy. In this connection I shall argue that their current concept of empathy is the product of their historical “agency.” This conception, as deployed by Martha Kaplan (e.g., 1995) for Fijian history-making in the context of British colonial power, helped me to grasp that earlier indigenous actors, interacting with former powers and institutions, were able to engender effects still discernible in current discourses and practices. The Banabans developed their conceptualizations of empathy in articulation with a multiplicity of other discourses. One is the religious discourse of acted-out Christian morality, from which they took ideas that then gave rise to their own conception of “pity.”2 In the course of my remarks, I shall present two prototypical scenarios of “pity” and consider what these imply for the Banaban concept of empathy. Prototypical scenarios are examples that members of a cultural community identify as classical or best cases (see Lutz 1988: 10, 210–212).3 The two scenarios will permit me to show the extent to which the Banabans have integrated the concept of empathy as an integral part of their ethnic self, the better to represent themselves as capable of expressing “pity” for others, but also as entitled to receive the “pity” of others. In the course of the argument, I will additionally treat the issue of how the Banabans represent social positions in terms of empathy (cf. for the case of the Ifaluk

Empathy, Ethnicity, and the Self among Banabans

27

Lutz 1988: 146). I shall strive to show how the Banabans also deploy this strategy to negotiate positions in terms of ethnicity, thus constituting their ethnic self in relation to others.

Representations of the Self and Empathy among the Banabans

Representations of the collective and personal self in the Banaban community are woven into a web of discourses bearing on the colonial and postcolonial history of the Banabans. In these discourses, the fact of the community having its origins in the island of Banaba in west-central Oceania plays a pivotal role (cf. Dagmar 1989; Hermann 2003a, 2004, 2005; Kempf 2003a, 2003b, 2004; Kempf and Hermann 2005; Maude 1946; Silverman 1971; K. Teaiwa 2005; T. Teaiwa 1997). Through narratives and theatrical performances the Banabans communicate that their ancestors became Christians after the Protestant mission reached Banaba in 1885 (cf. Silverman 1971: 88). In 1900, the Banabans of the day authorized a Western mining company to exploit Banaba’s considerable phosphate reserves (the island itself was annexed in 1901 by Great Britain). In the years that followed, the local populace found itself forfeiting ever more land to the mining company’s predatory attentions, without adequate compensation for their losses. When the Japanese occupied Banaba in 1942, they evacuated the islanders to the islands of Nauru, Kosrae, and Tarawa (Kempf 2004). In December 1945 the greater part of the Banaban community was taken to Rabi in Fiji, settling down in the following years and eventually acquiring legal ownership rights over the island. From their new home on Rabi Island in Fiji, the Banabans strove to secure independence for Banaba, their old home. Though they failed to secure the sovereign status for Banaba they were seeking from the departing British colonial authorities (in 1979 that island was awarded to the fledgling state of Kiribati), they did succeed in winning wide-ranging rights of codetermination over their ancestral island. The Banabans see the ruination, at once ecological and economic, of their island of origin, Banaba, as a bitter experience their collective self has had to take on board. For them, this is a history that sets the Banabans apart, as an ethnic group, from all others. The individual Banaban self identifies with this history, and to no small extent. A person acquires his or her membership of the Banaban ethnic group either by being born or adopted into it (although adoption, earlier prevalent, is less recognized today as a modality of inclusion, or so it would appear). In Banaban logic, a person is a Banaban if, in terms of the operant system of bilateral descent, he or she can point to Banaban ancestors on at least one side. Through linkage with earlier generations, with those who

28

Elfriede Hermann

bore the brunt of a terrible history, Banabans sees themselves as part of a community of fate—which is what, in their eyes, Banaban ethnicity constitutes. To the ethnic criterion of constituting a collective as well as a personal self were then conjoined additional meanings, which, as time went by, acquired ever greater weight. On the one hand the Banabans took over aspects of Western “race” and class discourses that turn on difference. When they adopted into their language “race” as “reti” (note that ti is pronounced as s), they managed to avoid crassly discriminating notions of a hierarchy of races, such as were prevalent in nineteenth-century Europe. But they did use the term to set apart their own from other ethnicities and to strongly imply their own cultural difference. At the same time they began, under the hegemony of Western discourses of class, to stress that they were landowners and therefore not to be confused with the group of workers, to which, at that time, the Gilbertese invariably belonged. Thus they have taken to differentiating themselves very strongly, and increasingly so as their political history progressed, from the Gilbert Islanders (or, in today’s parlance, the I-Kiribati). In citing the uniqueness of their own origins and culture, their ultimate aim has long been to demand independence for Banaba. On the other hand, the Banabans have incorporated aspects of the Christian teaching of human equality into notions they likewise entertain of culture-specific egalitarianism—thus they refer to those who belong to other groups and ethnicities as equals or, as they put it, the “same” in relation to themselves. Not just the culturally specific conception of the self in relation to others, but also cultural representations of emotions, ethics, and empathy among the Banabans have changed through time, partly as a result of external influences impacting on their lives and lifeways and partly owing to an active reshaping they have undertaken of their own culture. With regard to emotions as a component in how the self relates to others, the Banabans have adopted many core tenets of the Christian congregations of faith they joined.4 From 1885 on, after the Protestant missionary Capt. A. C. Walkup from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Boston) arrived on Banaba and left behind a Gilbertese mission teacher (Maude and Maude 1994: 118; Silverman 1971: 88), the majority of Banabans became Protestant, although some, after the arrival of Roman Catholic functionaries in 1911, did convert to Catholicism (Silverman 1971: 114–115). After settling in Fiji, the majority of Protestant Banabans became Methodist and others stayed (or became) Catholic, while some threw in their lot with the Pentecostal Church, the Assembly of God, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the Seventh Day Adventists. From these Christian discourses, the Banabans “transculturated” those thematic formations that mattered most to them—that is to say, they took these over, recontextualizing and reconceptualizing them as they did so.5 Among these

Empathy, Ethnicity, and the Self among Banabans

29

thematic formations were (especially) those associated with specific emotions toward others. As is apparent from earlier discourses preserved in writing, as well as from today’s discourses, the Banabans especially incorporated into their discourse of te nanoanga (compassion) notions of Christian pity. Strictly speaking, the transculturation of these concepts and conceptions was a two-way street, led by the Banabans as much as by the missions. The dictionaries compiled by the missionaries and the Kiribati version of the Bible show that the missions, for their part, used the term te nanoanga to translate the Christian terms “compassion” and “pity.”6 The Banabans, in turn, took over and reconceptualized the meanings these terms had acquired within the context of Christian teaching. For their insights into Christian pity the Banabans derived much from the parable of the good Samaritan, the social outsider who helps a wounded man waylaid by thieves.7 Also held in high esteem by the Banabans is the legend of St. Martin, who shares his cloak with a beggar. Both narratives are communicated not just verbally, but also as theatrical spectacles performed on festive occasions.8 Such narratives encapsulate a concept of pity that portrays others as persons in distress and that commits the self to render help. Banabans are well aware of the fact that their earlier cultural code of conduct turning on manifestations of compassion became, at some point in time, conflated with Christian notions of pity. Thus Mrs. Corrie Tekenimatang told me: “Before Christianity, te nanoanga was only expressed within the family. But after Christianity arrived, it was expanded” (19 February 2005). The term “pity” (with its Christian connotations) was, as it happens, taken into the Banabans’ Kiribati vernacular as a foreign loanword, finding use as noun, verb, and adjective alike. In their daily life, the Banabans accord a prominent role to the discourse on pity, not least in connection with other emotions similarly influenced by Christian notions. Some examples are love (te tangira), goodness (te akoi), respect (te karinerine), and humility (te nanorinano).9 Seen against the historical background of Banaban culture, it is clearly the case that contemporary Banaban discourse on te nanoanga (compassion, empathy) has long been indissolubly linked to Christian understandings of pity. When asked to translate the vernacular te nanoanga (compassion) into English, which many speak as a second language, most Banabans come up with the word “pity.” Educated Banabans translate te nanoanga also as “sympathy” or “compassion.” Te nanoanga is to be construed as a compound from the words nano and anga. Nano used as a noun literally means the “inside,” i.e. the chest cavity in which the physical organ of the heart (te buro) reposes; thus it stands metaphorically for the “heart” qua locus of “feelings-thoughts” (and in certain contexts of “desire” and “will”). Anga means “giving.” Nanoanga could therefore be translated literally as “heart-giving,” in the sense of turning oneself and

30

Elfriede Hermann

one’s feelings-thoughts to the other, the better to enable his or her situation to be grasped, and carrying with it the implication of a readiness to help. Such feelings-thoughts are evoked when someone is described by the adjectives kananoanga or kawa—both of which mean “pitiable” or “to be pitied” (cf. Sabatier 1971). Nor can understanding and concern be developed, in Banaban thinking, in the absence of the imagination—which is comparable with the role played by imagination in empathy, as noted by Roger Lohmann (this volume) among the Asabano in Papua New Guinea. In the Banaban case, this is the capacity to put oneself in another person’s position, the better to secure a first person–like perspective. This is signaled already in the expressions used to chastise children: tai karoa anne, ba ngke arona ba ngkoe, ko na kawa, “don’t do that, because if this [behavior] was done to you, you would deserve pity.” Discernible nowadays among the Banabans are two important contexts in which te nanoanga or kawa, “compassion” and “pity,” are spoken of. In the first of these, compassion with the other or others is expressed. When expressing fellow feeling for the Banaban group as a collective whole, Banabans are likely to exclaim kawa te aba, “they are to be pitied the people/land!”10 Speaking of a single other person (not necessarily a Banaban), the expression often heard is e kawa, “he/she is to be pitied.” In the second context, others are asked to show empathy for the collective and personal self. In this case, what is formulated is pegged to the perspective of the collective or personal self: ai kawara, “to be pitied are we,” or ai kawara ngai, “to be pitied am I myself.” Just how important empathy for others and from others is to constituting the Banaban self, I will now demonstrate by considering two prototypical scenarios.

Historical Scenario I: “Pity” and Hospitality

My first prototypical scenario, which closely follows Banaban accounts, turns on the theme that the Banabans are capable of empathy. This scenario consists of a story about their history, telling of how hospitable Banabans were when living on their ancestral island of Banaba back in precolonial times. The story goes like this: when a stranger (iruwa) fetched up on Banaba’s shore, the Banabans felt te nanoanga toward him in his plight and did what they could to assist. The iruwa (which can be variously translated as “stranger,” “outsider,” “other,” “visitor”) is depicted here as one who arrives on Banaba’s shores in a canoe. When asked about “pity,” Nei Makin, an old lady held in high regard and old enough to have spent her childhood on Banaba, came up with the following association: “Our people, they have an open heart. They easily have pity on people. Because on Banaba before, when some people drifted from Kiribati

Empathy, Ethnicity, and the Self among Banabans

31

and landed on Banaba, they were welcomed. They could be adopted as a son or a brother. And when they were adopted, they could be part of a real family and be given land” (19 February 2005). Exactly the same association was voiced by Mr. Teai, a highly respected man from the first generation of those born on Rabi Island, when I asked him to explain the meaning of nanoanga and “pity.” Similar descriptions of, or references to, this historical scenario involving the arrival of strangers on their shore were advanced on numerous earlier occasions by Banabans whenever they felt I needed reassuring about how hospitably inclined they were toward visitors.11 What the Banabans are voicing in this key scenario is that compassion is the basis for their capacity to bond socially with others, even compassion to the point of readiness to take strangers into their community. Their empathy therefore relates causally to how they act socially toward others. Here, compassion or pity embraces both understanding and fellow feeling: the islanders understand that the stranded mariner is at the end of his strength, which is why they succor him and treat him as one of their own. They understand him because he, like them, is a human being, a person.12 Banabans associate this train of thought with hospitality, generally and at all times. Thus the historical scenario impels people to action. Mindful of what it means to be morally upright in terms of this prototypical scenario, the Banabans conduct themselves appropriately, not only toward (ethnic) others but also toward their fellow Banabans. Thus, for example, when someone passing by a house does not belong to the immediate family of those inside, it is customary to welcome the passer-by by calling out the words mai rin! (Come in!), which carry the implication that food and drink will not be found wanting inside.13 It is true that there are many exceptions to the rule. Douglas Hollan (this volume) has shown for the Toraja in Indonesia that experiences on the individual level are responsible inter alia for whether empathy is forthcoming or whether it is withheld, and this is certainly also the case for Banabans. Likewise, their culture permits Banabans to proceed strategically when deciding whether to extend trust to others or to keep thoughts and feelings to themselves, in a manner comparable to what Jason Throop (this volume) sets forth in his study of ethical subjectivity in Yap, Federated States of Micronesia. Nevertheless, the line of argument one hears time and again from the Banabans, namely that the passer-by might be hungry or thirsty or in need of care, just as they themselves might very well be under the same circumstances, indicates that they value empathy highly. The comparison between themselves and the guest is, in the cultural logic of the Banabans, of no small importance. Frequently they use expressions like titebo, “just as/like/same/ equal,” to make comparisons between themselves and others, their own culture or that of others.

32

Elfriede Hermann

When the Banabans compare themselves with others, and when by their behavior toward the stranger they show that they understand him and feel with him, they do not, however, equate themselves fully and entirely with him. Rather they can relate to him as they do only because he and they are differently placed in the scheme of things. In the prototypical situation being invoked, the point of variance with the stranger is that they are firmly situated on their island home of Banaba while the stranger is not. In everyday life on Rabi Island today, thanks to a partial security (admittedly, this waxes and wanes with the political situation in Fiji) proceeding from a sense of being at home, the Banaban person is able to reach out to the stranger in their midst (or the traveler far away from home). Empathy for the other, therefore, also says something about positioning: the Banaban self is socially and economically better positioned vis-à-vis the stranger (or traveler), who is solitary and needy. This implies, despite the points of sameness, the existence of a hierarchy between where they are positioned and where he is. In other words: concealed in the conditions for the possibility of compassion is their own difference. In their account of a prototypical scenario enacted on ancestral Banaba in precolonial times, the Banabans see their empathy for the other as a capability integral to their existence as an ethnic group. In their discourses, they claim for their ethnos the merit of once having helped stranded mariners, i.e., ethnic others, men and women who, according to oral tradition, were Gilbert Islanders. One of my Banaban interlocutors, Ten Taomati, put this point very nicely. First, he associated te nanoanga (compassion) with the hospitality the Banabans had accorded the strangers washed up on Banaba’s shore. Then he reminded me that Banaba was called te aba n aine, “the land of the women,” explaining “Banaba is the women’s land because of that nanoanga attitude. We express it as kindness” (15 February 2005). He associated te nanoanga with the gender-specific property of “caring,” linked to women. As a group hailing originally from “the land of the women,” all Banabans, men and women alike, identify with this trait of “caring” for others, deeming it a defining feature of their ethnos. In addition, the narratives they tell of their forebears’ compassion for others permit them to claim also that they have actively retained this capacity down to the present. This testifies, in turn, to their agency. By ascribing to themselves this highly articulated culturally capacity, the Banabans construct a continuity in their ethnic existence running from precolonial times down to the present. However, from the perspective of their culturally specific historicity, they certainly do point to discontinuities in their charitable links with others. As Ten Taomati remarked to me, the nanoanga attitude “has often been exploited as well” (15 February 2005). What he meant by this is depicted in the prototypical scenario to which I shall now briefly turn.

Empathy, Ethnicity, and the Self among Banabans

33

Historical Scenario II: Being Exploited and Appealing for “Pity”

The second prototypical scenario that I detect in Banaban discourses turns on their bitter past experience and the right this confers to expect empathy from others. This is a historical scenario, describing how the Banabans came to be exploited by the mining company that from 1900 on actively extracted phosphate from Banaba. This fact is historicized not only in narratives, but also in “During the Year 1900,” a prominent song composed in the mid 1970s by Mrs. Tebwebwe Beniamina. Furthermore, exploitation is the theme of a dance theater play, “The Year 1900,” the work of Na Maraki, a well-known contemporary composer. The play, based on the lyrics of the song, was performed regularly on Rabi Island by the Banaban Dancing Group when Na Maraki was their director from the mid 1980s to 2002. This stage spectacle addresses the ease with which the Banabans were exploited by those in charge of the phosphate extraction operations (see Hermann 2004 for a detailed account). It condenses the long years of bitter experiences into a portrayal of the original negotiations, going all the way back to 1900, between their forebears and Sir Albert Ellis, discoverer of the phosphate and representative of the Pacific Phosphate Company. On stage we see Sir Albert Ellis offering to buy up all their phosphate from a group of astonished Banabans. He calls on them to decide whether they will accept in payment the coins he holds in one hand, within easy reach, or else a banknote, which he holds up almost out of reach in his other hand. When the unsuspecting Banabans opt for the coins—none, it goes without saying, of any great value—Sir Albert Ellis laughs triumphantly and gets them to sign the contract. After this scene a number of female dancers move to the center of the stage and begin dancing to a chorus sung by the Banaban Dancing Group, the core passages of the song “During the Year 1900.” The verses of the chorus are mostly in English and run as follows: How Pity! How pity O! They misunderstood value of money Our Ancestors ake ngkoangkoa The words of the first verse, “How pity! How pity O!” are a call to empathize with the Banabans: “How they are to be pitied!” As these words are sung to a background melody, the dancers lift their arms aloft, then let their fingertips converge in a graceful downward sweep midway across their chest, thus pointing to the inside, the heart’s symbolic seat. Unmistakably, they call with their fingertips for te nano to bring them nanoanga or pity. The dancers here

34

Elfriede Hermann

with their earnest expressions represent the social body of the Banabans, both “Our Ancestors ake ngkoangkoa” (those who were before) and their descendants, the Banabans alive today—for contemporary Banabans not only feel compassion for their forebears; they take on board and make visible the fate they suffered, which was to be exploited. Thus when I asked Na Maraki whom the words “How pity!” were intended for, his answer came back loud and clear: “That’s us!” (25 July 1998). Since land and people (te aba) are deemed by the Banabans to be integrally linked, the destruction of their land could not be other than a great loss for Banabans both now and in former times. The fact that they were never adequately compensated for the massive ecological impacts on their ancestral island makes its loss for them all the greater. The historical scenario of Banaban exploitation, not just performed on stage but reproduced in the moving narratives that Banabans tell, is intended to refer to a core segment of the history of Banaban society and to enable the Banabans to be understood. That not just “pity” from others but also empathy is demanded, and that the Banabans also have a right to adequate remuneration, is expressed with admirable clarity by Ten Taomati. Speaking of the piece put on by the Banaban Dancing Group, he said “What we really want is understanding, … sympathizing with us and justice for us” (15 February 2005). This demand needs to be seen in the political context of the time the song was composed. It was directed chiefly at the British, Australians, and New Zealanders who, as former colonizers and shareholders of the phosphate mining company, were blamed for the ruination of Banaba and the exploitation of Banabans. But the demand went beyond the immediate culprits, being directed too at all the industrial nations. If the Banabans accord to all these quarters a higher status and rank themselves significantly lower down the scale, they are not just thinking of an economic hierarchy of “rich” and “poor.” Rather they are drawing on their own Christian convictions in order to strike a responsive chord in others who also profess Christianity, and who therefore have a duty to show moral rectitude: as “the rich,” they know they have to give to “the poor.” In addition, Banabans trust that members of the very cultures that first brought them Christianity and preached the equality of all mankind will, of all people, be ready to identify in their imagination with the Banabans and so understand them. They hope that representatives of these higher-ranked countries will be motivated by such an understanding to side with the Banabans, to do what they can to ensure that Banabans receive justice in the form of adequate economic compensation, including the ecological rehabilitation of Banaba. By historicizing their experience of exploitation, the Banabans have for decades now anchored in their collective and personal self this demand that others “pity” them. Moreover, by advancing a claim to the compassion of others, they are also advancing an ethnic definition of their own self, for in their

Empathy, Ethnicity, and the Self among Banabans

35

logic, if they do deserve “pity,” it is because they have their roots on Banaba— because they trace their descent back to its former inhabitants and their specific culture and history.

Conclusion: Empathy as the Product of Historical Agency

Both prototypical scenarios show the two sides of empathy that feature so prominently in Banaban self-definition: the Banabans represent themselves, on the one hand, as possessing a special capacity to show pity for others and, on the other hand, as having a special claim on others when it comes to receiving understanding and compassion from them. In thus articulating these two sides, the Banabans come very close to the analytic concept of empathy as proposed by Douglas Hollan, i.e., an “intersubjective process involving someone attempting to understand as well as someone needing or allowing oneself to be understood” (this volume; cf. also Hollan 2008). Importantly for the Banabans, these two sides of empathy are constitutive of their ethnicity: by binding spatially to Banaba their willingness to accord pity and understanding to others, and by simultaneously calling on others to reciprocate by feeling pity for them, they identify themselves as rightful owners of Banaba, as descendants of its original inhabitants, and as an island people with a unique culture who have undergone specific historical experiences. In another twist, the Banabans also articulate a gender-specific aspect to their concept of giving and taking pity and understanding. That gender can be pivotally implicated in empathy is an issue raised by Claudia Strauss (2004) in the context of studies she carried out in the United States. In Banaban society it is not as if empathy were only ascribed to one gender. To be sure, pity and understanding are associated with care, which in turn is chiefly associated with women; yet it is men no less than women who are enjoined to feel for others and to extend care to them. The empathic traits exhibited by Banaban women and men alike are, nevertheless, justified in terms of a gender-specific characteristic of their island of origin, that is to say, by reference to an ethnic characteristic of theirs, for, so it is said, it is precisely the fact of them having their ethnic origins on Banaba, “the land of women,” that has given Banabans their capacity for empathy. Thus empathy also serves the cause of ethnic differentiation of Banabans vis-à-vis others, with especial reference to I-Kiribati but also vis-à-vis representatives of the ethnic groups that today’s Banabans rub shoulders with in multicultural Fiji, including Europeans. The contemporary concept of empathy lets the Banabans not only assert equality between members of their own community, but also—depending on the political context—between their own ethnos and ethnic others, whether for

36

Elfriede Hermann

purposes of understanding them or being understood by them in return. But it also gives them, at one and the same time, a position of difference vis-à-vis these very others. By exhibiting these facets, the cultural concept of empathy is shaped to fit in with the Banabans’ conception of self, which has likewise undergone a historically specific shaping; the Banabans deftly render their conception of self as titebo ma kaokoro, “same but different” (cf. Hermann 2003a, 2003b). Here the Banabans draw, as and when it suits them, on their concept of empathy, the better to round out their sameness-within-difference by adding a significantly ethnic component. When they do so, they normally have their political interests in mind, namely their concern to ensure their continued existence as a group within a framework of wide-ranging autonomy for their two home islands, Rabi and Banaba. What we see from the discourses and social practices of the Banabans is that their facility for empathy, whether given or received back in return, is a product of cultural development. They have built this capacity from the basics of their culture and their experiences in the course of a long and complicated history. They trace their contemporary culture of compassion and understanding partly back to the cultural order prevailing in former times on Banaba and partly back to their own acceptance of Christianity. In the process of forming their concept of empathy, they bore the brunt of power wielded over them by representatives of missions, the phosphate industry, and various institutions of colonial and postcolonial governments. But that is just one side of the story: the other is that the Banabans forged pathways of their own, pathways that let them act powerfully and effectively. Thus the culturally specific shaping of empathy among the Banabans should be seen as an outcome of their sociopolitical actions, as having evolved in awareness of the way things are and of their own existence within the historical process. From my case study of the Banabans I conclude that culturally specific concepts of empathy—and not only in their society but in others as well—are the product of the historical agency of a number of actors operating from a number of angles. In effect, cultural models of empathy are manifest aspects of historical formation. Cultural models are not preserved as static wholes, unchanging like flies in amber as sociopolitical processes unfold around them. Rather we must assume that substantive aspects of concepts like empathy are codetermined by their contexts, even when the individual steps in their historical formation cannot be reconstructed in any detail. In most cases there were once earlier models competing with newly developing hegemonies and undergoing modification, as ideas were transculturated out of these hegemonic discourses. From the perspective of a historical anthropology, we can therefore say that concepts of empathy are products that derive, if not in their entirety then to a significant degree, from the historical agency of local actors.

Empathy, Ethnicity, and the Self among Banabans

37

They spring from such effective actions as local actors perform based on their specific historicity.

Notes I am greatly indebted to both the Rabi Council of Leaders and the Council of Elders for permission to conduct research among the Banaban Community on Rabi Island (Fiji) and on Banaba (Kiribati). I also wish to thank those Banabans who gave me access to their social networks, affording me comprehensive insights not only into their culture generally but also, and more specifically, into how they shape their emotions along with their personal identifications and collective ethnic identity: Kam bati n raba nakon Ten David Christopher, Ten Taomati Teai, Nei Makin Corrie Tekenimatang, Nei Taiman T., Na Maraki, Nei Rotia T., Nei Kataake K., Ten Teatu R., and Nei Rebo, Ten Bauro, Ten Aren, Nei Miri, Ten Toki, Nei Tearatu, and Ten Heyving. In addition, I wish to record my gratitude to the following institutions: the Fijian authorities for granting me a research permit for Fiji, the National Archives of Fiji for help generously extended, and the German Research Foundation for funding my research projects. I am grateful to Doug Hollan and Jason Throop for a stimulating exchange of ideas in connection with the sessions they organized, to Alan Rumsey, Roger Lohmann, other session participants, Rupert Stasch, and three anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on my contribution, and to Wolfgang Kempf for his long-term cooperation in this research project. Bruce Allen helped, as ever, by cheerfully and competently proofreading the English-language text. 1. In what follows I cannot get into the ethnographic detail of how the personal self is empathetically socialized. Yet it is important to note that not just the collective but the personal self too is constituted by means of empathy. 2. It would exceed the scope of this essay to trace in any detail how the precolonial discourse of compassion came to be historically linked to the Christian discourse on pity. Unfortunately there are, as far as I know, no written sources from pre-missionary days that describe a local concept of compassion that could then be contrasted with its Christian counterpart at the time. But the fact that the current Banaban discourse on compassion cannot be separated from Christian understandings of pity would seem to indicate that the Banabans’ gradual interweaving of indigenous and Christian discourse postdates the onset of missionization. 3. Catherine Lutz (1988: 10, 210–212) has studied such scenarios for certain emotions among the Ifaluk (Caroline Islands). 4. Cf. Mageo (2002: 357) on Samoan emotion categories, which shifted under the influence of teachings of the missionaries. 5. On the concept of transculturation see Coronil 1995; Hermann 2007; Ortiz 1995. 6. See, e.g., A Gilbertese-English Dictionary by Hiram Bingham, D. D., Missionary of the American Board, 1953, first edition 1908; An English-Gilbertese Vocabulary compiled by Rev. G. H. Eastman, O. B. E. of The London Missionary Society, 1996 [Orig. 1948]; Gilbertese-English Dictionary, originally compiled in French [1954] by Father E. Sabatier, M. S. C. and translated by Sister Oliva, F. N. D. S. C. of the Catholic Mission, Tarawa, 1971; and the Kiribati Bible, Te Baibara, n.d.

38

Elfriede Hermann

7. The relevant passage (Luke 10:37) in the Kiribati Bible uses the term nanoanga: Ao ngaia e kangai, Teuare nanoangaia (literally: “He said, The one who showed him pity.”) 8. My thanks to Wolfgang Kempf for pointing to the bearing these performances have on this phenomenon of pity. 9. Of these emotions love especially is associated with pity, compassion, and empathy in other cultures too: in Samoan culture (Mageo), among the Anutans (Feinberg), and among the Toraja in South Sulawesi, Indonesia (Hollan) (the above authors all feature in the present volume). 10. The Banaban term te aba encompasses people and land alike, implying that they are integrally linked. 11. Interestingly enough, there are today no audible discourses circulating among the Banabans to the effect that strangers, whether singularly or collectively, could potentially have been dangerous. If it is true also that in the past they engaged in no such discourse, this would contrast with conceptualizations found on other Micronesian islands, where villagers were keenly aware of dangers threatening from across the water (D’Arcy 2006: 106). According to Banaban tradition, all those stranded on the beaches of Banaba were exhausted and utterly destitute, and were always given food and shelter (cf. Maude and Maude 1994: 119). However, we cannot be sure that there was not some idea of potential danger emanating from strangers. When a Banaban (someone with a special right to do so) placed a garland around the neck of a newly arrived stranger, he or she first breathed on the garland some secret words. It is possible that this practice was intended not only to protect the stranger now on Banaban land—which is what is emphasized today—but also to protect the Banabans and their land from the same stranger—which, however, is not made explicit. 12. Here the sameness of human beings is thought of as a precondition for mutual understanding. Interestingly, this idea (which may have become more pronounced in the course of adopting Christianity) can also be found in other cultural communities, a case in point being Ku Waru speakers in Papua New Guinea (see Rumsey 2008: 464–465). 13. Offering food as a way of empathizing is not infrequent in Oceanian cultures. Compare, for example, practices among the Bosmun of Papua New Guinea, described in this volume by von Poser.

Bibliography Barbalet, Jack M. 2001 [1998]. Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure: A Macrosociological Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. “Science and Emotions.” In Emotions and Sociology, ed. Jack M. Barbalet. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. ———. 2004. “Consciousness, Emotions, and Science.” In Theory and Research on Human Emotions, ed. Jonathan H. Turner. Special Issue of Advances in Group Processes 21: 245–272. Bingham, Hiram, D. D. 1953 [1908]. A Gilbertese-English Dictionary. London: Lowe and Brydone.

Empathy, Ethnicity, and the Self among Banabans

39

Coronil, Fernando. 1995. “Introduction to the Duke University Press Edition.” In Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, Fernando Ortiz. Durham: Duke University Press. Dagmar, Hans. 1989. “Banabans in Fiji: Ethnicity, Change, and Development.” In Ethnicity and Nation-Building in the Pacific, ed. Michael C. Howard. Tokyo: The United Nations University. D’Arcy, Paul. 2006. The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Eastman, G. H. 1996 [1948]. An English-Gilbertese Vocabulary of the Most Commonly Used Words. Antebuka, Tarawa: KPC Levett Print. Geertz, Clifford. 1977. “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.” In Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader in the Study of Symbols and Meanings, ed. Janet L. Dolgin, David S. Kemnitzer, and David M. Schneider. New York: Columbia University Press. Hermann, Elfriede. 1995. Emotionen und Historizität: Der emotionale Diskurs über die Yali-Bewegung in einer Dorfgemeinschaft der Ngaing, Papua New Guinea. Berlin: Reimer. ———. 2003a. “Manifold Identifications within Differentiations: Shapings of Self among the Relocated Banabans of Fiji.” In Multiple Identifications and the Self, ed. Toon van Meijl and Henk Driessen. Focaal—European Journal of Anthropology, Special Section 42: 77–88. ———. 2003b. “Positionierungen des ethnischen Selbst: Autobiografische Assoziationen einer Banaban-Frau in Fiji.” In Lebenswege im Spannungsfeld lokaler und globaler Prozesse: Person, Selbst und Emotion in der ethnologischen Biografieforschung, ed. Elfriede Hermann and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler. Münster: LIT Verlag. ———. 2004. “Emotions, Agency, and the Dis/Placed Self of the Banabans in Fiji.” In Shifting Images of Identity in the Pacific, ed. Toon van Meijl and Jelle Miedema. Leiden: KITLV Press. ———. 2005. “Emotions and the Relevance of the Past: Historicity and Ethnicity among the Banabans of Fiji.” In Ethnographies of Historicity, ed. Eric Hirsch and Charles Stewart. Special Issue of History and Anthropology 16 (3): 275–291. ———. 2007. “Communicating with Transculturation.” Journal de la Société des Océanistes 125 (2): 257–260. Hirsch, Eric, and Charles Stewart. 2005. “Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity.” History and Anthropology 16 (3): 261–274. Hollan, Douglas. 2008. “Being There: On the Imaginative Aspects of Understanding Others and Being Understood.” Ethos 36 (4): 475–489. Hollan, Douglas, and C. Jason Throop. 2008. “Whatever Happened to Empathy? Introduction.” Ethos 36 (4): 385–401. Kaplan, Martha. 1995. Neither Cargo Nor Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji. Durham: Duke University Press. Kempf, Wolfgang. 2003a. “‘Songs Cannot Die’: Ritual Composing and the Politics of Emplacement among the Resettled Banabans on Rabi Island in Fiji.” The Journal of the Polynesian Society 112 (1): 33–64. ———. 2003b. “Räumliche Überlagerungen: Die kulturelle Konstruktion der Insel Rabi als neues Heimatland der diasporischen Banabans in Fiji.” In Kulturelle Räume – räumliche Kultur: Zur Neubestimmung des Verhältnisses zweier fundamentaler Kategorien

40

Elfriede Hermann

menschlicher Praxis, ed. Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin and Michael Dickhardt. Münster: LIT Verlag. ———. 2004. “The Drama of Death as Narrative of Survival: Dance Theatre, Travelling and Thirdspace among the Banabans of Fiji.” In Shifting Images of Identity in the Pacific, ed. Toon van Meijl and Jelle Miedema. Leiden: KITLV Press. Kempf, Wolfgang, and Elfriede Hermann. 2005. “Reconfigurations of Place and Ethnicity: Positionings, Performances, and Politics of Relocated Banabans in Fiji.” Oceania 75 (4): 368–386. Lutz, Catherine A. 1985. “Ethnopsychology Compared to What? Explaining Behavior and Consciousness among the Ifaluk.” In Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies, ed. Geoffrey M. White and John Kirkpatrick. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1988. Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mageo, Jeannette Marie. 2002. “Toward a Multidimensional Model of the Self.” Journal of Anthropological Research 58 (3): 339–365. Maude, H. E. 1946. “Memorandum on the Future of the Banaban Population of Ocean Island; With Special Relation to their Lands and Funds.” Auckland, Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, Suva: The National Archives of Fiji: F 37/269-3. Maude, H. C., and H. E. Maude, eds. 1994. The Book of Banaba: From the Maude and Grimble Papers; and Published Works. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific. Ortiz, Fernando. 1995. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Rosaldo, Michelle Z. 1984. “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling.” In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rumsey, Alan. 2008. “Confession, Anger and Cross-Cultural Articulation in Papua New Guinea.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 455–472. Sabatier, E., M. S. C. 1971. Gilbertese-English Dictionary/Te Tekitinari n Taetae ni Kiribati ma n Ingiriti [originally compiled in French, 1954.] Translated by Sister Oliva, F.N.D.S.C. of the Catholic Mission, Tarawa. Tarawa: Sacred Heart Mission. Silverman, Martin G. 1971. Disconcerting Issue: Meaning and Struggle in a Resettled Pacific Community. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Strauss, Claudia. 2004. “Is Empathy Gendered and, If So, Why? An Approach from Feminist Psychological Anthropology.” Ethos 32 (4): 432–457. Teaiwa, Katerina Martina. 2005. “Our Sea of Phosphate: The Diaspora of Ocean Island.” In Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations: Unsettling Western Fixations, ed. Graham Harvey and Charles D. Thompson. Ashgate: Jr. Aldershot, Hampshire, UK. Teaiwa, Teresia K. 1997. “Rabi and Kioa: Peripheral Minority Communities in Fiji.” In Fiji in Transition, ed. Brij V. Lal and Tomasi R. Vakatora. Suva: University of the South Pacific, School of Social and Economic Development. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. White, Geoffrey M. 1985. “Premises and Purposes in a Solomon Islands Ethnopsychology.” In Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies, ed. Geoffrey M. White and John Kirkpatrick. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Empathy, Ethnicity, and the Self among Banabans

41

———. 1992. “Ethnopsychology.” In New Directions in Psychological Anthropology, ed. Theodore Schwartz, Geoffrey M. White, and Catherine A. Lutz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Geoffrey. M., and John Kirkpatrick, eds. 1985. Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2 The Boundaries of Personhood, the Problem of Empathy, and “the Native’s Point of View” in the Outer Islands MARIA LEPOWSKY

The core paradox of anthropological epistemology, method, and representation remains the human inability to experience full empathy with another person. This paradox comes into sharpest relief in ethnographic encounters that pose dramatic challenges to identification, imagination, and understanding among persons whose ways of making sense of the world differ radically. Intersubjective understanding has held a privileged position in anthropology since the publication of Malinowski’s first book on the Trobriand Islands (1922). Malinowski, Geertz (1983), and many others justifiably position such understanding at the core of modern ethnographic method (e.g., Gottlieb 2004; Kracke 1987, 1994). So how can I meaningfully imagine myself (to paraphrase Malinowski) not only set down on a beach—some three hundred miles southeast of the Trobriand Islands in my own case—but participating, in a way, in the islanders’ experiential matrix, and in the ongoing anthropological quest to see the world from their point of view? And, on my return from the field, how can I meaningfully represent islanders’ lives, particularly their inner thoughts and emotions, to others? I owe a special intellectual debt to Malinowski as ethnographic inspiration. I also acknowledge the analytical provocation of Geertz (1983), who used the (still recent, still controversial) publication of Malinowski’s field diaries (1967) as a dramatic, cautionary example of the limits of anthropological understanding and empathy. The mystery of others’ inner thoughts and feelings, including the ethnographer’s own, became part of Geertz’s argument for why anthropologists should limit themselves to the interpretation of public symbols, avoiding analyses of individual symbolism or private meanings (cf. Hollan and Throop, introduction to this volume). A philosophical insistence on what Robbins and Rumsey (2008) memorably label “the doctrine of the ‘opacity of other minds’” is characteristic of many

44

Maria Lepowsky

Pacific cultures.1 On the island of Vanatinai, when someone, including an ethnographer, privately asks a trusted confidant, “Why did she/he act like that?” “What was she/he thinking?” the common answer, often uttered in tones of puzzlement and despair, or anxiety and fear, expresses one of the islanders’ core epistemological principles: “We cannot know their renuanga.” Renuanga is a word that refers to a person’s inner experiences, both and inseparably thought and emotion. In this chapter, I explore some of the implications of this core ideology of island ethno-psychology and concepts of person for the ethnographic project of intersubjective understanding, for ethnographic representation, and for reconsidering the concept of empathy. Elders on the island of Vanatinai, where I have carried out long-term fieldwork, fairly quickly informed me that my kaiwa, my work, was to understand their customs (mumuga) and learn how they followed taubwaragha, the way of the ancestors. Central to this kaiwa has been a continuing quest to understand how islanders relate to one another, and to me, within their own culturally shaped matrices of experiential realities. These lived realities overlap, but they also vary among individuals, most notably by age, gender, life course, and personality. Their existential cultural core on Vanatinai includes philosophical recognition of spirit-human and cross-species communication, daily psychoactive substance use (Areca nut), pervasive belief in and frequent practice of magic and sorcery, and recognition of prophetic signs and prophetic dreaming. How then can I know (or continue to believe I know) and write about islanders’ experiences and social relations? What were they thinking/feeling in an ethnographic or social encounter? How did they truly see the world and relate to one another? How can I fathom these phenomena, write about them meaningfully, and communicate them to others? I do not share islanders’ beliefs in personal causation of illness or misfortune, the invasions of self by other persons or spirit entities (seducing, soliciting valuables, sanctioning), or the shape-shifting abilities or magical powers of many of their kin and neighbors. The boundaries of personhood on Vanatinai are permeable. To islanders, Vanatinai is a landscape of uncertainty and danger, inhabited by named persons—close kin, affines, neighbors, distant clanspeople, strangers—as well as by other-than-human persons such as ancestor spirits, place spirits, totem animals, and plants (cf. Hallowell 1960). Any of these entities may have the power and intention to aid or harm, to project its personhood into another. And their psychic states, their inner thought and feelings, are inherently unknowable. It may never be clear why they were angry or sympathetic, and what caused them to act and influence an event in someone’s life: an illness a recovery, a prolific yam crop, success in love or ceremonial exchange. The renuanga of these beings, as with those of other persons, cannot be fathomed. Even so, one can, and must, try to understand them, to communicate

Personhood, Empathy, and “the Native’s Point of View”

45

with these kinds of other-than-human persons emotionally and persuasively, through divination, magical petition, and the healing practices of countersorcery and counter-witchcraft. The term renuanga encapsulates the unity of thought and emotion. Etymologically, renuanga derives from nua, a verb stem in everyday use. Nua means to want or to desire; the suffix -nga indicates an action or state of being. Nua appears in daily discourse in the idiomatic query, Nuanio budá? “What do you want?” or more literally, “Your desires are what?” Even more common is a negative statement of individual will, Ma nuagu, “I don’t want to,” or again more literally, “My desires are negative.” (Here I am using the dialect of the southwestern districts, but the term renuanga is island-wide.) Renuanga, then, refers to an interior, active, although covert, state of desire or feeling. Lo renuanga vazari, people privately inform their friends and kin—literally, “My thoughts/feelings are going bad.” And Le renuanga izovuye, “Her/his thoughts/feelings are good,” they observe freely, albeit privately, to one another. These are the ordinary ways of reporting inner affective states of self or others: “I am (feeling) sad,” or “S/he is (feeling) happy.” To translate Vanatinai ideologies more precisely, then, it is not the opacity of others’ minds (indistinguishable from bodies, as Cartesian dualism holds no sway on the island), but the opacity of others’ inner states that are such a culturally marked concern. The speech acts of others (and their silences) and their interactions with others (as well as absences of action and hidden actions) may fairly be, and need to be, decoded and interpreted. This is a daily task of social interaction, even though both speech and other forms of action are frequently, in local perspective, either ambiguous or intentionally deceptive. On Vantinai and in many other Pacific cultures, the philosophical principle of an inability to know another person’s true inner state of being is central to concepts of personhood and to theories of social relations. In spite of this premise of the inherently unknowable other, individuals must continue to act, relating to others in everyday life in the absence of culturally sanctioned confidence in understanding (and, by extension, of identifying with) the desires, emotions, or thoughts of other persons. On Vanatinai, as elsewhere in the Pacific, this includes an often articulated, ongoing problem of the inability to know other-than-human persons (Hallowell 1960), coupled with the dilemmas of how to interact with them and divine their inner states. These represent a diverse range of beings, including ancestor spirits, place spirits, totem animals, sacred rocks, and totem trees. The islanders inhabit an animate landscape of uncertainty, power, and desire. Is empathy, then—the imaginative experience of another’s state of being—culturally envisioned as even possible, given the Vanatinai worldview and concepts of person, and in particular the centrality of an overt denial of ever being able to imaginatively experience the renuanga of others? Given this

46

Maria Lepowsky

philosophical premise, is empathy possible for an outside ethnographic observer? And how might an ethnographer communicate this kind of “native’s point of view” to outside others, to readers, through anthropological writings? I address these questions in the following sections.

Autonomy, Personhood, and the Limits of Empathy on Vanatinai

Vanatinai, the Motherland, fifty miles long and ten miles wide, appears on maps and nautical charts as Sudest Island, or Tagula (its name in a neighboring island language). It is the largest island in the Louisiade Archipelago, and still among the most difficult islands in the Pacific to reach. Surrounded by one of the world’s largest lagoons, it lies at the edge of the Coral Sea, halfway between the great island of New Guinea and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The people of Vanatinai are militant cultural conservatives. One obvious index of this is the fact that most women go bare-breasted and wear skirts of shredded coconut leaf—the so-called grass skirt. Its 2,300 or so people speak their own unwritten language, which I was the first lumolumo, “European,” to learn. Despite a previous six generations of intermittent contact, there were no other Europeans living on the island while I was conducting ethnographic research. The islanders are subsistence horticulturalists who also fish, forage, and hunt in the rain forest. They have twelve matrilineal clans, each with its own multiple totem animals and plants (birds, fish, crocodiles, trees, vines) to whom they feel special bonds of kinship and emotional attachment. The islanders continue to sail outrigger canoes on long expeditions to distant islands to search for shell disc necklaces and polished greenstone axe blades to exchange at elaborate feasts honoring the dead. This network of ceremonial exchange and barter, in which women and men alike participate, is cognate to kula, the inter-island ceremonial exchange made famous by Malinowski (1922; cf. Lepowsky 1993). The islanders understand their environment to be animate and full of agency. Every rock outcropping, section of reef, and mountaintop is individually named, the home of a place spirit. The islanders communicate freely—in daily conversation, magical petitions, dreams—with ancestor spirits, who may appear in the form of certain birds or snakes or sharks. Vanatinai is regionally notorious for its powerful sorcerers, and the islanders believe firmly in the personal causation of misfortune. Virtually all deaths, serious illnesses, or misfortunes are attributed to the sorcery or witchcraft of another, or to the retributive acts of ancestors’ spirits or place spirits, the result of the victim or a kinsperson having violated a taboo (ghabubu), a sacred proscription.

Personhood, Empathy, and “the Native’s Point of View”

47

The philosophical principle of personal opacity, the interiority of others’ thoughts/feelings (renuanga), is closely bound to the islanders’ fierce insistence on personal autonomy, both as cultural ideology and as daily social practice. The cultural value of personal autonomy coexists uneasily on Vanatinai with conflicting notions of relational personhood: with the ties, identifications, and obligations of kinship and affinity; and with a cultural ideal of sharing and generosity, of giving to others unselfishly without considering one’s own desires, just as a parent would a child.2 Greed, anger, and jealousy—that is, inner states and desires that conflict with cultural ideals of harmonious sharing—ideally remain concealed and thus do not disrupt the social fabric. But individual will and desires visibly affect a person’s behavior, leaving observers to guess at the motivations—or to give up on an attempt to do so, except through their own concealed private thoughts and feelings—as they review the nonverbal, verbal, and behavioral cues of others. “Why didn’t she even go to the feast, or contribute a ceremonial valuable, when she’s so closely related to the widow?” I asked privately, after I got to know some people well. Or, “Why doesn’t he work more in the garden, the way his wife wants him to, instead of going off hunting wild pigs all the time?” The usual answer, delivered with an island shrug—a quick intake of breath, a tilting of the head, a lifting of the eyebrows, a significant glance—was “She/He doesn’t want to” (Nige nuai). Another common response was “That’s the way they are,” or, translated more literally, “It’s something of theirs” (Be iye), referring to the individual in question. Or the reply could be a theatrically rhetorical “Who knows!” This last, the idiomatic expression Ku ghai, literally means something like “What she/he is eating/consuming,” which has the intriguing connotation of something—thoughts, feelings—incorporated into the self, becoming part of the person. No adult on Vanatinai, in customary life, has the right to tell another adult what to do. Colonial and national government superstructures of authority have had only indifferent success at influencing island lives. Mission influence on the island, both Protestant and Catholic, has been notably weaker than elsewhere in the region, or in the Pacific more generally. What islanders do is try to influence another through persuasive speech, sometimes with words made hot by convincing magic, through attempts to induce shame through gossip or threat, through ostracism, or by withdrawing altogether from cohabitation in a house or hamlet. And the islanders agree that their regional notoriety as sorcerers and witches is well earned. Nonconformists—and there are many on the island—are confident in their individual magical powers and relations with spirit entities. These enable them to ignore or resist the gossip and entreaties of others, and live as they choose.

48

Maria Lepowsky

A strong belief in the power to aggressively project one’s desires or wishes onto, and within, the person of another explicitly underlies the principle of personal autonomy in island theories of personhood. This power resides in magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. In the practice of sorcery, islanders understand this quite literally, as occurring through the firing of magical projectiles into the body of a victim. In order to recover from such an attack, a healer must ritually suck the projectile out of the afflicted person. Magic (kukura), sorcery (ribiroi), and witchcraft (wadawada) work on the same principle: the subversion of the autonomy of another, their will, changing their interior state of being. In the case of magic this is often done by making the target negenege, or dizzy with desire. You work your persuasive and seductive exchange magic or love magic, which in turn has been empowered by your own prior relations with senior kin, a powerful magician or sorcerer, and the individual ancestor spirit or place spirit whom you previously and secretly petitioned for aid. Then the renuanga—the thoughts, feelings, desires of your exchange partner (of either sex), or of the person you are trying to make your lover—will turn only to you, and (as island elders instructed me privately) the person will then hasten to give you the greenstone axe blade you desire, or (in love magic) her or his genitals. Magical spells (including the spells of destructive magic such as sorcery) involve at least three persons: the actor, the object of desire or enmity, and the spirit entity whom the magical spell, the kukura, addresses. Such spells are petitions to ancestor spirits for assistance in influencing a desired outcome: the seduction, metaphorical or actual, of an exchange partner or lover, or the illness and death of an enemy. Generally the intent of a magical spell, recited in private before the interaction with the object of desire, or before the harvesting of yams, for example, is to invoke the pity or compassion of the spirit being or beings, their identification with the desires of the petitioner, and her or his state of need: in other words, their empathy. “My mother, my kinsman”: Beda’s kukura began with a reference to her ancestors as she crouched in her hillside yam garden with a digging stick, alone except for me, and spat ginger and other substances on the ground. “We are poor, hungry people, your children. Take pity on us…” Pity or compassion among human persons, an identification with their feelings, especially their sadness, is part of daily life on Vanatinai. Islanders seemed to me shrewd judges of one another’s moods, decoding signs and symptoms, words and nonverbal cues, social situations. My husband sent me a photograph of himself sitting on our front porch in Berkeley with a friend. At that point I hadn’t seen him for about a year. Bode, my neighbor, took it and studied his face carefully. “Leghomoli iran Maria,” she pronounced to the assembled spectators. “Her husband is crying for Maria.” I took the photo back and studied it again, this time seeing an unmistakable sadness in his face I hadn’t been able to bring

Personhood, Empathy, and “the Native’s Point of View”

49

myself to notice at first. The letter that came with the photo asked when I was finally coming home. One of the most significant cultural institutions on Vanatinai, the mortuary ritual complex, provides a means for publicly expressing something closely akin to the Western idea of empathy. Islanders express compassion, pity, or sorrow for the predicted or imagined suffering of others by ritually, quite literally, crying for another’s pain. This culturally formalized empathic grieving is central to a years-long sequence of mortuary rituals and ceremonial exchanges—of shell necklaces, polished greenstone axe blades, pigs, and the like—that binds matrilineal kin of the deceased to the clans of the deceased’s father and widowed spouse (Lepowsky 1993). Nevertheless, a mourner’s public, ritualized wailing may, to the inner bitterness and rage of some observers, mask a successful sorcery or witchcraft attack upon the deceased. Actors and observers alike describe ritual mourning, including the formal crying for the deceased, after the death, at the burial, and during key points in the mortuary ritual sequence, as work, kaiwa. Islanders do not speak about ritual wailing, their own or others’, as outward evidence of an internal state of grief or as a mourner’s identification with the emotions of a newly widowed spouse or bereft child. It must be performed on behalf of the bereaved by certain categories of affines or kin, and the ritual mourner must eventually be compensated for this kaiwa with valuables by, for example, a surviving spouse or a father’s adult child. Like a Method actor, the person who cries draws upon inner emotions, or memories of past emotions, calling out while sobbing, “O my cross-cousin, why have you left us alone? I will never see you again.” Others judge each individual’s mourning performance covertly for its emotional sincerity, or for the possibility that it masks the vicious satisfaction of a successful homicide accomplished through sorcery or witchcraft. Islanders publicly, rhetorically deny the possibility of empathy, of imaginative understanding of and identification with the thoughts/feelings of another being. In private, within a current, constantly fluctuating group of trusted confidants—spouses, lovers, siblings, matrilineal kin—they conjecture at length, in exacting detail, based upon a range of external cues, about what others are thinking and feeling, their renuanga, and how this may affect their interactions with others in the recent past, present, or future. There is no cultural emphasis on the danger of gossip on Vanatinai. The risk in spreading gossip is similar to other kinds of risks that islanders take in daily life: possible retaliation by the angered subject of gossip, either through public speech (including the ritual challenge, or uraura) or through privately worked destructive magic.3 Gossip—the discourse, often covert, of decoding and interpreting the actions and thoughts/feelings of others—is an everyday occurrence on Vanatinai. It is sometimes sympathetic or admiring, but it is often malicious. It is also risky, as the target may learn of it or suspect it, and fly into a dangerous rage.

50

Maria Lepowsky

“That young woman is feeling pleased, look at her, she must have finally seduced my cross-cousin last night, that’s why. She’s been trying for a long time. You can see how she is walking, her smile, that hibiscus she stuck in her hair. Maybe she got some strong love magic, might be from her mother’s brother.” Or, “Eh, that youth might be feeling shame (Ne imwajina). We all heard that girl cry out indignantly from her sleeping mat last night and then send him away. Didn’t you see him leaving, Maria?” At this point we all laugh at his mortification, evident in his hunched shoulders and averted gaze. Or, “That big man is happy because all the Jelewaga people, not just the ones from his hamlet, his close kin, went across the bay to help plant his new yam garden. He might still be feeling generous at harvest time. Maybe he’ll help if I ask him for a greenstone axe blade.” Note the frequent use of the conditional tense in these translated, slightly paraphrased examples of private conversations about others, their actions, and their inner emotional states. These utterances are working hypotheses to be tested in future social interactions, not statements of fact.4 Negative emotions are of course the most volatile, dangerous, and potentially disruptive of the social fabric on Vanatinai, so they are the ones the islanders privately talk about the most. “That widow might be feeling especially sad today about the death of her husband. She looks mournful. O, that is truly sad.” Since his death several seasons earlier likely resulted from either sorcery or witchcraft (from the widow’s and her neighbors’ point of view, although scenarios and explanations of root causes could vary), the speaker may identify with the widow, experiencing something of the poignancy of her grief. The observer may have loved the widow’s deceased husband too, as a kinsman, and very likely has experienced grief and mourning herself. But the widow’s barely hidden grief, more visible today than usual, is inherently volatile and may swing toward rage, accusation, or a covert supernatural attack, either by her or by one of her kin motivated to act on her behalf. The islanders are respectful of such volatility: “That old man, Zeyala, might still be angry because that woman from the north coast, his exchange partner, wouldn’t give him a bagi [shell-disc necklace] when he went to see her last month. He is a powerful sorcerer; people say maybe he killed his own wife. Who knows how he might lash out next. It would be good to stay away from him for a while, until his renuanga become less hot, and to keep children away from where he is, so they don’t become his next victim.” “Sosoro, the young woman up the hill, is jealous (iyamokabo) and angry (igaizi),” the neighbors say, watching her pass from the shade under the house, chewing betel nut and speaking in low tones. “That’s because her husband— they are estranged, you know [this to me]—he’s been sleeping with that pretty young widow in the next hamlet, the one near the swamp.” In this particular case, Sosoro soon thereafter marched over to her rival’s house and physically

Personhood, Empathy, and “the Native’s Point of View”

51

attacked her, scratching her face and knocking her down. Overt violence is quite a rare event on the island. People explain that this is due to what, to them, is an obvious reason: the immediate danger it provokes of supernatural retaliatory attack. Sosoro’s two-year-old son died suddenly about a week later, of what was to me a tragic case of cerebral malaria. All my neighbors, including Sosoro’s own parents, attributed the little boy’s death to the retaliatory witchcraft of the other woman’s mother. The interiority of renuanga, thoughts/feelings, is partially exteriorized by a number of means, including reported dreams and dream analyses, reports of spirit visitations, and of course the actions or inactions of another and their congruence with social expectations. The most common form of evidence under discussion by others is the analysis of discourse and its accompanying nonverbal cues. In all of these forms, the evidence of another’s inner states is verbally exteriorized, then pragmatically assessed (cf. Feinberg, this volume, for Anuta). But speech acts, like other forms of action, can be deceptive. During a days-long exchange journey in search of ceremonial valuables ( ghune, cognate to kula), Malabwaga listened impassively as an exchange partner on the north coast explained at length why he could not give her the greenstone axe blade she sought. She turned and politely took her leave. Another woman from Jelewaga and I followed her. That night, sitting by the fire, after our hosts had silently brought us cooked food and then withdrawn, she exploded in wrath. “Ikwanuanga ghino! That man is lying to me! He has that axe blade in his basket; he is just saving it for something else, even though he owes me for the one I gave him last year! He is deceiving me.” This is a common verdict, pronounced later to intimates, upon another’s utterances: Ikwan, “S/he is lying.” Ikwanuanga ghino, “S/he is lying to me.” Social interaction on Vanatinai is often deceptive, and the motives of others—neighbors, affines, exchange partners, spouses, and kin—are suspect. Full understanding of the thoughts/feelings of another is impossible. But it would be foolhardy and dangerous not to conjecture, to oneself or among a small circle of (currently) trusted associates, about what lies behind another’s smile or neutral gaze, and to behave accordingly. This is a core approach to living among supernaturally powerful, potentially volatile, and autonomous persons in a place where no one can tell another what to do. Sorcery (which is deliberate and purposeful), witchcraft (which may either be involuntary or conscious, learned, and deliberate), and destructive magic more generally constitute a deliberate refusal of empathy on the part of the attacker, an indifference to the suffering of the prospective victim and the future grief of her or his loved ones. Sorcerers and witches turn human beings into prey. The sorcerer is commonly said to be hot with rage, or burning for revenge, sometimes openly, more often covertly. Witches may fly in from across the island, or from other islands, to attack victims or hold cannibal feasts with

52

Maria Lepowsky

each other, exchanging victims like pigs. Witches may act in their sleep, motivated by powerful inner states such as rage at a slight. They leave their bodies behind, squatting like predatory birds on the rooftops of their victims or capturing their reflections in a pool or mirror, causing slow wasting illnesses such as cancers or polio or dementia. They are also the cause, islanders say, of catastrophes such as falls from trees or drownings. Shipwreck survivors later report hearing witches whispering to each other, or perhaps to a kinsperson (to attack, or to warn of another witch’s attack) just before a canoe capsizes in a sudden, violent storm. On Vanatinai it is a customary and frequent, though covert, move to imagine another’s point of view, another’s emotional and cognitive state of being, imagining how one might oneself think and feel in the other person’s psychic situation. Islanders make this move of imagination and identification not, primarily, out of compassion for others or a desire for, or value on, emotional closeness, but out of concern, wariness, or outright fear. This strategy meshes well with an island outlook on the world that resembles what Theodore Schwartz (1973), informed by his ethnographic understandings of Manus in the mid twentieth century and influenced by reports of Reo Fortune for Dobu and by Ruth Benedict’s interpretations of them (1934), described as a “paranoid ethos.” This, he claimed, was characteristic of the Melanesian region as a whole. While I would not agree that a paranoid cognitive orientation distinguishes all the cultures of the Southwest Pacific, and although the term bears distinctly unfortunate connotations of individual and societal pathology, I do recognize elements of a similar worldview and affective tone in Vanatinai people’s powerful fears of the destructive agency of other persons, including other-than-human persons. Schwartz attributes a paranoid ethos, in part, to “the extreme atomism of social and political life,” to the constant threat and “omnidirectionality of war and raiding,” and to “[u]ncertainty … experienced as a pervasive threat in terms of the premises of a cosmology of animate and personal causation” (1973: 155–156). Relevant for our close analysis in this volume of empathy in Pacific cultures, Schwartz observes, “[t]he paranoia of Melanesia combines realism and autism, fear and hostility, sensitivity to the intentions and submerged meanings of others, and fluency in layered discourse” (1973: 156–157). This kind of heightened sensitivity to, and clandestine interpretation of, the intentions, hidden meanings, and concealed emotional states of others, in some form, I would argue, always accompanies a cultural philosophy of the opacity of other’s inner states. On Vanatinai, the atomism to which Schwartz refers—the lack of established authority over the actions of others—continues despite several generations’ worth of intermittent attempts at colonial and national intervention and political control. The islanders’ major structural solution to a pervasive fear of the destructive emotions and supernatural powers of

Personhood, Empathy, and “the Native’s Point of View”

53

others is their elaborate mortuary ritual sequence, compensating the bereaved for their grief and loss. Ritual exchanges, while in no way an overt admission of complicity in the death of a spouse or in-law, are regarded by givers and receivers alike as sasi, compensation, for a death. They work, ideally, to forestall any additional retaliatory supernatural attacks, warding off further harm to the widow(er) or children of a deceased parent, who are the principal mourners. It is the exchange of valuables among matrilineages that gradually, over time, as passions cool, reknits the social fabric rent by a death (Lepowsky 1993).5

Empathy, Narrative, and Ethnographic Understandings

What do these philosophies of knowledge and social relations imply for thinking about empathy and transcultural understanding as the foundations of anthropological epistemology and method? Given the painful limits of our human abilities to transcend interpersonal and cultural difference through imaginative identification with another, how can we go about seeing the world, even if only partially, from “the native’s point of view”? I have returned to this vexing question, the focus of this chapter, as a result of reflections on the challenges of ethnographic representation. I have recently completed a fieldwork memoir (Lepowsky, in press) intended for a broad reading public as well as for anthropologists, about my first, extended sojourn on a remote South Sea Island, that is to say, Vanatinai. Writing this narrative was a long, quite often emotionally painful process of recalling vivid, charged encounters and conversations of my younger self, reading and rereading hundreds of pages of my own field notes and letters from the field, and imaginatively evoking incidents, words, and feelings, my own and the islanders’. It has led me to consider afresh the puzzle of how an outside anthropologist, or anyone, really, can fairly represent a valid answer to a question that the islanders themselves say is unknowable, “What were they thinking/feeling?” Ethnographically informed narrative, the process of telling and retelling stories of intersubjective experiences in the field, at home, and in print, can create a path toward at least a partial empathy, a partial identification, between ethnographer and subjects.6 This is a mutual process. The islanders frequently told stories about me as well, both within and outside of my hearing, some of which were repeated and interpreted to me by other hearers. It was through the islanders’ stories, their imaginative attempts at understanding, that I came to at least some understanding of my own of who they thought I was, what I was thinking/feeling, and what I was doing on their island. “Look how long her hair is!” exclaimed a woman on the north coast whom I had never met before. “That is because she is in mourning for her mother-in-law. When she goes back to America, she will make the feast for her mother-in-law.”

54

Maria Lepowsky

My own renuanga, my thoughts and feelings, keep returning to my most perplexing and troubling encounters in the field. These stories told by the islanders to me and to their neighbors—these interactions—were deeply disturbing, both at the time and long afterward. They place into sharp relief for me the limits of empathy and the possibilities of intersubjective understanding in the anthropological encounter among persons whose worldviews radically differ. Yet they were key events that continue, decades later, to inform my (partial, imperfect) insights into the islanders’ renuanga, their vision of their world, “from the native’s point of view.” And so these stories, and my ongoing attempts to make sense of them, helped shape the narrative of my field memoir. As soon as I landed on the shore Vanatinai (although I did not realize it until much later), certain influential elders identified me as an ancestor spirit returned to my island home from America, the land of the dead, and as a harbinger of a mass return of island spirits. This belief in my spirit identity—which continued, despite my strenuous denials, over many years—was generationally marked: only islanders born before World War II saw me as a returning spirit. Still, this identification will likely endure until the last of these elders has joined the ancestors.7 The narrative I wrote about Vanatinai is of course my story, my own “native’s point of view” as tyro ethnographer in the islands, at least as I re-imagined and remembered the experience years later. I am present in the text as narrator, actor, object, and imperfect instrument of intercultural understanding. My readers could make no sense of these ethnographic encounters if I edited myself out except as omniscient narrator or scholarly analyst. Intersubjective communications and mutual (mis)understandings are central to my ethnographic, and scientific, data. Fieldwork is, after all, a scientific method: naturalistic observation.8 Working with other human beings, describing a social situation in which they took part or the perceived emotional tone of a ritual event, field observers position themselves within the social field, writing themselves, if minimally, into the text for clarity or explanation. As Clifford (1983) memorably observes, modernist ethnographic authority consists primarily of the existential statement, however elaborately documented in our writings, “I was there.” Narrative can allow the reader to accompany the ethnographer along the paths of a journey, the fraught and gradual unfolding of (partial, sometimes mistaken) intersubjective understandings and emotional identifications. It is especially useful for conveying a sense of the imagined, projected feelings of those whose lives are so different from those of the observer and eventual reader that they are baffling, opaque. It can depict the long process of crossing seemingly impenetrable barriers to knowing and to empathy. Here, for

Personhood, Empathy, and “the Native’s Point of View”

55

example, is British anthropologist Piers Vitebsky, writing of his first arrival, in a post–World War II bi-plane, in Sebyan, a Soviet-era village of seven hundred Eveny, Siberian reindeer herders who control a vast territory of taiga and permafrost, a month’s walk northwest of Yakutsk. Yet it was not the physical isolation of the place that made it feel so remote. Like a space traveller who visits a planet in another dimension, I appeared to be invisible. The lack of eye contact did not seem to be from fear, as in [Soviet] Leningrad, but because the people led a self-absorbed existence that left no room for relations with a visitor from another world. Everyone was going about their business, and this business seemed deeply unknowable.… I did not yet understand the Eveny cultural ethos of not intruding on others, though as an anthropologist I should have noticed that my every move was being noticed and judged. (2005: 42) Of course this initial sense of the unknowable Eveny—and, significantly for our task in this volume, their purposeful lack of outward display of empathy, concern for, or even curiosity about, an outsider—later changes, after long months and years of co-residence, the subject of Vitebsky’s insightful narrative ethnography. Some of our colleagues and critics will forever be deeply suspicious of the rhetorical move of writing ourselves into the story. Many view the humanistic genre of narrative—with its foregoing of esoteric jargons and specialist argots—as narcissistic, self-indulgent, romantic, sensationalist, impressionistic, unscientific, and so on (cf. Okely 1992). It is no accident, either, that narrative, like the humanities, is gendered in academic and popular discourses as feminine, soft, thus lower in prestige, scientific value, and supposed impact (cf. Behar 1995; Tedlock 1995). It is similarly no accident that nonfiction narrative conventionally encompasses a narrator’s testimony about emotional states, those of self and of others. Emotions, versus reason, and the very act of empathy, of imaginatively identifying with others, are explicitly gendered as female in European and Euro-American cultures, more so than in other world cultures (Strauss 2004). This European-derived cultural motif actually leads to a peculiar contradiction, simultaneously of ethnographic method and the persona of the ethnographer. On the one hand, the ethnographer assumes the persona of hero, as Susan Sontag (1966) observed about Lévi-Strauss in her essay on Tristes Tropiques (1973)—a distinctly masculine hero at that, an adventurer (Simmel 1911) who moves about the world, engaging others on his own terms. On the other hand, though, s/he is supposed to listen to others, to learn from them, to identify with their point of view, to understand their “vision of [their] world.”

56

Maria Lepowsky

The latter are, from a Western perspective, distinctly feminine characteristics grounded in listening to others and imaginatively experiencing their emotional states: in other words, feeling empathy. As medical anthropologists Linda Garro and Cheryl Mattingly (2000: 1) point out, “[n]arrative is a fundamental human way of giving meaning to experience.” Still, to use the subdiscipline of medical anthropology as an example, illness narratives (Garro and Mattingly 2000; Kleinman 1988, 1995; Mattingly 1998), first recounted by the sufferer and then excerpted, retold, and analyzed by the ethnographer, are more commonly incorporated into scholarly writings than narrative accounts of a medical anthropologist’s own field research and quest for understanding. Memoirs by clinicians are much more common than memoirs by medical anthropologists. Only a charismatic and confident few medical anthropologists deploy narrative to dramatic effect in their ethnographies, as a rhetorical means of communicating intersubjective understandings. The most visible, not coincidentally, are those authors who take as their subject the suffering and interior emotional states of ethnographic others, such as Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992) on “death without weeping” among impoverished mothers and children in Northeast Brazil, and Paul Farmer (2001) on illness and misfortune among Haiti’s rural poor. Some of the best-known or most illustrious of our anthropological forebears, including Malinowski, Boas, Benedict, and Mead, employed narrative rhetorical strategies, pitching their works to a broad reading public. But as early as the 1940s, their intellectual descendants had become uneasy about such a move (MacClancy 1996: 31). Witness Evans-Pritchard’s nastily intended remark about Mead’s “discursive … chatty and feminine style” and “rustling-of-the-wind-in-the-palm-trees style of anthropological writing” (Lutkehaus 1995). This was not only sexism at work. Phyllis Kaberry, a student of Malinowski’s who conducted fieldwork with aborigines in Northwest Australia, recorded in 1957 her fear of writing in her teacher’s “impressionistic and subjective style” (MacClancy 1996: 31; cf. Thornton 1983). The scientistic rhetorical fashion was in full cry in anthropology after World War II. Problemfocused research design, including hypothesis testing, was the vogue in the post-Sputnik era, not least because it was more likely to secure funding from a source such as the U.S. National Science Foundation. Malinowski, maligned by his intellectual descendants in mid-century for what was to them an embarrassing lack of rigor, begins Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) by staking a rhetorical claim for a new, modern figure: the ethnographer, a scientist, his work in sharp contrast to “the inferior amateur’s writing”—that is, books by the traveler or “white residents in the district” (1922: 5–6). Like Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss (1973 [1955]: 3) takes care to distance himself rhetorically from mere writers of travelers’ tales. He too is a scientist, an ethnologist. “I hate travelling and explorers,” reads the first

Personhood, Empathy, and “the Native’s Point of View”

57

sentence of Tristes Tropiques. “[T]his kind of narrative [travelogue] enjoys a vogue which I, for my part, find incomprehensible.” Lévi-Strauss then proceeds to write just such a narrative, albeit an ethnographically informed one, a record of intersubjective and intercultural encounter.9 The tension between anthropology as science and as humanistic research is now at least a century old. Nevertheless, narrative has surfaced throughout, a contrapuntal rhetorical tradition, highlighting the messy ethnographic process of intersubjective identification, rupture, miscommunication, and understanding. Ethnographically informed narrative is clear and transparent only on the surface, engaging a reader’s willing suspension of disbelief or, put another way, acceptance of the author’s ethnographic authority to convey the actions and inner thoughts of distant others (cf. Clifford 1983). It is always, of course, a rhetorical construction. A fieldwork memoir offers interpretations of ethnographic encounter and reflection, partial and subjective, the story of a slow, imperfect process of making sense of singular, emotionally charged encounters with others unlike ourselves. All these years after I first went to the outer islands, I am left with fundamental questions. How do islanders truly think/feel about the misfortunes of others, the power of sorcery, the dangerous volatility of spirit beings? How do they know what they know? Can I truly experience empathy with them, identify with, think/feel their renuanga? How can I represent my unfolding, partial understandings, meaningfully communicating them to my readers (Papua New Guinean or German or Australian)? My field narrative, my memoir, is explicitly subjective, evocative of another place and state of being, stripped of jargon and professional esoterica, narrated years later from memory, field notes, and old blue air letters with Papua New Guinea’s red bird of paradise logo emblazoned on them. What could it contribute to the project of intersubjective, imaginative identification with those who are radically other, and to the historic project of modernist anthropology? I am left wondering whether narrative can actually build toward empathy, using the medium of the ethnographer/narrator’s own empathic and imaginative experiences to meaningfully communicate fundamental epistemologies that differ radically from those of most readers.

Narrative, Empathy, and “The Moral of the Story”

I suspect it is not a coincidence that recent anthropological writings on empathy and the ethnographic encounter come not only from psychological and linguistic anthropologists but from accomplished writers of ethnographic narrative such as Jean Briggs (2008), Ruth Behar (1996), and Alma Gottlieb (2004). These are scholars who have grappled not only with problems of in-

58

Maria Lepowsky

tersubjective identification in the field but with the issue of how to represent meaningfully the lived experience of others in their texts, to record through narrative their imaginative projections of another’s thoughts and feelings. The answers to the questions I have just posed lie in the cognitive and affective responses of individual readers. In my fieldwork memoir, I recount my own retrospective stories of especially dramatic ethnographic encounters in order to communicate my own insights to others. Thus I tell at some length how I was taken—mistaken, from my perspective—for a returned ancestor spirit, including an account of my own shifting emotional and cognitive inner states as I vividly recall them or recorded them at the time: my responses to these stories, these narratives, woven and refined over time by island elders and based in turn on previous, braided colonial and cargoistic narratives of intercultural contact. When I finally allowed myself to believe—that is, when a man named Miso came right out and said it one night, after I had resisted and denied it to myself for months—that my older neighbors, people I counted as friends, truly believed in my own spirit identity, I was at first elated and fascinated. Very quickly, though, I felt quite hurt, and for a long while afterward I was deeply depressed. Here I am, all alone, I thought to myself (I was actually surrounded by people), and they don’t even think I’m a human being. I was responding, I eventually came to realize, to what I perceived as the elders’ lack of emotional identification with me as a person: the limits, in other words, of their empathy for me, a person they seemed to see as inherently volatile and thus potentially dangerous. This peculiar (to me) and unexpected subject position led me to ask some basic ethnographic questions about what happens, emotionally and perceptually, when elders see themselves as in a social relation with a spirit: me, for example. Did they exhibit an affect of wariness and guardedness (often), of fear (absolutely, in a few individuals), or of intimate warmth and even familial love, a joy at reencountering a person who had seemingly departed for another, distant place after her death but had now come home? In this last instance I am remembering the intimate, loving gaze of Dosin, a big man I knew well and spent weeks with, who (I heard afterward) sailed around the island telling everyone that I was Taineghubwa, his beloved stepmother, dead three years before—buried, it turned out, in the scrub about twenty-five feet from where I slept—returned from America, the land of the dead. This experience of conflicting, intersecting narratives of who I was and what I was doing on the island (mine, the elders’, the younger islanders’) led me in turn to think more deeply about how all the islanders related, through magic, ritual, and the daily negotiations of an animate landscape, to spirit entities, totem beings, and sacred places. What were the extent and the limits of

Personhood, Empathy, and “the Native’s Point of View”

59

their understanding, of their emotional identification with these other agentive beings? How were magical and oratorical persuasion deployed by a hunter, a weather magician, a woman harvesting her yams, a sorcerer, a person on an exchange journey, all of them addressing, in some fashion, other-than-human persons?10 These island narratives, charged with shifting emotions—the islanders’ and mine alike—are key, I believe, to understanding the worldviews, the epistemologies, the renuanga, the thoughts and feelings, of influential islanders and elders. It was through coming into both an emotional and intellectual relationship with these narratives of otherness, constructed by others about my self, that I gradually gained a measure of emotional insight into my island neighbors. My own narrative is partial and subjective, but evidence nonetheless of what islanders may have been thinking and feeling, and how they in turn perceived our complicated encounters. The island philosophy of the ultimate unknowability of the inner states of others serves as a useful caution, because it ultimately holds true for all interpersonal encounters in any society. We may think we know. The islanders publicly claim no such omniscience. My readers are unlikely to meet the islanders, will never have the same experiences I did nor intersect the islanders at a time that is now well past. Narratives of emotional and intellectual discovery offer readers a chance of a growing identification, of empathy, with the ethnographic self, represented as protagonist in the text, as participant in intercultural encounters, as observer and fledgling ethnographer. Fieldwork narratives use ancient, effective rhetorical tropes—the journey, the encounter, the retrospective retelling—to communicate complexities. They evoke telling ethnographic details of daily life, affective tone, ceremony, and crisis to convey something of others’ lived realities, their (emotionally imagined) inner thoughts and feelings, their perceptions of the world, and their place in it. What, then, is “the moral of the story” for thinking about empathy, personhood, and narrative? Readers’ feelings of empathy and identification are at still another remove from the ethnographic encounter. The researcher’s quest for empathy with ethnographic subjects is highly imperfect and only partly achievable. It is based on intersubjectivities, on intersecting narratives, theirs and ours, as continually reinterpreted by our selves. The goal of ethnographically informed narrative is for a culturally distant, initially opaque people, along with their ways of thinking and feeling, to grow more familiar and closer as readers continue their own imaginative journeys. Experience-near, reflexive, ethnographically detailed narratives of intersubjective encounters can be at least a partial path to empathy—a compelling way of portraying, without the distancing genre conventions of monograph or scholarly article, the contours, emotional tone, and subjective details of the lives of others.

60

Maria Lepowsky

Notes My research on Vanatinai, Papua New Guinea, has been supported since 1977 by the National Science Foundation; the Chancellor’s Patent Fund of the University of California, Berkeley; the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health; the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; the American Philosophical Society; the American Council of Learned Societies; and the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I gratefully acknowledge all of this financial support. Portions of earlier versions of this chapter were read or circulated among session participants at the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania Annual Meetings in San Diego, California; Charlottesville, Virginia; and Canberra, Australia. I thank Douglas Hollan, C. Jason Throop, and the other session participants and attendees for their valuable comments and Niko Besnier for later fruitful discussions. I also thank Rupert Stasch and three anonymous reviewers of my manuscript as submitted to the ASAO Monograph Series for their suggestions. 1. The phrase comes from Robbins and Rumsey (2008). See Schieffelin (2008), Robbins (2008), Stasch (2008), and Rumsey (2008) for Melanesia, but also Keane (2008) for Sumba in eastern Indonesia, Feinberg (this volume) for the Polynesian island of Anuta, and Throop (this volume) for Yap, Micronesia. There are notable variations and cultural nuances in this range of ethnographic reports. The cultural situation is complicated by the advent, often recent, of powerful ideologies of Christian conversion, ideas of the individuated Christian self, and the individual responsibility of sincere confession of sin and internal desire (Keane 2007, 2008; Robbins 2008; cf. Lohmann, this volume, for the Asabano and Hermann, this volume, on Christian identity and historical transformations of concepts of pity and empathy among Banabans in Fiji). 2. Theorists of self and person in non-Western cultures, notably including the Pacific Islands, have offered an array of terms to convey a contrast with Western notions of the individual self—socio-centric personhood, relational personhood, “dividual,” the partible person—that emphasize structural and symbolic aspects of personhood as defined by relation to its social field, and by its roles and social identities (e.g., Dumont 1970; Mageo, this volume; Strathern 1988; White 1992; White and Fitzpatrick 1985). These formulations, while heuristically valuable in thinking about cultural difference in ethos and worldview, risk rigidifying a dichotomy between Western individualism versus concepts of person and self in the rest of the world. These terms also raise the problem of eliding individual agency and internally experienced senses of self (cf. White 1992). In addition, theoretical constructs of the sociocentric person a risk a static depiction of psychocultural phenomena and can obscure the historical contexts of cultural transformations, including those of personhood and self (cf. Wardlow 2007; Hermann, this volume). Wardlow (2007: 4–9) develops a related critique by placing female agency at the center of her exploration of the lives of young Huli women, a critique that challenges the applicability of relational, sociocentric person concepts such as the “dividual” in other Melanesian cultures, and by extension in other nonWestern ones. Stephen (1996) documents Mekeo sorcery beliefs, notions of permeable personhood, and explicit concerns with self-differentiation. As Hallowell (1955) long ago pointed out, all human concepts of self exist and take meaning from a behavioral environment, from a range of interactions of self and other. Mines (1988, 1994), using analyses of Tamil personhood to critique Dumont’s generalizing of his concept of the

Personhood, Empathy, and “the Native’s Point of View”

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

61

“dividual” to all Indian societies, argues that every human culture possesses a range of modalities of personhood, and that Tamil concepts of individualism exist (alongside caste, kinship, and other social identities), yet are culturally distinct from those of the West. This lack of any stigma attached to gossip contrasts with many other Pacific cultures, both those New Guinea societies that similarly deny the ability to know what others are thinking (for example the Kaluli as discussed in Schieffelin 2008) and those Polynesian cultures that place a strong cultural emphasis on aropa or alofa—pity, compassion, empathy for others (see chapters by Feinberg and Mageo, in this volume, for Anuta and Samoa, respectively; and Hollan, this volume, on Toraja villagers’ use of discourses of persuasion to elicit the pity of others). In at least one Polynesian atoll culture, Nukualaelae in Tuvalu, where gossip is sanctioned yet prevalent, there is also a term for mutual empathy, feaalofani (Besnier 2009: 45). Feinberg, this volume, makes a similar argument about the hypothetical, pragmatic quality of empathy assumptions on Anuta. A similar cultural solution is prevalent among their regional neighbors in the islands to the northwest, stretching at least as far as Dobu, which has its own traditions of powerful sorcerers and flying witches, made famous in anthropology by Malinowski (1922) and Fortune (1932); cf. Damon and Wagner (1989). Narrative appears in anthropological life histories beginning with Paul Radin (1926) and in anthropological oral histories from the time of Boas. It flowers eventually into fieldwork memoirs (Lévi-Strauss 1973 [1955]; Powdermaker 1966), portraits of anthropological informants (Casagrande 1960; Crapanzano 1980), and the reflexive, narrative anthropologies and auto-ethnographies of more recent generations (Behar 1993, 1996; Briggs 1970; Narayan 1989, 1997, 2007; Rabinow 1979; Reed-Danahay 1997; Scheper-Hughes 1992). Theoretical analyses of this “textual move” have become highly visible in cultural anthropology since the 1980s (Clifford 1983; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1988). It was through a process I recount in the memoir that I gradually learned that the islanders born before World War II—and no one born afterward—perceived me as an ancestor spirit, returned from America, the land of the dead, a place of immense riches and spiritual power. This fits into a series of secretive prophetic movements and cargo cults that swept the region, and other parts of New Guinea, during the colonial era, continuing well beyond it. I washed up on the island and became an unwitting figure (to the elders, at least) in a cargoistic movement: a harbinger of the apocalypse, that is, the return of the rest of the spirits of the beloved dead, who will one day come sailing back with all the cargo, the wealth—gold, metal tools, store goods—and thus the power that Europeans stole from its rightful owners, the islanders (see also Lepowsky 1993, 2004). The term was introduced into anthropology by Alfred Cort Haddon, one of Malinowski’s teachers, who originally trained as an ornithologist (Stocking 1983). Pratt (1986), a literary critic, shows how anthropologists employ the same tropes as travel writers do when describing similar regions: the Amazon, the Pacific Islands. See Hallowell (1960), Brightman (1993), Willerslev (2004), and Vitebsky (2005) for analyses of the challenges of social interaction with other-than-human persons. These ethnographic examples are drawn from studies of North American foragers (the Ojibwe and Woods Cree) and Siberian foragers and reindeer herders (the Yukaghir

62

Maria Lepowsky

and Eveny). In each case the extent and limits of identification and empathy with animals, animal spirit guardians, and other spirit entities are foundational to indigenous worldviews and concepts of person.

Bibliography Behar, Ruth. 1993. Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1995. “Introduction: Out of Exile.” In Women Writing Culture, ed. Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1996. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press. Benedict, Ruth. 1934. Patterns of Culture. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Besnier, Niko. 2009. Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Briggs, Jean. 1970. Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family. Harvard: Harvard University Press. ———. 2008. “Daughter and Pawn: One Ethnographer’s Routes to Understanding Children.” Ethos 36 (4): 449–456. Brightman, Robert. 1993. Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships. Berkeley: University of California Press. Casagrande, Joseph, ed. 1960. In the Company of Man: Twenty Portraits of Anthropological Informants. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Clifford, James. 1983. “On Ethnographic Authority.” Representations 1 (2): 118–146. Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1980. Tumani: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Damon, Frederick, and Roy Wagner, eds. 1989. Death Rituals and Life in the Societies of the Kula Ring. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Dumont, Louis. 1970. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Farmer, Paul. 2001. Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fortune, Reo. 1932. Sorcerers of Dobu: The Social Anthropology of the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific. New York: Dutton. Garro, Linda, and Cheryl Mattingly. 2000. “Narrative as Construct and Construction.” In Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing, ed. Cheryl Mattingly and Linda Garro. Berkeley: University of California Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.” In Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1988. Works and Lives: the Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gottlieb, Alma. 2004. The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Personhood, Empathy, and “the Native’s Point of View”

63

Hallowell, A. Irving. 1955. “The Self and Its Behavioral Environment.” In Culture and Experience. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1960. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior and Worldview.” In Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, ed. Stanley Diamond. New York: Columbia University Press. Keane, Webb. 2007. “Sincerity, ‘Modernity,’ and the Protestants.” Cultural Anthropology 17 (1): 65–92. ———. 2008. “Others, Other minds, and Others’ Theories of Other Minds: An Afterward on the Psychology and Politics of Opacity Claims.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 473–482. Kleinman, Arthur. 1988. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1995. Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kracke, Waud. 1987. “Encounter with Other Cultures: Psychological and Epistemological Aspects.” Ethos 15 (1): 58–81. ———. 1994. “Reflections on the Savage Self: Introspection, Empathy, and Anthropology.” In The Making of Psychological Anthropology, ed. Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, George Spindler, and Louise Spindler. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace. Lepowsky, Maria. 1993. Fruit of the Motherland: Gender in an Egalitarian Society. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2004. “Indian Revolts and Cargo Cults: Ritual Violence and Revitalization in California and New Guinea.” In Reassessing Revitalization: Perspectives from Native North America and the Pacific Islands, ed. Michael Harkin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. In press. Dreaming of Islands. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1973 [1955]. Tristes Tropiques. New York: Pocket Books. Lutkehaus, Nancy. 1995. “Margaret Mead and the ‘Rustling of the Wind in the Palm Trees School’ of Ethnographic Writing.” In Women Writing Culture, ed. Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon. Berkeley: University of California Press. MacClancy, Jeremy. 1996. “Popularizing Anthropology.” In Popularizing Anthropology, ed. Jeremy MacClancy and Chris McDonough. London: Routledge. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: E. P. Dutton. ———. 1967. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mattingly, Cheryl. 1998. Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mines, Mattison. 1988. “Conceptualizing the Person: Hierarchical Society and Individual Autonomy in India.” American Anthropologist 71 (6): 1166–1175. ———. 1994. Public Faces, Private Voices: Community and Individuality in South India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Narayan, Kirin. 1989. Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1997. Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2007. My Family and Other Saints. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Okely, Judith. 1992. “Anthropology and Autobiography: Participatory Experience and Embodied Knowledge.” In Anthropology and Autobiography, ed. Judith Okely and Helen Callaway. ASA Monographs 29. London: Routledge.

64

Maria Lepowsky

Powdermaker, Hortense. 1966. Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist. New York: W. W. Norton. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1986. “Fieldwork in Common Places.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rabinow, Paul. 1979. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Radin, Paul. 1926. Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian. New York: D. Appleton & Company. Reed-Danahay, Deborah. 1997. Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. Oxford: Berg. Robbins, Joel. 2008. “On Not Knowing Other Minds: Confession, Intention, and Linguistic Exchange in a Papua New Guinea Community.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 421–429. Robbins, Joel, and Alan Rumsey. 2008. “Introduction: Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 407–420. Rumsey, Alan. 2008. “Confession, Anger, and Cross-Cultural Articulation in Papua New Guinea.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 455–472. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schieffelin, Bambi. 2008. “Speaking Only Your Own Mind: Reflections on Talk, Gossip, and Intentionality in Bosavi (PNG).” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 431–441. Schwartz, Theodore. 1973. “Cult and Context: the Paranoid Ethos in Melanesia.” Ethos 1 (3): 153–174. Simmel, Georg. 1971 [1911]. “The Adventurer.” In On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sontag, Susan. 1966. “The Anthropologist as Hero.” In Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Stasch, Rupert. 2008. “Knowing Minds Is a Matter of Authority: Political Dimensions of Opacity Statements in Korowai Moral Psychology.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 443–453. Stephen, Michele. 1996. “The Mekeo ‘Man of Sorrow’: Sorcery and the Individuation of Self.” American Ethnologist 23 (1): 82–101. Stocking, George. 1983. “The Ethnographer’s Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski.” In Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkley: University of California Press. Strauss, Claudia. 2004. “Is Empathy Gendered and If So, Why? An Approach from Feminist Psychological Anthropology.” Ethos 32 (4): 432–457. Tedlock, Barbara. 1995. “Works and Wives: On the Sexual Division of Textual Labor.” In Women Writing Culture, ed. Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thornton, Robert. 1983. “Narrative Ethnography in Africa, 1850–1920: The Creation and Capture of an Appropriate Domain for Anthropology.” Man (N.S.) 18: 502–520. Vitebsky, Piers. 2005. The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Personhood, Empathy, and “the Native’s Point of View”

65

Wardlow, Holly. 2007. Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. White, Geoffrey. 1992. “Ethnopsychology.” In New Directions in Psychological Anthropology, ed. Theodore Schwartz, Geoffrey White, and Catherine Lutz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Geoffrey, and John Fitzpatrick, eds. 1985. Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Willerslev, Rane. 2004. “Not Animal, Not Not-Animal: Hunting, Imitation, and Empathetic Knowledge among the Siberian Yukaghirs.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society 10: 629–652.

PART II Universal and Particular Aspects of Empathy

3 Empathy and “As-If” Attachment in Samoa JEANNETTE MAGEO

Please don’t just yet look further down the page. First, try to imagine empathy as a figure. I see mother images: first a woman holding an infant and gazing into its eyes and then, with her arms wide open, making a space for a child to run to; next, I see a Madonna holding the corpse of Christ. An American male friend I asked saw two women, one head bowed in sorrow, the other “facing the camera” but also sad. Another man saw his much younger wife. That wife saw her dog and the Venus de Milo but with arms, which were open and welcoming. We will return to these images later. Empathy, as understood in Western cultures, has cognitive and affective features. Cognitively it refers to the ability to see as others see: to simulate their viewpoint. Affectively, to empathize is to feel as if one were the other: that is, to simulate oneness. From Samoan data, I argue that, while empathy may have physiological correlates (Kogler and Stueber 2000), culturally variant child care practices direct it in more personal or social directions. They can do so because empathy is re-directed attachment. In other words, attachment occurs spontaneously between infants and others in early life and inspires a state of identification, which in turn inspires attendant behaviors of love and care. This state/behaviors can become the basis for fellow feeling between individuals but also between groups. Culturally constituted ways of caring for kids lead elders to nurture certain types of attachment and teach youngsters to transfer associated behaviors (affection, care, sympathetic identification, etc.), to later relations that people in their culture construe as empathetic, often in face of contradicting data. These ways also undermine other types of attachment and police their practice with negative sanctions. The result is that attachment in certain kinds of relations is likely to be fraught with ambivalence, which inhibits people who are in attachments that are disfavored in their culture and makes empathy unlikely

70

Jeannette Mageo

within them. Should this ambivalence flag later in life, cohorts resume negative sanctioning until the person desists from or at least hides these attachments. Empathy, moreover, is rooted in cultural models of attachment that change through time. I begin this chapter with a brief critique of the attachment paradigm in Western human development studies and continue with propositions about how caretakers shape empathy through attachment. This chapter’s strategy is—I believe must be—comparative (moving back and forth between the Samoan and the US case) because Western scholarly understandings of empathy are culturally biased. A comparative approach allows us to subtract bias and to grasp empathy as a genuine mode of human experience.

Empathy and Attachment

Attachment is the Western human development term for bonding between an infant and a primary caretaker. Bowlby (1969) argues that the child’s initial attachment to a caretaker becomes a prototype for all later relations: the quality of this relation has determining effects on individual psychology. Based on her work in Uganda, Ainsworth (1973) hypothesizes that attachment may be secure or insecure. According to Ainsworth, secure attachment gives a child the confidence necessary to explore its environment and to become socially “competent,” meaning able to engage in appropriate peer relations. Insecure attachment fails to provision the child in both these respects. Attachment is a major focus in current studies of human development (see, for example, Ahnert et al. 2004; Cassidy and Shaver 1999; Hughes et al. 2005). Despite repeated critiques of the cultural biases inherent in these studies (LeVine and Miller 1990; Mageo 1998: 40–51; Markus and Kitayama 1991: 237; Rothbaum et al. 2000), they persist. Central to the attachment paradigm is the “Strange Situation.” In the Strange Situation, a mother accompanies her child into a room and leaves. In the US, a securely attached child will become upset, then calm down and begin to explore the room. An insecurely attached child will become and remain upset as well as passive vis-à-vis the environment. When the mother returns, a securely attached child is happy to see her; an insecurely attached child is angry or withdrawn. Ainsworth realized that the Strange Situation tested secure attachment only in a Western middle-class context where leaving an infant alone or with a stranger was a common practice. She nonetheless held that secure attachment promoted emotional development while insecure attachment did not, and that attachment depended on the “sensitivity” of a mother figure. This emphasis on “mother,” I argue, is a US cultural bias that clouds human development studies. Thus, Hays (1996) documents a contemporary US model of “inten-

Empathy and “As-If” Attachment in Samoa

71

sive mothering,” in which people assume that childrearing should be carried out primarily by mothers, centered on the child’s needs, and labor-intensive. Scheper-Hughes (1992) adds that North Americans wrongly assume it is natural for mother love to endure any disaster or deprivation. In Ainsworth’s paradigm, what causes distress to young children is pernicious; hence, insecurity-inducing practices appear as pernicious. Even cross-cultural studies that aim at a critique of this paradigm in the Western developmental literature often retain the concept of “sensitive mothering” as necessary to appropriate child development. In Rothbaum’s powerful comparison of American and Japanese mothering, for example, the attentive Japanese mother, although producing a different form of empathy and a more dependent form of personality (omoiyari) than her Western counterpart, is still the linchpin of the attachment system and ideally creates only secure attachment (Rothbaum et al. 2000; see also Doi 1981; Shimizu 2000). “Sensitive” mothering, moreover, meaning mothering highly attuned to the child’s needs and meant to reassure, is so ideological a feature of US developmental models that it obscures distancing practices. North Americans—indeed, people everywhere, I propose—use forms of distancing to create insecurities in children; these practices play an equally fundamental role in developing culture styles of attachment and empathy.

Shaping Empathy

I agree that attachment begins with sensitive care that leads to a sense of security. Secure attachments in infancy are tantamount to identifications with others nurtured by contact practices of a neutral or positive kind. Although there are many culturally variant contact practices, they range along a continuum that runs from eye contact to tactile contact. Winnicott (1967) documents facial interchanges between mothers and babies that precede verbal communication, but visual contact need not be reciprocal. Watching over, visually attending to a child, is also a form of contact that makes the child feel secure. Visual versus physical contact allows for greater autonomy and exploration, traits lauded in Western attachment research (Rothbaum et al. 2000). Students of Japanese human development often call physical contact between a caretaker and an infant “skinship” (Rothbaum et al. 2000: 1097). I call visual contact between a caretaker and an infant “gaze-ship.” Skinship, I argue, is intimately related to affective empathy (feeling as another feels) and gaze-ship to cognitive empathy (seeing as another sees). Caretakers prepare the way for empathy by forging boundaries that define social actors through distancing practices that generate insecure attachment. Where there is insecure attachment, people tend to draw back, just as the inse-

72

Jeannette Mageo

curely attached US child draws back when its mother returns after separation; that gesture is a boundary. In Western cultures people understand the social actor to be the individual, but in socially oriented cultures they understand it to be the group. In North American jurisprudence, for example, trials are between an accused individual and the state. In traditional Samoan society, everyone acted as their group’s representative. It was not the individual who redressed crimes, but his or her chief in a ceremony of apology to the offended family. The chief and his retinue would sit in the sun before the offended family, bearing with them baskets of stones and wood. Stone and wood, the materials for an earth oven, symbolized that if the offended family chose not to forgive, they could cook and eat the supplicants. This offer was not literal, of course, but symbolized abject regret. Distancing practices include physical or emotional absence as well as painful forms of tactile or visual contact such as punishing or critical scrutiny. Absence combined with painful contact in certain relations creates insecure attachment by undermining trust—in others whose unavailability or hurtfulness implies one cannot count on them, and in the self because of the alarming hostility felt toward those upon whom one still depends. In other words, one might feel (without that feeling arising as an explicit thought), “I can’t trust mom because she is scary and unreliable and I can’t trust me because I am so enraged.” Contra Ainsworth, I suggest that elders in all cultures actively forge some form of insecure attachment in children. They do so through distancing practices crafted to curtail what elders view as boundary confusion: that is, unreflective identifications between individuals or groups that people in the culture regard as distinct. By doing so, they outline those social units that are supposed to engage in the empathic relations that make social life possible and pleasurable. These bounding outlines are necessary because empathy is an extension of self across a boundary, however self is culturally defined. Caretakers foster this extension by directing the child’s lingering desire for attachment into subjunctive forms: that is, into relations in which persons or groups act as if they are one with others (feeling as others feel, seeing as they see). Thus empathy, in my view, is an as-if form of attachment: it appropriates and redirects a state (identification) and behaviors (love and care) that characterize attachment. In US culture, the individual is the basic social unit and empathy is supposed to flow between individuals—from self to another individual. Mother/ child is the developmental prototype of this self-other bond and of the dounto-another empathy that, ideally, comes to characterize it. Scholars tend to see secure maternal attachment as a developmental universal, I believe, because they see the self-other model for relating as universal. Yet to the extent that a culture is group-oriented, normative attachment is among group members and empathy flows between groups: empathy is, then, to treat another

Empathy and “As-If” Attachment in Samoa

73

group as if it were one’s own. In this case being overly attached to one person, originally mother but later other individuals, represents a form of boundary confusion. I take attachment to arise initially from suckling, which necessitates skinship and invites gaze-ship between mother and child, although even here cultures differ. Mead (1935), for example, describes suckling among the fierce Mundugumor, a society she describes as without empathy. Mothers held infants at their side; infants grabbed their mothers’ breast without any fond exchange of glances. In Samoa, I have heard stories to the effect that, in the days before bras, when women had many children, their breasts would lengthen so that a toddler could feed while its mother attended to another activity. Mothers might even throw a breast over their shoulder so that a child behind them might nurse. Tendencies to attach to a maternal figure and to a kin group are probably universal—possibly products of human evolution (Hrdy 2001, 2005). Some cultures, presumably those that favor Ainsworth’s attachment model, build upon skinship and gaze-ship between mother and infant in the nursing experience to foster interpersonal relations. Others build upon skinship and gaze-ship among kin to foster group relations. Yet, this chapter argues, in more interpersonally oriented cultures, people also use kin attachment needs to create compelling insecurities; in more group-oriented cultures, people use mother-child needs to do so. Elders also teach children to redirect those positive, culturally validated feelings first experienced in early attachments to create empathy among adults. Here I offer a “How-to” conception of empathy in which attachment practices constitute what Foucault would call a “technology of self ” (1988). I do not mean that people in a culture consciously intend the consequences I ascribe to their actions. Rather, they engage in contact and distancing practices because these practices are congruent with their own conditioning, they sense them to be appropriate, and they fear that should they fail to do so, children would be maladjusted to social life.

The Samoan Case

Contact is first a matter of proximity. In pre-Christian times, Samoan babies did not necessarily remain proximate to their birth mothers. The father’s family had a right to a couple’s first baby, the mother’s family to the second baby. The couple might or might not be living with one of these families depending on opportunities for land and titles in each group. Indeed, the couple might not reside with either one if there was promise of land and titles with more distant relatives. Siblings could ask for a couple’s babies; it was impolite to refuse.

74

Jeannette Mageo

Nineteenth-century missionaries objected to this distribution system, believing that it undermined those attachments fundamental to Christian morality (see, e.g., Turner 1984 [1884]: 83), yet in modified forms it persists. I lived and worked in American Samoa from 1981 to 1989. One of my college students there, for example, had parents who lived on another island and who kept all her children with them, even though both my student and her husband missed them badly. A childless Samoan sister-in-law of mine talked her brother’s wife out of one of his children when the brother was out drinking. The sister left early the next morning for the westerly islands, while her sobered brother loudly bemoaned the loss of his child. Wherever the infant resided, early care was sensitive: householders never left the infant to cry, routinely responding with solace. Everyone in the household carried the infant, thereby creating an extended form of skinship. Indeed, in some cases mothers held the baby only when they breastfed it or put to sleep at night (Schoeffel 1979: 101–102). The toddler almost constantly touched, groomed, or leaned up against another family member (Sutter 1980); this contact developed skinship into a kinship bond. The child might also wander among the extended family’s adjacent households, sure of finding “food and drink, a sheet to wrap herself up in for a nap, a kind hand to dry casual tears and bind up her wounds” (Mead 1961 [1928]: 41–42). The entire village watched over toddlers. Samoans have told me, for example, of stopping their car, upon seeing a small child from their village playing near the road, to remove, reproach, and punish it. Visual contact not only came from the group, but was directed back toward it. Unlike the Western mother who holds her child in a face-to-face position, when a Samoan mother or others held the baby, they turned it toward the family group or to the road where villagers passed (Ochs 1982). Western studies indicate that babies show most distress at their mother’s absence between nine and eighteen months of age (Berger 1980: 243). Around this time, Samoans began to suspend skinship between the child and its elders by transferring care to older siblings (Mead 1961 [1928]: 22, 1969 [1930]: 90; Schoeffel 1979: 102, 126; Sutter 1980: 31). The child then became a member of another group—the lowest ranking age-grade group in the family. After that, rather than attending directly to children’s actions, elders were aloof, their gaze-ship also having been replaced by that of older children whose responsibility it was to watch the youngster and keep it in order, making sure that it did not successfully seek contact with elders or intrude upon their activities. At weaning, it was common to send the child to relatives in another household or village. While a child caretaker and many others cared for little ones, they tended to display behaviors associated in US studies with insecure attachment during and after such episodes. Thus, Freeman (1983: 203) documents a case of a thirteen-month-old infant who, taken to his maternal grandmother

Empathy and “As-If” Attachment in Samoa

75

in another village for weaning, became so severely depressed he had to return to his natal family. After that “he would cry whenever his mother made to leave him.” Gerber says, “One of the most frequent sights in a Samoan village is a child having a tantrum when his mother gets on the bus to go to town, even when his usual caretaker is standing right beside him” (1975: 107). The toddler who obstinately remained proximate to his mother was dragged away (Gardner 1965: 154). Through these practices, Samoans effected insecure attachment to mother, undermining the prototype of the self-other bond that characterizes Western styles of attachment and empathy. When little ones tried to reestablish contact with elders, either through physical proximity or by attention-getting behaviors, their actions were construed as a violation of the boundary between age-grade groups. If the offense was minor, elders might respond with negative scrutiny in the forms of ridicule and name-calling. Most commonly, they called children tautalaitiiti, “to talk when young,” but Samoans had a rich vocabulary for the child’s insolent pretensions to membership in a more privileged group. They might be called fiatagata, literally “want to be a person,” meaning that they were pretending to distinction, or fiapoto, “want to be smart,” or they could be dubbed fiapālagi, meaning “want to be a Western-European.” If the offense was more serious, cheeky behavior provoked negative skinship—physical punishment administered either by elders or by a child caretaker. Punishment ended only when the child dramatically relinquished any demand for physical or visual contact by sitting silently stock-still and lowering its gaze. Members of a lower age-grade group were never to eyeball those of higher status. Positive forms of skinship remained but were vectored upwards. Children, for example, might massage their elders. We know from Ainsworth’s work on attachment (1973) that when a child is insecurely attached, separations from its mother, particularly repeated separations, create hostility. One can read Melanie Klein’s (1988) work on young children’s ambivalence toward mother figures as elucidating those emotions and fantasies generated by ambivalent attachment. Klein links the fantasies she explores to weaning, but in Klein’s psychology weaning is a pivotal event in the emotional parturition of mother and child and a metaphor for lessening contact between them. The child experiences its mother’s withdrawal as a refusal to nurse and in response would like to eat the mother up. Yet its personality is not strong enough to contain hostile feelings toward the object of its attachment. As a result, the child splits the figure of the mother into a good mother and a bad mother and projects its hostility upon the bad mother—hostility that takes an oral form in the child’s fantasies. Like the witch in the tale of Hansel and Gretel, the child imagines the bad mother wants to eat the child. A prevalence of ogress figures (who want to eat people) in a culture’s mythology, then, can serve as an index of ambivalent attachment to mother

76

Jeannette Mageo

figures. In Samoan lore, magic females who can become animals are often ogresses. In one traditional tale, for example, a wife has an aunt who is a rail and an ogress (Moyle 1981: 51–55). This woman’s husband, angry because his wife has eaten all their food, asks the rail to eat his wife and son. She does, finishing her meal by eating the husband. In another tale (Moyle 1981: 145– 152), Tigilau, the titled traveling lover of Samoan and pan-Polynesian lore, visits a mother who can become a chicken and who is an ogress. He makes her a presentation of food while she is in chicken form. Tigilau has come for her daughter, whom she hides, telling him she is dead. His men discover the girl and kidnap her. Arriving home, angered by this girl’s disdain, Tigilau tells his men, “go light a fire and throw this girl in” (1981: 151)—in Lévi-Strauss’s (1970) terms trying to change her from raw to cooked: that is, symbolically changing her into food. She turns into a chicken and flies away. Both of these tales link oral themes to antipathy between individuals.

Reestablishing Attachment as a Subjunctive Relation

As a number of contributors to this volume mention, Western scholars tend to define empathy as a work of personal imagination—imagining oneself in another’s place (see, for example, Halpern 2001; Rosen 1995). Here again I suspect Western bias: only in cultures where cultural models of self emphasize inner experience is empathy a matter of seeing/feeling as if one were another. Samoans, like Anutans (Feinberg, this volume) and Yapese (Throop, this volume) assert the opacity of others’ minds and hearts (Mageo 1989). When others’ minds and hearts are opaque, they cannot provide resources for personal identification or participation. In Samoan, loto means the inner depths of the self. A loto is any “inside”—a deep hole in the reef, for example, and also what is within the person. The unknowable loto is a pool of darkness that one cannot fathom. Empathy, I have argued, has developmental origins in skinship and gazeship, which lead to attachment. Attachment in more individually oriented places inspires empathy as an imaginative identification of self with another, bridging the self/other divide. In more socially oriented locales, attachment leads to empathy as enacted: giving care in gifts, both material gifts like food but also more abstract gifts of service—what Samoans call tautua—to one’s own group, and through ceremonies, feasts, and festivals to other groups. Indeed, enacted empathy is the constitutive practice of what Mauss calls “gift economies” (1990). Even in the West, I later argue, only since the rise of capitalism and individualism during and after the Industrial Revolution do people generally cultivate empathy as an inner state in which one imagines another’s inner state. Yet we will soon see that this contrast is not really between

Empathy and “As-If” Attachment in Samoa

77

empathy-in-action versus empathy-in-imagination, but between empathy in social versus personal imaginings. In Samoa, the word for empathy is alofa, which Milner defines as “love” or “affection” but also “mercy,” “compassion,” “pity,” “kindness,” and “sympathy” (1979 [1966]: 17). As in the case of Feinberg’s Anuta, alofa is a paramount Samoan value. The standard Samoan greeting is Tālofa, “We love you.” Yet rather than being an act of imagining one’s likeness to another, alofa is giving, most materially giving food, as among the Bosmun of Papua New Guinea (von Poser, this volume); more abstractly, but at least as importantly, alofa is giving service—giving care. While Samoan elders showered alofa on infants through positive physical and verbal contact (Gardner 1965: 145–146, 153; Gerber 1975: 51, 53), the end of infancy marked the beginning of a long string of substitutions that culminated with alofa between villages. Elders were still supposed to show alofa to youngsters, though indirectly, through critical scrutiny and punishing, which were construed as “watching over” children: that is, as subjunctive forms of positive visual and tactile contact. Youngsters too learned to show their alofa indirectly by serving elders. US mothers and to a lesser degree fathers care for their children; Samoan children care for their parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents. A contemporary Samoan girl gave an example: All my life … I never did anything for myself.… I was given to my grandparents, so I could run errands for them. My grandmother was put on a hemo-dialysis machine every four days within a week, and most of the time I was there with her.… I learned how to put her on [the] hemo-dialysis machine.… I gave her insulin shots in the morning, took her blood pressure rate after every meal, made her food to fit her diet the doctor told me to give her. I translated everything she felt to the doctor because she didn’t speak English, but I did. I had to do all this and I was still going to Elementary School. I did this until my grandmother passed away.… Then I took care of my grandfather till he passed away. After infancy, Samoan parents were not to show their alofa for kids because to do so was to serve them. The family’s age-grade hierarchy was a prototype for the Samoan social hierarchy—the very structure of society: as youngsters served elder relatives, so those lower in status served those higher in the larger world. For a parent to show care directly was to reverse hierarchical principles in confusing ways. However, when a child was sick parents relented and again showed solicitous care. As young people matured, giving service to elders came to include supporting ceremonies staged by their extended family. As one young woman put it,

78

Jeannette Mageo

Samoan people worked hand in hand; they love to help other people, for instance, a Samoan fa‘alavelave such as a funeral. All people related to the one who is dying, are able to donate something—money, fine mats, keg beef, or whatever that family can afford to help the fa‘alavelave. Therefore the Samoan life and culture is unique. Fa‘alavelave is a general term for one’s obligations to help one’s extended family with ceremonies’ obligations as well as with any big problem (Mageo 1998: 13; Shore 1982: 169–170). Rhetoric supported a transfer of identifications and care cultivated among kin to others in the village. In polite speech, villagers addressed the representatives of other families as if they were of higher status: that is, as if they were their own elders. Robert Louis Stevenson, writing of Apia streets in the late nineteenth century, remarks, “Terms of ceremony fly as thick as oaths upon a ship … commoners ‘my-lord’ one another as they meet—and urchins as they play marbles” (1892: 2). Villages gave not only status to one another, but also money and goods. While family property was held in common, in the village Samoans begged things from others in a manner reminiscent of that Hollan describes among the Toraja (this volume). Robert Louis Stevenson tells us that in the nineteenth century this begging was endemic, such that: the dictionary teems with evidence of its abuse. Special words signify the begging of food, of uncooked food, of fish, of pigs, of pigs for travelers, of pigs for stock, of taro, of taro-tops, of taro-tops for planting, of tools, of flyhooks, of implements for netting pigeons, and of mats. It is true the beggar was supposed in time to make a return, somewhat as by the Roman contract of mutuum. But the obligation was only moral; … as a matter of fact, it was disregarded. The language had recently to borrow from the Tahitians a word for debt. (1892: 14) In villages today, people still beg money from those they know have some cash; traveling begging parties journey about to raise money for a multitude of purposes (O’Meara 1990: 196–202). Young people also learned to give service (which signified alofa) to village chiefs, just as they gave it to their own elders. A society of young men (‘aūmaga) drawn from all village families served titled adults, especially the village’s highest chief, carrying out his orders and forming a village militia. Likewise, a society of young women (aualuma) served the village by hosting visiting parties, providing singing at funerals and comic entertainment at various events, and weaving fine mats as dowries for the marriage of a tāupōu (titled village virgin) to a highly titled chief. In this sense, there were gendered ways to render alofa—ways that reached their apex in the malaga. Malaga, formal traveling parties that journeyed from village to village, constituted a way

Empathy and “As-If” Attachment in Samoa

79

of life in old Samoa. Krämer says, “Like a swarm of locusts the travel-happy Samoans used to descend on various places; for free hospitality is the rule” (1995 [1902]: 101; see also Wilkes 1845: 148–149). The ‘aumaga staged ceremonies upon the arrival of visitors that portrayed ideal instances of inter-village relations as dyadic: as an empathetic relation between two groups. Through flowery oratory and prestations, each group treated the other group’s chiefs as if they were their own, enacting identification between them. Prestations consisted of items that signified the service of men (‘oloa) and others that signified the service of women (toga). Service, again, was a symbolic form of alofa: the way kids first gave love to elders, then to their family chiefs, then to village chiefs. Self-other empathy is a Western model of an ideal exchange among individuals. In Samoa, ceremonial exchanges flooded participants with what Victor Turner calls communitas—a word I take to mean empathy between groups. Thus, a nineteenth-century missionary recollects these exchanges as characterized by “a delightful flow of friendship all over the place” and says, “On such occasions parties who have been living at variance had a fine opportunity of showing kindness to each other” (G. Turner 1984 [1884]: 183). Marriages were commonly elopements (āvaga), which often occurred during or on the morning after the final party staged by the aualuma for a traveling group. Marital love too, then, was likely to grow out of communitas and the wild carnivalesque celebrations that it generated rather than, as in the Western case, romance. The anti-structural character of alofa within and between villages underlined their as-if quality. Thus, Shore (1982) argues that there are two major forms of relating in Samoa: competitive peer relations and complementary hierarchical relations. Extended families within the village are functional peers and hence in competition with one another. Until recently, fighting between rival families was often so severe as to tear a village apart and might be mediated by a marriage between them that bound them into one larger family. In old Samoa the as-if character of ceremonial alofa was underlined by the fact that it might not long outlive the day itself: ceremonies between rival villages were interspersed with wars. Indeed, I have heard of late twentieth-century ceremonies where men carried concealed weapons, in case events did not progress as anticipated.

The US Case

Again, I argue that attachment studies outline a practice that is part of a Western technology of self, sensitive mothering, but leave out the counterpart practice of distancing. In the US, distancing begins at birth in the hospital with the

80

Jeannette Mageo

separation of the infant from its family and continues through practices of leaving the child alone in its crib or in a fenced playpen while its mother leaves the room. Later the mother leaves the child with babysitters or at daycare. Secure attachment to mother is supposed to make these absences inconsequential for the infant’s development, but there is evidence that they are deeply felt. I mentioned above that one of the child’s responses to maternal withdrawal is hostility toward the mother, which Klein sees as oral. Perhaps only a few “insecurely attached” children display hostility in the Strange Situation, but US children’s literature suggests it is more general. One finds ogress figures—projections of oral hostility according to Klein (1988)—in contemporary US children’s stories. Indeed, the witch is the second most common female figure in these stories, the most common being the mother (Heim 1995). In the very popular Disney animated production of Sleeping Beauty, for example, the evil Maleficent takes the form of a dragon and tries to consume the prince. Unlike the Samoan tales mentioned above, however, Disney’s Sleeping Beauty rehearses young people’s ability to surmount all barriers to intimate interpersonal relations. In the US, dependence on mom is increased by the relative absence of dad. Nationwide, father absence is ever more pronounced: in 2000, only 69 percent of US families consisted of mother, father, and minor children, as opposed to 87 percent in 1979 (Fields and Casper 2001: 7). Between 2004 and 2006, I collected 990 dreams from 115 undergraduate college students in the Northwestern US. In student interpretations of their dreams, father absence or quasi-absence was a prominent theme. Absence may be emotional rather than physical: boys and girls routinely reported they could “talk to” their mother but not their father. As of 2005, when parents divorced, courts gave residential custody to mothers 83.8 percent of the time (Grall 2007). After divorce, most children have less than weekly contact with their dad (Kelly 2006). This trend, however, may be changing: in the early 1980s, the number of kids who did not have any contact with dads two to three years after a divorce was 50 percent (ibid.). Based on her reading of a number of studies using different data sets, Kelly (ibid.) estimates that by the late 1990s, the number had decreased to between 18 and 26 percent. In a traditional US nuclear family, Benjamin’s work suggests, a dad who is only intermittently present or quasi-present also represents the larger world/ group to a child as unreliable. Just as in the traditional Samoan world a mother’s intermittent presence implies that interpersonal relations come and go, father absence may give kids an impression that group connections cannot be deeply trusted. Communitas is not a frequent experience in the US, and Margaret Mead tells us that in Samoa intense interpersonal feeling was likewise rare (1961 [1928]: 128).

Empathy and “As-If” Attachment in Samoa

81

Here again, of course, one cannot make absolute contrasts. President Obama’s 2009 inauguration appears to have been an experience of communitas for many US attendees. Did the inauguration celebrate an ideal relation between black and white groups? On the National Public Radio program Talk of the Nation (21 January 2009), a white man reported standing next to a black woman whom he did not know. She was sobbing. He turned to her; they continued to cry in one another’s arms. A little later in the program, another white man reported being in a mixed-race group; a black man led the group singing the popular song, Lean on Me. Black-white racism has long been symbolic of inequality between groups in the United States. As in Victor Turner’s ideas about ritual (1977), Americans symbolically reversed relations of inequality when they elected Obama as president.

Reestablishing Attachment as a Subjunctive Relation

If Western students of child development tend to judge “secure attachment” to be a cornerstone of personality development, this is at least in part because it fosters independent exploration of an environment when mother is absent. Independence, or self-reliance in Hsu’s (1961) terms, is a fundamental US American value (see also D’Andrade 2008: 63). Yet Whiting (1961) found that US children are less independent then children in a number of agricultural and horticultural communities. One might say that in the US children are supposed to perform independence: act as if they are independent in certain contexts (like the Strange Situation), in counterpoint to their real financial and, often, emotional dependence on parents. In the US, watching oneself (inner scrutiny) and self-support come to stand for parental watching over. In a traditional Samoan village, houses without walls allowed fellow villagers to constantly watch one another and to report their findings in gossip—an as-if version of gaze-ship that Throop also finds in Yap (this volume). Watching over, of course, is always internal and social: the difference is a matter of emphasis and degree. As Hollan mentions in the introduction, this volume came out of a series of conference sessions on empathy in the Pacific. Sitting next to me at our San Diego session, Maria Lepowsky quietly remarked that empathy is women’s work—meaning that in many places, particularly Western ones, people consider it so. Empathy is an emotion, and Lutz (1990, 2002) shows that in the US people tend to see emotion too as women’s work. This division of labor, I believe, begins in early childhood and is prerequisite to understanding empathy in Western cultures and scholarly paradigms. My idea is that Americans turn attachment into intersubjectivity, and then intersubjectivity into inter-

82

Jeannette Mageo

personal empathy, through a technology of self that, typically, is first practiced by mother and babe but then continues as a primary mode of relating among girls. Attachment in the US begins with (interrupted) visual and tactile contact between mother and child. In Western cultures, eye-to-eye gazing in a mother’s arms has long been a symbol of this contact. Think of the long history of Madonna and child images in Western sculpture and painting (the example with which I opened); this contact, in turn, is a symbol of what Benjamin calls intersubjectivity (1988). Gazing is a physical act of recognition; intersubjectivity is a sense of self that grows out of mutual recognition between two people and continues the gaze-ship first experienced in the infant/mother relation. Winnicott (1967) documents this nascent form and enduring symbol of intersubjectivity between mothers and children. By the age of two, however, US boys and girls begin to learn different ways of relating. Chodorow (1974, 1978) argues that girls construct their gender identity through identification with a person intimately known—mother. Because males are often distant figures, boys are more likely to construct theirs by defining themselves against their mother. An oppositional self-definition lays the groundwork for ego identity: a definition of self in counterdistinction to others. Chodorow believes boys also tend to reject what mother represents to them, one-to-one intimacy, in favor of competitive peer relations. Boys form groups with other boys where they continue skinship in playfully aggressive pastimes such as wrestling and football. Girls form intersubjective connections with other girls that may involve fond physical contact, re-creating mother/ child relations. No one has documented, to my knowledge, differential skinship and gazeship between US elders and male versus female children, but Tannen (2001) documents these relations among children. Left alone to converse, the US girls Tannen videotaped gazed steadfastly into one another’s eyes, their arms around one another’s shoulders—contact that repeats the mother/child pattern. The boys in Tannen’s study sat uncomfortably with chairs parallel, gazing off into space as they talked. These relations appear to endure at least into young adulthood. Thus, in a random sample of 125 dreams from the Northwest collection mentioned above, hugs appeared in six female dreams but only in one male dream—a dream in which this male was exploring his feelings about homosexuality. Physical fights, on the other hand, appeared in 17 percent of male dreams and only in 2 percent of female dreams.1 The presence of an activity in dreams suggests that it is emotionally salient for the dreamer. Whether or not early family relations effectively mold individual gender traits is controversial (Hyde 2005; Tavris 1992). When a majority of each sex shares a common experience, however, that experience becomes the basis for gender subcultures, which US children enter when they join playgroups and

Empathy and “As-If” Attachment in Samoa

83

then go to school. In these peer relations, girls learn “troubles talk,” Tannen’s term for intimate problem-sharing chat (2001). In troubles talk, one girl (later, a woman) plays the role of someone needing solace (the infant), while her interlocutor plays the role of succorer (the mother). Then they reverse roles. Trouble-talking is an intersubjective ritual that allows girls to empathize: through sharing life stories, each comes to imagine the other’s personal history and the dramas that frame present experience, permitting each to leap into the other’s inmost feelings and thoughts. Canaan (1990) found that while US boys told jokes to establish their status in high-school classrooms, girls passed notes cultivating intimate, offstage relations with other girls. Here we return to my opening example of the North American man who, imagining empathy, saw two women communing but sad, evidently practicing “troubles talk.” In Samoa, by way of contrast, one never shows or shares personal feelings. Even upon the death or departure of a loved one, a person of character expresses only appropriate sentiments—they do not cry or carry on: they are lototele. Neither does one console when others display personal feelings. I was married to a Samoan, Sanele. Sanele once had to tell his mother that her favorite and most promising unmarried daughter was pregnant. Sanele and his mother were very close. She cried. Instead of holding her, he sat quietly, waiting for her to regain her composure, much like Torajans as described by Hollan (this volume). As US girls mature, parents and age mates usually expect them to substitute a male boyfriend for girlfriends, creating heterosexual intersubjectivity along with heterosexual gaze-ship and skinship. The result is often an imperfect replication of the intersubjective style of relating girls have learned with one another, probably because boys’ developmental experience initiates them into the rituals and practices of a competitive peer culture. Boys’ difficulty with intersubjective relations may persist. Tannen (2001), for example, begins one of her most popular books with an anecdote about her husband’s unwillingness to look into her eyes even during what US Americans call “heart-to-heart” talks. Despite a difference in socialization, as boyfriend/girlfriend relationships mature, US sexual relations often become highly intersubjective—romantic, in a word. Romance is one of the major practices of US adolescence, one characterized by a special rhetoric best represented by popular US adolescent music about “true love” that lasts “forever” and by many rituals from a “first kiss,” to wearing a letterman’s sweater. It is noteworthy, however, that in the US people consider romantic films to be “chick flicks.” Trade presses market romantic novels specifically for women. Holland and Eisenhart (1990) see US college women as “educated in romance”: they learn romance as a social strategy for a successful life. A psychological division of labor—boys learning to compete as individuals and in teams, girls learning to identify imaginatively with another indi-

84

Jeannette Mageo

vidual—traces back to the Industrial Revolution in England and America. Members of English and US agricultural village communities often had to cooperate to survive, as in Somerset Maugham’s beautiful account of an English village bringing in the harvest in Of Human Bondage (1915), or barn building in the classic US musical Oklahoma. In industrialized cities, however, individuals learned to strive for gain against one another. Hence, they also learned to define themselves and their interests in counterdistinction to others. Freud called this singular form of self the “ego.” Meanwhile, the early modern period also occasioned the development of intersubjectivity. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, an industrialist’s home was likely to be adjacent to his factory, his wife was his assistant and sometimes second-in-command, and his home’s central room was the factory office (Davidoff and Hall 1987). As industrial fortunes grew in the middle class, public and private split along gender lines. People came to regard the private sphere as bourgeois women’s proper place; there, women developed a culture of intersubjectivity. This culture was evident in letter-writing practices of the time. In the mid-eighteenth century, a new form of letter gained ascendancy in England and the United States—the “familiar letter” (Dierks 1999). An expansion of the London postal service supported and probably reflected a new surge in familiar letter writing. The number of London letter carriers increased from 81 in the late eighteenth century to 224 in the early nineteenth; deliveries were six times a day, and a person sending a letter in the morning could expect a reply by evening.2 A bevy of manuals on the familiar letter then extended what had once been an elite male province to women (Dierks 1999). Indeed, some manuals were specifically for women and praised them as having a sensibility that lent itself to familiar letters (ibid.: 33). Familiar letters were for artlessly yet gracefully expressing heartfelt feelings. As one epistolarian put it, “your sentiments [should seem] to have sprung up naturally like the lilies of the field” (Dilworth 1794 [1763]: 4–5). Sentiments, particularly moral ones, were considered by many of the period as nature’s gift to the feminine sex (Ellis 1842; Wheeler and Thompson 1825; Wollstonecraft 1993 [1787]). This intersubjective culture also cultivated empathy: one of bourgeois women’s major pastimes, for example, was charitable work—attending to the poor and sick (Davidoff and Hall 1987). An important epistolarian of the time, Samuel Richardson, also wrote the first English novel, Clarissa (1985 [1748]), framed as a series of letters. He set his tale in the bourgeois class; it is a manifesto in favor of romantic love—that is, in favor of privileging a marital pair’s ability to share intimate sentiments over the older value of augmenting family status and property. Clarrissa refuses an arranged marriage with the higher-status neighbor who offers to join her family’s properties to his in one impressive estate. In more socially ori-

Empathy and “As-If” Attachment in Samoa

85

ented cultures, marriage is an alliance between families. Richardson’s novel and the nineteenth-century romantic novels that followed in England and in the United States, many written by women, hailed marriage as the consummation of an enduring intimacy. Remember the US man with whom I opened, who saw his younger wife as the very figure of empathy? He did, I suggest, because US Americans often expect women to become specialists in intersubjectivity. An intersubjectivity in which one not only recognizes the other’s boundaries, but also identifies with the other, is what makes interpersonal empathy possible. The wife, in turn, saw the Venus de Milo but with arms. Venus represents an ideal female lover. Did this wife see Venus with welcoming arms because she conflated her role as a lover and as an empathy provider? This wife, you recall, imagined her dog as a figure of empathy—a dog with whom, I observed, she shared a great deal of skinship (she called her a Velcro dog) and even nose-to-nose gaze-ship. Not everyone has a lover; in any case, a lover is only one person. In a culture where many adults find empathy only in a lover’s arms, many are lonely. Pets, particularly dogs in the US (which Sahlins [1976: 171] calls “the land of the sacred dog”) fill the gap. Pets, of course, play a role in the development of intersubjectivity and US-style empathy for boys too. This is a relation in which others often support boys for continuing the fond skinship (and gaze-ship) they shared with mother—where they don’t have to compete. In the Northwest dream collection mentioned above, pets appeared in twice as many male dreams as in female dreams. The hyper-mobility of late modern middle-class US life teaches children that pets may offer long-term intimacy, while one might only pass through groups: of classmates, or scout troops, or neighbors. In contrast, Sutter tells the story of a pet turtle that a Samoan village pastor kept as a child. “His father noticed his … delight in his possession and used this as the basis for a never-forgotten lesson. One day his father announced that the time had come to kill the turtle and share it with the village by giving it to the council of chiefs for their feast” (Sutter 1980: 39–40). In Samoa people keep dogs not as pets, but to protect households. Much as Hollan reports of dogs in Toraja (this volume), they are half-starved, half-crazed, and mangy—chasing and snarling after the wheels of passing cars in a manner that is anything but welcoming.

Attachment, Imagination, Identification, and Anthropological Empathy

Freud argued that we first construct a sense of self and other through boundary work: identifying with positive experience, introjecting it within, and dis-iden-

86

Jeannette Mageo

tifying with negative experience, projecting it without (1961). Building upon this idea, Erikson says trust is an incorporation of loved others and supplies the initial basis for identity (1963; see also Bowlby 1969). Attachment is Bowlby’s and Ainsworth’s stand-in for what Erikson calls “basic trust.” Trust and attachment are related experiences because kids develop basic trust through secure attachments. The cultural shapes attachment and empathy take, I have argued, vary in relation to how people in a society promote and discourage people’s capacities for trust, first and most importantly in early childhood but continuing throughout their lives. The question is: Who does the child come to experience as dependable? Early childhood practices in all cultures, I propose, support a type of dependency that most people presume is so stable that that they can take it for granted. US Americans tend to believe that mothers will love their children whatever their imperfections and failings. Samoans tend to believe that they can count on their natal kin group to defend and support them whatever their exigencies. Americans, of course, may count on kin too but often do not have strong relations outside their nuclear family (Schneider 1968). Many parents, furthermore, hope and expect their kids will become financially and emotionally independent after age eighteen or twenty-one. Samoans, on the other hand, also count on the support of their spouses, but before missionaries redefined love and relating, there was no word for marriage in Samoan. Conjugal relations aimed to produce offspring, not to forge an enduring intimacy between two individuals (Mageo 1994, 1998). Cultural styles of socialization reinforce or undercut certain forms of attachment. This is not to deny that attachment may be a biosocial given; multiple forms probably are—most obviously maternal attachment and kin attachment. But people may privilege these penchants or use them against the grain to create relational insecurity, and they need to do so to outline social actors, however they are culturally defined. Thus, in the Western psychiatric tradition, too broad an identification with others is “boundary confusion”—a failure to maintain “a consistently individuated sense of self ” (Chodorow 1974: 58). We cannot understand empathy without an apprehension of the negative space (the boundaries) that surrounds it. This negative space traces back to distancing practices in childhood that curtail certain forms of attachment and that adults later replicate with others. In other words, to understand empathy we must also explore those cultural practices, especially in childrearing, that limit attachment and undermine it. Empathy may be a universal human capacity, but it flowers first through secure attachments sustained by positive contact and by sensitivity to the infant’s needs by an individual, by a group, or some combination thereof. While empathy does not equal kindness and support, these behaviors flow spontaneously toward a person or group to whom we feel attached. People learn to

Empathy and “As-If” Attachment in Samoa

87

transfer these behaviors to new objects and to act as if they felt attached to them. Simultaneously, elders create insecure attachments, thereby sculpting the negative space between social units by inspiring people to avoid other possible objects of attachment and empathy. People, then, use skinship and gaze-ship to forge many kinds of relations. In Samoa, extended-family carrying and care helped the child develop kinship bonds. Young people learned to extend this alofa the length of the village through: polite rhetoric, responding to supplications for money and goods, and, traditionally, young men and women’s different forms of service in the aualuma and ‘aūmaga. As they matured, they extended alofa to other villages by hosting malaga. The consummation of such an event was a marriage between two families of different villages. In the US, ideally gaze-ship and skinship first develops mother-child attachment into their intersubjective recognition of one another. In troubles talk and other “girlfriend” rituals and practices, girls learn to develop intersubjectivity into a peer relationship. Adolescent girls then typically transfer skinship and gaze-ship with a girlfriend to a boyfriend. In the Samoan case, empathy blooms as communitas—a collective fantasy in which two groups (temporarily) imagine that they are one: that they see as others see and feel as they feel. In the US, empathy blooms as romance—a personal fantasy in which two people (temporarily) imagine that they are one. Such fantasies are the poetry of our social worlds and can exert a lasting influence on participants. These kinds of empathy and attachment—focused on the group or focused on individuals—serve more broadly as models for living. Thus, a song that was frequently sung at public events when I was in Samoa counseled listeners “to teach the world humanity and hospitality”; here hospitality (the clearer referent) is a symbol for humanity and refers back to the malaga, the event that enacted and celebrated hospitality between groups. Indeed, when Samoans sojourned, they considered it a point of honor to take nothing with them, trusting the hosting village to foresee and supply all their needs. US Americans, on the other hand, tend to imagine even transnational empathy as intersubjective. Charities, for example, encourage you to adopt a child in Africa whose big eyes look out of a poster or TV scene directly into yours. Am I, then, arguing for a binary contrast between cultures of empathy? My effort has been to establish a heuristic for thinking about attachment and empathy along with the relations between them. In Samoa, there is ample evidence for hybrids that date back at least to Western contact (Mageo 1998, 2001). Further, I have been discussing cultural forms that people are apt to resist. Thus, while interpersonal empathy demands sincerity, collective empathy demands acting. Samoans were always solicitous of their guests’ comfort on malaga. These guests had no need to beg, for their hosts pressed whatever they admired upon them. Yet a nineteenth-century dictionary gives evidence of the

88

Jeannette Mageo

feelings that underlay their gracious manner. Lesolosolou means both “to have no intermission of pain” and “to have no rest, as in the arrival of visitors.” Soua means, “to be overcome by fire, flood or visitors.” ‘Alovao, literally “to hide in the woods,” glosses as “to avoid visitors” (Stevenson 1892: 12–13, emphasis mine). “So, by the sure hand of popular speech,” Robert Louis Stevenson remarks, “we have the picture of the house deserted, the malanga disappointed, and the host that should have been quaking in the bush.” Let me complicate this contrast yet further by suggesting that, in the cultures discussed in this volume, personal empathy and collective empathy are antithetical to norms in varying degrees. Samoans never eyeball those higher in status, and high-status supervisors tend to politely ignore the activities of their inferiors. Yapese avoid one another’s eyes altogether: there was a “striking lack of direct eye contact,” Throop (this volume) comments, “when individuals spoke to one another and marked tendencies for speakers to turn their bodies and heads away from interlocutors.” Indeed, sometimes individuals carried on complete conversations gazing in opposite directions. When Yapese avoid eye-to-eye gazing, they police the boundaries between individual subjects and prevent the sense of intersubjectivity that can come from gazing into another’s eyes—gazing that enacts interpersonal empathy. Throop goes on to mention that for Yapese, eyes offer privileged access to another’s inner life (see also Hollan 1992: 52). Empathy is most strikingly different from the Polynesian case among Toraja. Hollan (this volume) tells us that Torajans have an extreme need to avoid shame-embarrassment and do so through rules of etiquette that demand people be hyper-polite and considerate of one another—in other words, that they enact empathy all the time. In Samoa, as I mentioned above, people use a respect discourse in which they grant their interlocutor a high status, but people just as often joke openly at one another’s expense and make fun of one another’s small misfortunes, such as an accident that causes minor physical hurt. On stage in little improvisations with which they have long entertained one another and in daily repartee, they may be hilariously spontaneous. Hollan (this volume) comments on “the sense of exposure” Toraja “feel as they attempt to perform as culturally competent actors” and on the possibilities of shaming present “in nearly every interpersonal encounter,” which channels “behavior into fairly predictable patterns and routines.” The result, Hollan tells us, is that Toraja begin to respond not to how others present themselves, but to how they imagine others to be; also, they imagine that others exploit them or attempt to harm them through black magic. Geertz (1973) tells us that, like Hollan’s Toraja, the Balinese suffer acute stage fright: they live in fear that they will not be culturally competent actors. Mead (1942) traces this anxiety back to a negative sanction practiced by Balinese families: mothers and others tease children at any display of personal

Empathy and “As-If” Attachment in Samoa

89

feelings, which they learn to suppress in nearly every interpersonal encounter and to express through trance and art. Wikan (1987, 1990) further tells us that should Balinese show personal sentiment in adult life, such as grief at the death of a beloved, companions are also likely to tease them (Wikan 1987, 1990): teasing polices the zone of inner life from infancy to old age. Further, Balinese believe they must always be polos. To be polos is to act kindly and considerately: to act as if one felt empathy. The result is that one can never know what another feels. People, therefore, are constantly afraid that they have unknowingly offended another and that he or she will go to a sorcerer (balian) for revenge. Indeed, one’s own relatives have the best opportunity to gather the hairs or nail clippings or other bodily debris that sorcerers need. In Bali and Toraja, then, personal imaginings are not a place where people are likely to identify with one another but a place where they are apt to destroy or be destroyed by one another. To the extent that people cultivate only a social form of empathy without imaginative identification with others’ inner life, personal imagination tends to return as anxious speculation about other’s real feelings. What about when people cultivate only a person-to-person form of empathy (as many seem to do in the US) and fail to imaginatively identify with other groups? Does collective imagining, then, tend to return as destabilizing anxieties about terrorist plots in other nations or of coteries within them? Our role as anthropologists is to help people empathize with other groups, other cultures, experiencing them as if from the “inside”: seeing as they see, feeling as they feel. In ethnography, one relies on personal imagination: one identifies with an indigene by listening to his or her stories, recording a life history, and by entertaining a fantasy about another form of subjectivity. But fieldwork is also practical and embodied; it involves giving and taking food and other forms of real-world exchange (von Poser, this volume). In entering such exchanges, however, anthropologists learn to share in their hosts’ collective fantasies about the nature of attachment and empathy. Together our attempts to imagine others’ inner states and to enter into their collective modes of fellow feeling distinguish anthropology from other disciplines and allow us to transcend Western paradigms to thickly conceive the emotional bonds that bind other social worlds. Notes I thank Douglas Hollan and Jason Throop for organizing a series of sessions on empathy at the meetings of the Association for Anthropology in Oceania, for which I wrote this essay, and for the stimulating work in this area that they shared (Hollan 2008; Hollan and Throop 2008; Throop 2008). I thank Stanley P. Smith, Kristina Cantin, Rupert Stasch, and two anonymous reviewers for their editorial comments on this manuscript and Cantin for her help researching statistics.

90

Jeannette Mageo

1. For content analysis, Domhoff and Schneider (2008) recommend a sample of at least 125 dreams to reveal significant common features. This does not mean that US girls never compete for status or use aggressive body language. Goodwin points out that girls’ aggression tends to be more relational and social (2006). 2. See http://www.georgianindex.net/R_mail/London/London_Mail.html. Bibliography Ahnert, L., M. R. Gunnar, M. E. Lamb, and M. Berthel. 2004. “Transition to Care.” Child Development 75: 639–650. Ainsworth, Mary D. Salter. 1973. “The Development of Infant-Mother Attachment.” In Review of Child Development Research, vol. 3, ed. B. M. Caldwell and H. N. Ricciuti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon Books. Berger, Kathleen S. 1980. The Developing Person. New York: Worth. Bowlby, John. 1969. Attachment and Loss, vol 1: Attachment. London: Hogarth. Canaan, Joyce. E. 1990. “Passing Notes and Telling Jokes.” In Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Boston: Beacon. Cassidy, Judy, and Phillip R. Shaver. 1999. Handbook of Attachment. New York: Guilford. Chodorow, Nancy. 1974. “Family Structure and Feminine Personality.” In Women, Culture and Society, ed. Michelle Aimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University of California Press. D’Andrade, Roy. 2008. A Study of Personal and Cultural Values, American, Japanese, and Vietnamese. New York: Palgrave. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. 1987. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dierks, Konstantin. 1999. “The Familiar Letter and Social Refinements in America, 1750– 1850.” In Letter Writing as a Social Practice, ed. David Barton and Michael Hall. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Dilworth, W. H. 1794 [1763]. The Ladies Complete Letter-Writer. New York: T. Allen. Doi, Takeo. 1981. Anatomy of Dependence. Tokyo: Kobundo. Domhoff, G. William, and Adam Schneider. 2008. “Similarities and Differences in Dream Content at the Cross-cultural, Gender, and Individual Levels.” Consciousness and Cognition 17: 1257–1265. Ellis, Sarah. 1842. Daughters of England: Their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities. London: Fisher. Erikson, Erik. 1963. Childhood and Society. New York: Norton. Fields, Jason, and Lynne M. Casper. 2001. American Families and Living Arrangements, 2000. Document P20-537. Washington, D.C.: United States Census Bureau. Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Technologies of the Self.” In Technologies of the Self, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Freeman, Derek. 1983. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Empathy and “As-If” Attachment in Samoa

91

Freud, Sigmund. 1961. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton. Gardner, Louise C. 1965. Gautavai: A Study of Samoan Values. Masters thesis, University of Hawai‘i. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Person, Time and Conduct in Bali.” In Interpretations of Culture. New York: Basic Books. Gerber, Eleanor R. 1975. The Cultural Patterning of Emotions in Samoa. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at San Diego. Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. 2006. The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion. Oxford: Blackwell. Grall, Timothy S. 2007. Custodial Mothers and Fathers and Their Child Support: 2005. Washington, D.C. Bureau of the Census. Halpern, Jodi. 2001. From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Hays, Sharon. 1996. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven: Yale University Press. Heim, Pat. 1995. Power Dead Even Rule. Buffalo Grove, IL: Core Vision Media. Hollan, Douglas. 2008. “Being There: On the Imaginative Aspects of Understanding Others and Being Understood.” Ethos 36: 475–489. ———. 1992. “Emotion Work and the Value of Emotional Equanimity among the Toraja.” Ethnology 31: 45–56. Hollan, Douglas, and Jason Throop. 2008. “Whatever Happened to Empathy?” Ethos 36: 385–401. Holland, Dorothy C., and Margaret A. Eisenhart. 1990. Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement, and College Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hrdy, Sarah. B. 2005. “Comes the Child before Man: How Cooperative Breeding and Prolonged Post-weaning Dependence Shaped Human Potentials.” In Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods, ed. Barry S. Hewlett and Michael E. Lamb. New York: Aldine. ———. 2001. “Mothers and Others.” Natural History 110 (4): 50–62. Hsu, Francis L. K. 1961. “American Core Value and National Character.” In Psychological Anthropology: Approaches to Culture and Personality, ed. Francis L. K. Hsu. Homewood, IL: Dorsey. Hughes, Marcia M., Marjolin Blom, Ronald P. Rohner, and Preston A. Britner. 2005. “Bridging Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory and Attachment Theory in the Preschool Situation.” Ethos 33: 378–41. Hyde, Janet S. 2005. “The Gender Similarity Hypothesis.” American Psychologist 60: 581–592. Kelly, Joan B. 2006. “Children’s Living Arrangements following Separation and Divorce: Insights from Empirical and Clinical Research.” Family Process 46: 35–52. Klein, Melanie. 1988. Love, Guilt and Reparation: and Other Works 1921–1945. London: Virago Press. Kogler, Hans Herbert, and Karsten R. Stueber, eds. 2000. Empathy and Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Human Sciences. Boulder: Westview Press. Krämer, Augustin. 1995 [1902]. The Samoa Islands: The Outline of a Monograph Giving Special Consideration to German Samoa. Trans. Theodore Verhaaren. Vol. 2. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. LeVine, Robert A., and Patrice M. Miller. 1990. “Commentary.” Human Development 33: 78–80.

92

Jeannette Mageo

Lèvi-Strauss, Claude. 1970. The Raw and the Cooked. Trans. John Weightnor and Dorren Weightnor. New York: Harper and Row. Lutz, Catherine. 1990. “Engendered Emotions.” In Language and the Politics of Emotion, ed. Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. “Feminist Emotions.” In Power and the Self, ed. J. Mageo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mageo, Jeannette. 2001. “Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology.” Ethos 29: 187–217. ———. 1998. Theorizing Self in Samoa. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1994. “Hairdos and Don’ts: Hair Symbolism and Sexual History in Sāmoa.” Man 29: 407–432. ———. 1989. “Āmio/Aga and Loto: Perspectives on the Structure of the Self in Samoa.” Oceania 59: 181–199. Markus, Hazel R., and Shinobu Kitayama. 1991. “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion and Motivation.” Psychological Review 98: 224–253. Maugham, Somerset. 1915. Of Human Bondage. New York: G.H. Doran. Mauss, Marcel. 1990. The Gift. Trans. W. D. Halls. New York: W.W. Norton. Mead, Margaret. 1961 [1928]. Coming of Age in Samoa. New York: Morrow Quill. ———. 1969 [1930]. The Social Organization of Manu‘a. “‘Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press. ———. 1935. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: William Morrow. ———. 1942. “Balinese Character.” In Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Balinese Character. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences. Milner, G. B. 1979 [1966]. Samoan Dictionary. Pago Pago: American Samoa Government. Moyle, Richard. 1981. Fagōgo: Fables from Samoa in Samoan and English. Oxford: Oxford University Press for Auckland University Press. Ochs, Elinor. 1982. “Talking to Children in Western Samoa.” Language in Society 11: 77–104. O’Meara, Tim. 1990. Samoan Planters. Forth Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Richardson, Samuel. 1985 [1748]. Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rosen, Lawrence. 1995. Other Intentions: Cultural Contexts and the Attribution of Inner States. Santa Fe: School of American Research. Rothbaum, Fred, John Weisz, Martha Pott, Kazuo Miyake, and Gilda Morelli. 2000. “Attachment and Culture: Security in the United States and Japan.” American Psychologist 55: 1093–1104. Sahlins, Marshall D. 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without Weeping. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schneider, David M. 1968. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schoeffel, Penelope. 1979. Daughters of Sina. Ph.D. dissertation, Australian National University. Shimizu, Hidetada. 2000. “Japanese Cultural Psychology and Empathetic Understanding: Implications for Academic and Cultural Psychology.” Ethos 28: 224–247. Shore, Bradd. 1982. Sala‘ilua: A Samoan Mystery. New York: Columbia University Press.

Empathy and “As-If” Attachment in Samoa

93

Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1892. A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa. London: Cassell. Sutter, F. K. 1980. Communal versus Individual Socialization at Home and in School in Rural and Urban Samoa. PhD dissertation, University of Hawai‘i. Tannen, Deborah. 2001. He Said, She Said. Video. Los Angeles: Into the Classroom Media. Tavris, Carol. 1992. The Mismeasure of Women. New York: Simon and Schuster. Throop, Jason. 2008. “On the Problem of Empathy: The Case of Yap, Federated States of Micronesia.” Ethos 36: 402–426. Turner, George. 1984 [1884]. Samoa: A Hundred Years Ago and Long Before. London: Macmillan. Turner, Victor. 1977. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Adline. Wheeler, Anna, and William Thompson. 1825. An Appeal of One-Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretension’s of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, R. Taylor. Whiting, John W. M. 1961. “Socialization Process and Personality.” In Psychological Anthropology: Approaches to Culture and Personality, ed. Francis L. K. Hsu. Homewood, IL: Dorsey. Wikan, Unni. 1987. “Public Grace and Private Fears: Gaiety, Offense, and Sorcery in Northern Bali.” Ethos 15: 337–365. ———. 1990. Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Wilkes, Charles. 1845. Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard. Winnicott, D. W. 1967. Playing and Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1993 [1787]. Vindication of the Rights of Women. London: Dutton.

4 Empathic Perception and Imagination among the Asabano Lessons for Anthropology ROGER IVAR LOHMANN

Introduction

Empathy, an ability to mirror others while retaining one’s own identity, is a deeply important phenomenon for anthropology for at least three reasons. First, empathy is a human specialty. This is evident in the fact that human reliance upon culture requires social intelligence; in order to copy behaviors and attitudes, one must be able to represent what others think and feel. Empathy is thus essential for effective sociality, for enculturation, for linguistic communication, and for theorizing about and knowing one another. Empathy has a demonstrable biological foundation and a deep prehistory in the hominid line. Second, empathy is modeled and developed differently depending on cultural context. Since the advent of culture, hominines have elaborated, suppressed, underestimated, and overestimated the capacity for empathy in multiple cultural directions. This cultural variation remains, continues to be generated, and can be observed in thousands of distinctive cultural groups. Finally, empathy is central to anthropological methodology, since visceral understanding of others’ behaviors and mentations depends upon this native ability as elaborated by anthropological tradition. Anthropologists do well to explore the limitations and strengths of empathy, as molded in their understanding by their personal emic (folk) perspectives, their professional etic (scientific) perspectives, and the emic baselines of the people they study, to avoid the pitfalls of projection and to maximize its potential for accurate apprehension of other perspectives (Davies 2008; Devereux 1967). In this chapter I consider these three factors in turn, illustrating the discussion with findings from a 2005 field study of how the Asabano people of Papua New Guinea model and use empathy and empathy-like experiences. I analyze the data in terms of the interdependent and often conflated processes of perceiving and imagining, which are the two sources of information upon which empathetic impressions are based. I discuss the role of the culturally

96

Roger Ivar Lohmann

informed imagination to either fill perceptual gaps or block sensory indicators of the inner states of others. In light of these considerations, I assess the potentials and limitations of empathy as an anthropological method to know others.

Empathy as a Human Specialty

Since empathy allows us to experience and display at least a semblance of what our fellows feel, it is implicated in humankind’s evolved reliance upon exaggerated social intelligence and culture. One of the ways this may have occurred is outlined in the social brain hypothesis, which suggests that improved interaction with social groups, through assessment of other minds and intentionalities, was a significant criterion of natural selection for brain expansion in hominid evolution (Dunbar 2003). The evolution of the capacity for culture in the hominid line engaged, depended upon, and improved empathetic abilities. This points to a prehistory of empathetic behavior that is very deep and rooted in biology. A physiological basis for empathy has been identified in mirror neuron research, which shows that similar brain activity occurs in observers as well as performers of particular behaviors (Carr et al. 2003; Iacoboni and Woods 1999; Rizzolatti and Craighhero 2004). Work in this area has shown that social interaction has a distinctive signature in the mirror neuron system (Oberman et al. 2007). Moreover, empathy depends on another cognitive capacity: the panhuman ability to model volition and intentionality in other people—a phenomenon that has come to be labeled “theory of mind” (see, e.g., Gobbini et al. 2007; Schulte-Rüther et al. 2007). In order to empathize or even speak with others, one must assume that they have minds that are in basic respects similar to one’s own, and one must have some ability to predict how they will understand and react to particular events and utterances. Theory of mind in action is being productively studied through functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain (Saxe and Powell 2006). Such work is showing that at a physiological level, the capacity we roughly gloss as “empathy” includes multiple, distinct abilities with attendant physiological bases and developmental sequences in individual maturation. The object or subject being empathized with (the “empathizee”) can only be a mind-bearing being or an entity to which the empathizer attributes mind through activation of theory of mind—what I have elsewhere called the “volition schema” (Lohmann 2003d: 176). It is nonsensical to empathize with a rock on the moon being smashed to bits by a meteorite—unless one applies theory of mind to it. A rock that is inert and unaware can experience neither pleasure, pain, nor thought. However, people sometimes do, in error or faith,

Empathic Perception and Imagination among Asabano

97

extend the volition schema to objects that do not in fact have minds; to this tendency we owe animism (the belief in spiritual beings) and supernaturalism (the belief that spiritual volition precedes physical cause), the bases of religions across humankind (see, e.g., Guthrie 1996; Horton 1960). Anything can be the object of a subjective experience of empathy so long as the empathizer thinks it has a mind, regardless of whether it has one in fact. People pray only to beings they think have volition, never to objects they regard as mentally inert. By the same token, people can feel a sense of empathy for a mythological agent’s suffering, or a sense of union with a deceased charismatic leader, and not only real, volitional beings (on charismatic relationships, see Lindholm 1990). Empathy, charisma, and relational identity are closely related phenomena, all with strong inputs from both the real and the contrived, from sensory perception and imaginative projection. All are experienced as though they were accurate, yet all are subject to a variety of hidden inaccuracies in their representations, including projection and supernaturalism. Self-centered though we may be, humans often experience, through our imaginative and perceptive capacities, what we take to be the perspectives of others, including not only other humans, but also other species and supernatural beings (Brunois 2005; Viveiros de Castro 1998). To befriend, negotiate, or fight with others successfully, one must be able to anticipate and assess their states of mind and their likely reactions to particular situations. For their actions and reactions to make sense to us, we must be able to imagine ourselves in their position, ideally based on good sensory information. However, insofar as empathy-like endeavors include projection and supernaturalism, what feels like accurate engagement with another is in fact illusion (Guthrie 2000). Totemists, for example, imagine themselves to be exemplars of the animal from which they believe they descend, and thus put themselves in the animal’s place, or put the animal in theirs. All forms of alternative perspective-taking, including acting and role-playing, are based on impressions of empathy with real or imagined volitional beings. They are all, to one degree or another, subject to inaccuracy or error—to projection and conflation of moods, beliefs, and identities—which easily creep into otherwise accurate reflections of other mind states. Empathy is a problem for research that goes far beyond anthropology’s confines (for a broad review, see Decety and Jackson 2004), but it is also one that is eminently suited to general anthropology’s holistic approach, which incorporates the biological and the cultural and is comparative across time, space, and related species. Empathy is not restricted to Homo sapiens, but has been demonstrated based on observed behavior in monkeys and, even more richly, in apes (King 2007: 33–41). Even restricting our vision to the human scale, wherever we see archaeological, biological, linguistic, or ethnological evidence of ideas and behaviors shared beyond single persons to dyads and

98

Roger Ivar Lohmann

groups, we see evidence of the empathetic behaviors that were prerequisite for these. All of this bespeaks a deep importance of empathy for humankind.

Cultural Elaboration and Variation of the Empathetic Capacity: The Asabano Example

The capacity for empathy is a biological endowment of humankind. However, like any such capacity, empathy is apprehended, understood, elaborated, and developed in culturally specific terms that can exaggerate or underestimate its potential. Representations of empathy—as a phenomenon and as a skill—are themselves culture. All this means that we would expect to see a degree of variation in how empathy is modeled and deployed, and the ethnographic record bears this out. For example, the place of empathy in society can be seen as an ethnic or religious identification. One thinks of the exiled Dalai Lama of Tibet’s continual championing of compassion, and of Elfriede Hermann’s account in this volume of Banabans’ responding to their history of displacement by defining themselves as compassionate and deserving of pity. Empathy can also be a paramount value, as in the Polynesian societies of Samoa (Mageo, this volume) and Anuta (Feinberg, this volume). Study of this variation can teach us what kinds of empathy exist in different traditions, to what ends, and how successfully. This sort of investigation also contributes to the list of possible kinds of empathy, how empathy works differently in different traditional settings, and how we can fashion empathy to work more effectively in a variety of applications, including anthropological research. Ethnographic studies of empathy provide data on how empathetic impressions are formed and acted upon in particular sociocultural contexts. The Asabano people of Papua New Guinea told me about their understandings of empathy in 2005. A dominant Asabano doctrine holds that the inner states of others cannot be known with certainty. Asabano people therefore avoid making definitive declarations on the inner states of others. Maria Lepowsky (this volume) notes that the Vanatinai Islanders also declare knowledge of another’s subjective experience to be, regrettably, impossible, and Samoans, Anutans, and Yapese hold similar views (Mageo, Feinberg, and Throop, all in this volume). Outer signs and communications do enable estimation, though Asabano people expect deception to frequently cloud even this vista. Their justification of this conclusion leads me to accept it not only as a folk theory, but also as valid for an anthropological conception of empathy. Asabano ideas about empathy, which stop far short of writing it off altogether, can help us know how, and to what extent, empathy works so we can maximize the security and validity of our depictions of others. Following consideration of the Asabano case, I will point to some of the contributing factors to empathetic

Empathic Perception and Imagination among Asabano

99

knowledge, including information derived from sensory perception and fantasy, and the tendency to project one’s own attitudes onto others. Asabano Models, Beliefs, and Uses of Empathy-Like Experiences

The Asabano are swidden gardeners living in a remote, sparsely populated rainforest in Papua New Guinea’s highlands fringe near Duranmin airstrip, Sandaun Province. They were my gracious hosts for over a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork spanning visits in 1991, 1994–95, 2005, and 2007. In the mid 1990s they numbered around 200 people living in two main villages. By 2005 they had abandoned one of two village sites and established hamlets in their traditional heartland north of the Om River, to the east of the airstrip. Readiness to make such moves is a survival of their earlier tradition of semi-nomadic, shifting settlement. They are one of the last groups in the world to have been contacted by representatives of European colonialism, with the Australian government’s first official contact occurring in 1963. Following pacification by government agents and missionization by neighboring Telefolmin Baptists in the 1970s, they converted to Christianity from their traditional religion, a male-dominated, secretive, initiation cult focused on ancestors and nature spirits. My main period of fieldwork among them in 1994–95 focused on documenting their reasons for converting to Christianity. During this earlier fieldwork, people often told me that one cannot know what another person thinks unless he or she reports it, which left me with the impression that the Asabano might regard a notion of empathy with suspicion. As Robbins and Rumsey (2008: 414–417) have observed, the widely reported belief in “the opacity of other minds” in the Pacific challenges social scientific views that empathy is necessary for sociality. Yet the Asabano case provides an example of how, such beliefs notwithstanding, empathy does exist in such societies, though conceptualized, valued, and learned in culturally distinctive ways. During a month-long return visit to the Asabano at Yakob village in 2005, one of my main purposes was to document local understandings of empathy. To that end, I collected narratives on “sensing” what another person thinks or feels in various situations in order to find out whether Asabano people do this routinely in spite of their skepticism, and to discover how, and how well, they think this works. I drew on my earlier work, which had demonstrated that many Asabano consider dreams to be a mode of communication, especially between spirits and humans, and a way of gaining special insight into events (Lohmann 2000). Dreams and other experiences like “spirit work” trance divination (Lohmann 2003a) that, from an etic perspective, depict imaginary images, served a role for many Asabano somewhat like that of sensory perception: they were used to acquire information and evidence about the external world.

100

Roger Ivar Lohmann

This generated questions related to empathy: Did the special experiential status of dreams and other apparently extrasensory experiences as sensorylike mean that Asabano thought they could use them to accurately look into others’ minds? Did they consider mind reading or telepathy possible under any conditions, and how might such notions relate to their doubting the possibility of accurate empathy? I set out to study how imagination and sensory perception (as scientifically and as emically construed) contribute to culturally distinctive ideas about empathy in this case. I approach these questions most systematically through analysis of how the Asaba language expresses empathylike notions. I also rely heavily here on narrative evidence. Ultimately (and ironically), the goal must be for both the anthropologist and readers to attain an empathy with the subjects of this study that is as accurate as possible, even while the accuracy of this method is under critical evaluation. Asaba Models of Mentation

I began by investigating how processes involved in imagining are expressed in the Asaba language. I found that a single morpheme, mable, refers to mentation as a whole, inclusive of thinking, feeling, remembering, imagining, and planning, and that the distinction between these various meanings, insofar as it is salient in Asabano thought, is known primarily by context. One implication for the Asabano understanding of empathy is revealed in achieving an understanding of this morpheme: thinking and feeling is for Asaba speakers a united process, as it is for the Banabans (Hermann, this volume) and for the Vanatinai islanders (Lepowsky, this volume). Thought and feeling, which are distinguished by two lexemes in English, are encompassed in a single lexeme in Asaba, implying that Asabano might tend to conceptualize and experience empathy (a kind of mentation) as an emotional and an intellectual identification, rather than merely an emotional identification as the English word implies. Unni Wikan (1991: 285) notes that a similar unity of thought and feeling in Balinese informs notions of wisdom (cf. von Poser, this volume, on other anthropological takes on this unity such as “think-feel” and “cogmotion”). From a clinical perspective, Jodi Halpern (2001) argues that empathy involves a fusion of intellectual and sympathetic identification with another person that, when skillfully deployed, need not cloud objectivity or smother rational relating; instead, its emotional component enriches understanding. I proceeded to ask Asabano people how they understood mable to happen. A young man named Laurie, whom I had trained as a linguistic informant and translator, answered by describing how “the heart creates an image”: “The heart just mentates and image/spirit, ah, sometimes you will see an image/ spirit, sometimes you are there and a man or woman is in another place, and you will see his or her image/spirit” (sosabu mea mableme alomoudu, ah, pi

Empathic Perception and Imagination among Asabano

101

abo alomoudu analedudu pi abo tiamome sanepdu, sopdu pebeatomodu amableda alomoumudu analedudu). The heart (sosabu) is the locus and the organ of mentation (mable—thinking, feeling, imagining, and planning). Thinking/ feeling is normally referred to as sosamableta or “heart mentating.” Some young adults occasionally talk about pamelemableta, “head mentating,” which appears to reflect their exposure to scientific understandings in school, but the heart remains the primary locus of mentation in Asabano discourse (for an interesting comparative discussion on such matters elsewhere in New Guinea, see Stewart and Strathern 2001). People do not always agree on these issues, which are considered abstract and remote, and change their views over time despite the high value placed on consensus. I discovered on my return that my earlier published effort (Lohmann 2003e) to depict a general Asabano model of souls as living in the intestines was not widely shared, and appeared to be derived from the missionary exhortation to “turn the belly” and “allow the Holy Spirit into one’s belly.” In fact, according to Belok, a man in his forties who is well versed in traditional lore, the pre-contact view was that souls resided in the shoulders, though I suspect there was variation even in the late pre-contact period. Moreover, bel can be used to refer to the entire thorax, and can include the heart, rendered in Tok Pisin as leva, the locus of love and other emotions. If a notion of empathy exists in the Asabano imaginary that is currently hegemonic, we would expect people to regard it as residing “in the heart—or is it the head?” rather like some Western folk models of empathy. The source of a person’s thinking and feeling, I next learned, is largely beyond the reach of others, even in dreams. When I asked people about the source of sosamablele (heart mentations), they sometimes described them as spiritual and as “saying” things, but my data suggest that just who or what is making the utterances (amole) is at best only vaguely theorized in Asabano thought. What kind of mentation, then, would an Asaba version of empathy be? To sum up, a common view is that thoughts and feelings occur in the heart, where they sometimes arise in the form of speech of unclear origin and with an unclear internal audience. Empathy in the sense of sharing or relating to the mentation of another person would necessitate for Asabano a communicative connection between the hearts of two people. What sorts of connection between hearts do they think possible? And how might these provide them with knowledge of the mentations of another? Knowledge and Empathy

“Know” is expressed in Asaba as atughuate. My 2005 fieldwork found widespread agreement with the notion that one cannot “know” with certainty what other people think or feel unless they tell. Laurie confirmed that this is re-

102

Roger Ivar Lohmann

garded as common knowledge. This tenet implies that empathy, in the sense of accurate knowledge of another’s inner state, is impossible. Nevertheless, both linguistic and narrative evidence contradict this explicit assertion. As expected, the window for empathy in the Asaba idiom exists in the possibility for two people’s hearts to be in contact. “Empathy” as it is used in common English parlance is well glossed in Asaba by the bound morpheme sosati- or “heart-with.” Thus, “I feel sorry for others” is rendered a ponoughte sosatibo (literally, “I others-to heart-with-am”). “I am sorry for her because she is sick” is rendered a yote sosatibo, yo ayatodu (literally, “I him/her-to heart-with-am, he/she sick-is”). Similarly, agreement is expressed as sosa aiole tole (“hearts are the same,” or in Tok Pisin, wankain tingting, “similar or same thought”). Since one cannot “know” (atughuate) another’s experience of thought, feeling, and imagination, what kind of awareness is this heart-togetherness, and on what evidence is it based for the Asabano? The answers are found in Asabano models of sensation. Sensing and Empathy

Through the senses, one can gather information about what is happening to others, and through this common experience one’s heart is metaphorically “with” theirs. Five senses are recognized in Asaba, all expressed as bound morphemes. They appear to correspond fairly closely with their English counterparts. To touch, hold, or feel is augha-, to see is nale-, to hear is melene-, to taste is lema-, and to smell is smea-. The senses (which can be active in dream travels) provide information about the outer world, and only secondarily about the inner worlds of other people and spirits—and of these only insofar as persons are willing to tell or happen to show. In one of our conversations, Laurie clarified that mablele (mentations— thoughts/feelings/images that appear in the heart or brain) are not understood to be representations of sensory information from the physical world. Laurie’s translation implies that mablele could be glossed in this instance as “images” in Neisser’s (1976) sense of mental representations deriving from memory and cognition, as opposed to “percepts,” which are mental representations of sensory data. Laurie continued, explaining that they use nalele (“seen things” or vision percepts) to refer to real, external, empirical phenomena that one has sensed, regardless of whether this was in a dream, a trance, or in alert life. Thus, Asaba privileges sight as a metonym for all the sensory percepts. Aluma nalele refers to things seen inside of a dream, while wanema nalele means things seen ples klia (Tok Pisin), that is, in the open and when awake (on how modes of consciousness influence evidential experience, see Lohmann 2003c). One might receive special revelations from people and spirits in dreams, trance, and in plain sight, should they choose to show themselves and nar-

Empathic Perception and Imagination among Asabano

103

rate their thoughts. One would describe this in Asaba as alomoudu sosamona mablele alunetu or “the spirit in the heart shows thoughts/feelings.” Note that the spirit referred to here is not described as the experiencer, but rather the presenter of experience to another aspect of the self that is not named. Interestingly, the word for spirit or soul is the same word used for a mental image: alomoudu, which appears to be a common pattern (e.g., Goodale 2003: 153 discusses the Tiwi gloss for image that includes “spirit, shadow, reflection, photograph, film”). While some Asabano regard certain mental images—particularly products of the “autonomous imagination” (Stephen 1989) like dreams and reveries—to be sensory experiences of a disembodied spirit, when I explicitly asked many people about their views on these matters in 2007, the exercise revealed a range of variation and uncertainty about the sources and causes of mental and imaginative experiences. So seeing a person’s image “with the mind’s eye,” as we say in English, does not necessarily mean for Asabano individuals that one is viewing the person rather than just an image of the person. Still, for many of my informants over the years, the sensory-like experiences in at least some dreams and trances are not considered mere images, or imagined likenesses of actual sensory perceptions. Rather, reflecting a literal interpretation of the Asaba expression, to “see in a dream,” they understood some dream and trance visions to be actual sensory perceptions and therefore potentially trustworthy sources of information about the world. The Asabano trust their senses as sources of relatively sure knowledge. Since they regard it as being impossible to directly witness, in any state of consciousness, the interior experiences of other people, certain knowledge of another’s felt experience is also impossible. Yet, through a combination of what they regard as sensory perceptions of the outside world and internally derived images, the Asabano do engage in empathetic exercises. In addition to “hearttogetherness” or sosati-, they interpret certain bodily signs in themselves as indicating something about the condition of people beyond other sensory indicators. Heart-Togetherness and Bodily Empathy: Knowing Oneself, Estimating Others

Asabano people told me they attain sympathy for others, if not accurate empathetic knowledge, in at least two ways. First, “heart-togetherness” or concern about another’s possible condition, derives from knowledge of one’s own thoughts about another, particularly when enriched by sensory data. Second, what I call here “bodily empathy” refers to sympathetic physical indicators in two people that suggest that they are having a common experience. Neither of these should translate as “empathy” if the term is used to refer only to accurate

104

Roger Ivar Lohmann

knowledge of another as opposed to surmising that is subject to projection, worry, and post hoc explanation. Laurie’s father Sumole explained heart-togetherness with the following hypothetical example: “[When] staying and the sun sets, yeah, my friend somewhere, Roger, [is] somewhere [and] the sun goes down. This [we] say, the heart usually mentates like that. Mentating and, [as] the sun goes [down], [at] the time of dusk [it is] usually mentating” (Tiamome-o anobu wodamoda, yea, saneadu toma, Losa, toma anobu-o, ma motemo. Nebe olome, sosanibu nebe mableama-yo. Nebe mablebomo, anobu oda, wobudliada mableama-yo.) Laurie said his father mentioned dusk because at this time people often sit and think about things. People tend to worry at that time because the sun is setting for others, too. They hope that their loved ones have found shelter if they are visiting the bush, and that they are all right after the day. Seeing the sunset, in this example, is a sensory catalyst to an imaginative exercise in sympathy. Has Sumole achieved something like empathy in his hypothetical example? The answer to this question must be that though in the Asaba idiom his heart is with mine, what he expresses is merely his own thoughts about me—what he expects, based on his own past sensory experience, I am likely to be going through at that moment somewhere in the bush, and his own emotional and intellectual response to this thought of concern and caring for his friend. Thus, the Asabano concept of empathy, sosati-, does not imply certain knowledge (atughuate) of another’s inner state. Rather, it expresses knowledge only of one’s own state of mind regarding another. Based upon one’s being an entity of certain known common characteristics, including a mind, and acting in an environment and situation that are partly known, in heart-togetherness one imaginatively creates an experiential scenario from the perspective of the empathizee that is likely to be at least partially accurate. From an etic point of view, the more variables that the empathizer controls about the situation, the more likely his or her empathetic impression is accurate. Such variables include knowledge of the object’s personality, habits, and background, and details about his or her situation. Though these characteristics are partially foreign to the empathizing subject’s own circumstances, through imaginatively taking the other’s perspective empathizers attain insight into the situations of others and reasonable estimates of their reactions to those situations. Empathy does not provide certain knowledge, and empathizers are prone to allowing their own projections to stand in for knowledge about another person’s situation. This leads to inaccuracies, and empathizers are easily tricked into overconfidence. However, with care, empathizing is a skill that can be improved. To what extent does Sumole’s heart-togetherness with me derive from what he has sensed, as opposed to what he has imagined? While sensory information is more closely tied to external reality than products of the imagination,

Empathic Perception and Imagination among Asabano

105

both can be misleading. The imagination produces accurate insights as well as fantasies out of touch with the sensory world. Sensory and imaginative information infuse one another and are difficult to separate. In the scenario Sumole described, what he is sensing at the moment are the indicators of sunset, such as the darkening bush, the cooling breezes of evening, the flickering of hearth fires and the smell of smoke. I am beyond his senses, so he is relying on his memory of other sensory experiences of what he and others have done when traveling in the bush, preparing for nightfall in a bush shelter as darkness, and perhaps witches, close in around the house. Sumole might think back to other sensory information, such as what I told him of where I intended to go and what I intended to do there, to think about what might have become of me since we parted. Heart-togetherness is knowledge of one’s own mentation and perceptions related to another that can give clues about the actual condition of the other. Sosati- or heart-togetherness is a kind of mable or mentation: an imaginary leap, an educated guess, or an estimate; it is an image, not a percept. Another empathy-like phenomenon in the Asabano worldview is bodily empathy, experienced as sympathetic clues on one’s own body, discovered through the senses rather than mentation. A form of culturally learned interpretation, it is used as a means of long-distance “perception” of the state of other people. An example of this sort of empathetic experience famous in the ethnographic record is the couvade, a phenomenon particularly prevalent in Native South America in which fathers mimic their wives’ childbirth (Klein 1991). The two examples of bodily empathy I can provide for the Asabano are involuntary physical reactions indicating the state of another. The first example involves the disposition of a sleeper’s body. I discovered it, like so many ethnographic nuggets, by accident. One day I asked Laurie if Asabano say that people can connect telepathically by thinking about one another at the same time; he denied this. In sleep, however, he said, “if you turn, the person you are dreaming of will have the same dream” (cf. Poirier 2003: 113). I was unable to obtain an explanation for how this works and its significance. The second example of bodily empathy came to the mind of an elder named Kafko. In Asaba, isi‘sitibu refers to a phenomenon in which one’s underarm sweats without exertion, indicating that someone will soon arrive. “We know this is true because people walking are hot, so you are hot, too,” explained Kafko. Later, I asked Laurie to tell me how this works in Asaba, and he replied, “When sweat appears in your armpit, it can mean that men [people] may be coming. We always say that. So when we aren’t working and sweat comes down in our armpits like that, people may be coming” (Kopsinemoma, isi‘isitisemlo saneno amotema-yo. Nebetita nesene napealowama-yo. Isi‘isitime namoptinisimlo saneno amotema-yo).

106

Roger Ivar Lohmann

Is isi‘isitibu a form of empathy? One shares the outer manifestation (sweat) of a feeling (body heat from exertion) that another person is having at a given moment. Though sweat is normally visible, and another person’s body heat or sweat can be directly apprehended with the senses, in this case, because the people one is supposedly sensing are not within range of the senses, the feeling is based on one’s own body, apparently reacting in sympathy with another’s in the absence of any sensory data. It is a feat as amazing as knowing what another person really thinks. No one I asked had a ready answer for how this is supposed to work. It appears not to be accepted on the basis of some logically worked out theory of sensation or extrasensory perception, but is simply invoked to explain sweating of unknown cause that in hindsight is discovered to have immediately preceded an arrival. Laurie does not, in his explanation of this customary belief, say that this phenomenon provides certain knowledge of others; rather, it indicates that “people may be coming.” Like heart-togetherness, this culture-bound, empathy-like syndrome provides sure knowledge only about oneself. While it offers clues about the state of other people—that they are hot and sweaty from a journey—this is rather superficial information about their inner state. From an etic point of view, bodily empathy of the forms described by the Asabano would appear to be folk wisdom, with no causal mechanism provided by informants and, it would appear, no basis in scientifically discernable fact. However, it has social and emotional value similar to other, more obviously supernatural notions that provide an appealing impression that we humans are even more closely linked to one another that it may seem, through some sort of common substance, consciousness, or relationship to a supernatural being. From an Asabano emic point of view, bodily empathy and heart-togetherness reveal little secure and accurate knowledge of the inner states of others. Having a simultaneous dream might be a much more intimate experience, depending on exactly what sort of connection the pair believed they experienced, but this was presented to me as a tidbit of folklore, not as an event that people use to attain understanding of the thoughts of someone else.

Quality and Quantity of Empathy

Observing behavior, one often sees what looks like evidence of empathy in others. Expressions of concern and commiseration from the well toward the sick, for example, are common among the Asabano. This alone is not proof of empathy, since one could falsely claim to experience heart-togetherness for political or other reasons, but taken with other indicators over time, the genuineness of an expression can be estimated. Another frequent occurrence in Yakob village is cruelty toward small animals by children, and toward dogs by

Empathic Perception and Imagination among Asabano

107

the general population (cf. Hollan, this volume). If these events were systematically observed and recorded using ethological methods, one could quantify and compare expressions of apparent empathy, showing cultural variation in the frequency, intensity, and tenor of empathetic expression in different societies. Regrettably, I did not undertake such a systematic study among the Asabano, but I am able to make a few general remarks based on what I have experienced in the field. Following ethnographic tradition dating back to Malinowski and beyond, I read novels in the field, and they spurred my powers of observation and analysis in directions they might not otherwise have gone. The reading list for my 2007 sojourn among the Asabano included a novel about Paleolithic Siberians, written by anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (1991), called The Animal Wife. In fiction, of course, authors can “cheat” and tell readers in detail what characters are really thinking and feeling—a luxury in which no anthropologist can safely indulge. The novel’s hero is good-natured and likable, but nevertheless is depicted as having little empathy for his captive wife. He is not purposely cruel; rather, he simply thinks of his own interests, while hers do not enter his mind. The book made me think of how the Asabano often appear to thoughtlessly strike their dogs and seem to have no concern for the suffering of animals they hunt, or young animals that children sometimes play with roughly or kill. It also reminded me of an account of the torture of an enemy captive by defleshing him alive, which an elder named Bagaiab recounted to me from his childhood memories in 1995. I also thought back to the shock with which I read of the lighthearted slaughter of pigs by singeing to death that Donald Tuzin (1980: 107, n. 35) vividly describes among the Ilahita Arapesh. Do such cases imply a lack of empathy or different kinds of empathy? I think it can be either. The English folk concept of empathy assumes an active, positive regard for the empathizee and thus might be labeled active positive empathy. Among the Asabano, this is exemplified by heart-togetherness. Cases of causing pain and discomfort to other beings imply either a lack of empathetic engagement (purposeful or unintentional) or active negative empathy, in which one approximates the inner state of another in order to disrupt his or her wellbeing. This is exemplified by the torture of enemies and some cases of cruelty to animals. I suggest that all acts of empathy fall on a continuum between positive and negative regard on the part of the empathizer for the empathizee, with neutral attitude and intentions toward the object in the center of the continuum. Cases like habitual hitting of dogs or roughly playing with captive animals reveal actions toward another being that are done relatively thoughtlessly, that is, with a relative lack of empathy. Thus we can speak of all instances of empathy as falling on a scale of intensity. At one extreme, there is no empathy when there is no concern with or modeling of the other’s state of mind. On the other

108

Roger Ivar Lohmann

end of the continuum, there is intense concern with and active modeling of the other’s state of mind. Though cultural and individual variation in the forms and frequencies of empathy displayed are to be expected, panhuman patterns appear as well for practical reasons. For example, one must not develop too much positive empathy for victims of war and execution, for strangers, or for the animals we kill for food: such empathy would incapacitate our ability to survive and thrive socially. Yet empathy allows one to predict certain basic needs and desires in others—thus the Asabano hunter knows the habits of his prey, building blinds near fruiting trees behind which to lie in wait for the birds, whose desire to eat these fruits he empathizes with in order to kill them.

Problematizing Perspectives to Form an Etic Conceptualization of Empathy

Like all linguistic elements, the English concept of empathy carries information from the cultures in which it is used that must be guarded against when it is made to do the work of a technical term in anthropology because these potential meanings can distort our descriptions of other emic realities in unintended ways (Lohmann 2003b). At least in the folk model of empathy implied by the term in my dialect of English, empathy signifies a primarily emotional rather than an intellectual identification with, and reflection of, another person’s attitude, experienced as though the empathizer were that person. This mirroring of another is assumed to model or re-create the empathizee’s experience with a degree of accuracy. Furthermore, empathy implies a sympathetic regard for empathizees. This is one emic model of empathy, not to be confused with definitions of empathy designed to serve the comparative and scientific purposes of anthropology. In a rich article on empathy spanning psychology and primatology, Stephanie Preston and Frans de Waal (2002: 4) point out that empathy (as they etically define it) can have different forms and strengths, including what they refer to as guilt, helping behavior, cognitive empathy, identification, emotional contagion, and “true empathy.” This explicit laying out of types of empathy is most helpful, both for analyzing folk categorizations and for constructing robust and useful etic definitions. In any given cultural context, experiences or abilities that we might call empathy could deviate from the term’s folk implications in a variety of ways. They may or may not: • • • •

include a sense of conflated identity with another person. emphasize emotional rather than intellectual experience. be, or be considered, accurate. be framed by a positive attitude toward the empathizee.

Empathic Perception and Imagination among Asabano

109

Looking for such possible deviations in the anthropological record is a method of analysis that leads to a more sophisticated anthropological conceptualization of empathy, based on the observed range of variability in empathetic forms and functions in multiple emic and etic perspectives. The Asabano folk models of empathy-like experiences are variants in the possible range.

Empathy as Anthropological Methodology: Necessity, Pitfalls, and Dependability

Since anthropology is in the business of knowing both others and selves so that we might understand humankind as a whole, empathy is a major tool of the trade. It behooves us therefore to understand just what empathy is, how it works, the ways it can fail, and the ways to maximize its potential for accuracy. It has been argued that empathy is vital to developing effective questions and contextual understanding of animals, including other humans (e.g., Paddle 2002 [2000]: 238). The danger of activating empathy in researching others is that one can project and thereby mistake one’s own model of someone else’s mental state for direct experience of their mind. If Asaba models of empathy have value for etic theory, it is to point out that empathy provides certain knowledge only about the empathizer’s inner state. The information it provides about the empathizee is an estimate based on reasonable, suggestive, but more or less incomplete evidence. It is easy to succumb to the illusion that empathetic impressions are direct apprehensions of reality (percepts resulting from perception) when in fact they are models of reality in our minds (images created in the imagination). The same occurs when we mistake dreams for waking reality during or after the event. Having voiced this caution is not to declare empathy so hopelessly contaminated by projection as to be useless as a method by which to know parts of the likely inner states of others. It is to recognize that in using empathy, one is making a more or less logical estimation based on inconclusive sensory information about one’s self and the other. Knowing how dependable empathetic experiences are, and their sources of accurate and inaccurate impressions, enables us to maximize our use of empathy to know others as accurately as possible. While I concur with Hollan’s (this volume) point that we must distinguish empathy from projection, projection is often, and arguably always, a part of empathetic experience, and one that can improve as well as diminish the accuracy of empathy. Though projection of our own thoughts and feelings onto others typically creates inaccurate impressions, it is only through knowing our own volition, motives, and reactions that we are able to model what these must be like for others. In-

110

Roger Ivar Lohmann

deed, mirror neurons, by producing similar brain behaviors in both observing empathizers and observed empathizees, give observers a similar physiological basis for common experience, which they project (with some accuracy) onto empathizees. As Preston and de Waal (2002: 4) conceptualize empathy, attended perception of the object’s state automatically activates the subject’s representations of the state, situation, and object, and that activation of these representations automatically primes or generates the associated autonomic and somatic responses, unless inhibited. Projection is not necessarily misleading or wrong, though it certainly often is. There is a degree of mutuality and intersubjectivity implied by empathetic relating, and Hollan rightly points to the sense of participation inherent in the empathetic undertaking, an identification with another being that Lévy-Bruhl (1985 [1926]) captured with his own notion of “mystical participation” that he theorized underlies the relationship between totemists and their totems. Certainly, projection is often dead wrong, and can overwhelm other sources of insight upon which empathy draws. For example, if one had a bad experience in love, one might assume that others are doomed to similarly suffer and project this association onto others exhibiting the signs of being in love. On the other hand, this cynicism, if thoughtfully placed in a broader context of other evidential indicators, might also alert one to likely outcomes for others based on one’s own experience. Nevertheless, empathy can and should be more than base projection of one’s own view onto others without evaluation of its potential for inaccuracy. The resources on which empathetic impressions are based also include sensory data on the outer disposition and situation of others, memories of our own reactions to circumstances similar to those observed in others, and logical reasoning about the incomplete information available in order to reach the most plausible empathetic representations possible. For example, one might reason that a person getting ready to camp in the bush will be feeling afraid of witches because one has had such fears when possessed of similar beliefs, a similar mind, and in the same situation. This is not base projection; it is a logical operation. The knowledge it provides is not fully certain; it is contingent on the accuracy and sufficiency of the observational data on which it is based and the logic with which equations and other cognitive operations are connected and manipulated.

Empathy as Perception, Empathy as Imagination

Weber appeared to be optimistic about the potential for empathy as a sociological method when he wrote that “[e]mpathetic certainty is achieved when an action and the complex of feelings experienced by the agent is completely

Empathic Perception and Imagination among Asabano

111

re-lived in the imagination.” However, he immediately softened this claim by noting that the more radically [the object’s] ultimate values differ from our own, the more difficult it is for us to understand them by re-living them through an act of empathetic imagination. Indeed, depending on the particular case, we may have to be content either with a merely intellectual understanding or, where even that proves to be unattainable, with a simple acceptance of them as brute facts. In that case, we have to try to make the course of the action motivated by these goals understandable by trying, as far as possible, to grasp the goals intellectually or to relive them empathetically in as close an approximation as we can manage. (Weber 1978 [1922]: 8–9) But how are we to judge the accuracy of this approximation of our empathetic, or our merely intellectual understanding of another person’s perspective and motives? Empathy exists at the interface between sensory perception and imagination. One draws on sensed indicators of the other person’s inner state and one’s own memories, thoughts, and feelings to build a semblance or a representation of others’ attitudes in one’s own mind. This representation may be more or less accurate than one thinks. Information about the environment obtained by the senses, though enmeshed in cultural and situational contexts and partly subjective, includes empirical facts. But empathy is brought to life through the imagination’s placing oneself in the other person’s shoes, as the expression goes. The risk of projecting our own views, and of inventing false conclusions regarding the inner state of other people, is high even when empathizer and empathizee share a cultural background. The risk of projection is much greater when one’s basic frames of reference—like cultural assumptions about the nature of the experiencing person itself—are not completely shared (Geertz 1984 [1974]: 126). Warnings to be wary of ethnocentrism and employ cultural relativism provide tools for anthropologists to reduce this risk, but they must be vigilantly maintained and used. Even when the ethnographer, after extended and intensive fieldwork, learns what he or she needs to know in order to act appropriately in a culture— Goodenough’s (1956) reasonable criterion for judging ethnographic success— it is likely that telltale accents remain, not only audible in our pronunciation of the local language but also inflecting our empathetic understandings as well. Schemas or mental models of reality both shape and are modified by ongoing experience (Strauss and Quinn 1998). Herein lies the reason for optimism as well as caution. Empathy need not be mere projection masquerading as true understanding of part of another person’s inner world—with greater intimacy and vigilance comes greater and more genuine empathetic understanding.

112

Roger Ivar Lohmann

This is one of the reasons why short-term ethnographic fieldwork not only produces fewer data, but also generates more inaccurate data because early misconceptions are less likely to have been exposed and corrected through subsequent indirect evidence of our hosts’ thought worlds. The most accurate empathy results partly from biological potentials, partly from relatively long and intimate exposure to the empathizee, and partly from nurturing empathetic skills. Though empathy is a relatively risky way of knowing that produces estimates rather than certainty, anthropologists can be lulled into undue confidence in their understanding of “the native’s point of view” (Malinowski 1984 [1922]: 25). They can minimize this danger by coming to terms with the role of empathy in their methods. All anthropological efforts to depict emic perspectives on reality, and based on these to produce etic generalizations and models, depend on empathy as a source of information. A skillful anthropological empathy depends on retaining and problematizing distinctions in the many perspectives that impinge on and make up anthropological data. Such perspectives include the emic personal and cultural views of informants and researchers, and etic views deriving from anthropological theories. Emic and etic cannot be conflated if we wish to approximate an accurate comprehension of another person’s subjective experience. Lepowsky (this volume) points out that readers of ethnographies and other anthropological writings come to the table with still other perspectives, and it is through stories that authors provide glimpses of how their subjects must think, based on what they do and say. Neither anthropologists nor readers of anthropological works necessarily come to accept the beliefs portrayed. In this sense their empathy comes short of full identity, and this is as it should be. How are we to come as close as possible to an objective understanding of anther person’s subjectivity? Intersubjectivity, ironically, is among our best methods for maximizing the accuracy of learning in the subject-subject relationships characteristic of ethnographic research (Lohmann 2006: 967). Empathy, defined by Hollan and Throop (2008: 387) as “approximating the subjective experience of another from a quasi-first person perspective,” provides anthropologists with a sizable portion of their data and insight. Including this in anthropological writing makes for some of the most exciting, viscerally satisfyingly, and genuine products of our research. This is precisely because it is “experience-near” rather than “experience-distant,” to use Kohut’s (1971) distinction, employed by Geertz (1984 [1974]: 124) to refer to ethnographic writing. Lindholm (2008) finds advantages and disadvantages to both viewpoints. Being there at the moment behavior is enacted allows one to construct a sensual, first-person account, yet one can only see the after-effects and the waves of implication that move out from the moment and site at which the event occurs through adopting a more experience-distant stance. The perspec-

Empathic Perception and Imagination among Asabano

113

tive moves from the particular to the general, both of which inform anthropological understanding. This provides a reminder that deep empathy, steeped as it is in the particular and the momentary, is not the only goal of anthropology, which must account for all of humankind, biologically and culturally, across space and time. But the glimpses it provides into the many particular minds that our species has tossed up are some of the most valuable products of the discipline.

Conclusion

In this essay I approached the methodological problem of empathy by documenting a native point of view on the nature and possibilities of attaining a native point of view. I reported what some Asabano people told me about their views on empathy. Their caution that we can never know for sure what another person thinks or feels at any point in time, at least not in its entirety, must steady us from declaring greater knowledge than we have. However, as social participants, in practice we all engage in and rely upon the estimates made possible by empathy. We stake our lives daily on the conviction that we have reasonably accurate knowledge of what others think and feel in particular situations. Empathy, a reasoned approximation of another’s inner state based on the percepts and images of another being with analogous capacities to one’s own, bridges the gaps between the minds that make up a society, much as neurotransmitters bridge the synapses between neurons in a nervous system. Empathy, imprecise as it is, conveys cultural information across the macrosynapses that divide us from one another, and does so successfully enough for coherent and recognizable traditions to span vast populations, and to persist for hundreds of years. Are we then so wrong in our approximations of how other people feel and think? Our brain-minds are quite similar and capable of experiencing the world in similar ways, given similar exposures. This is what nineteenthcentury anthropologists called “the psychic unity of man,” a kind of transhuman uniformitarianism. I imagine that you feel pain or happiness because I feel pain or happiness under the circumstances that my senses tell me you are in. The imagination can help produce a relatively accurate picture of another’s state of mind when there is a lack of perceptual information. Such imagined empathy is not necessarily very inaccurate, even though it might be a hallucination, either willful or autonomous. Empathy is a biological capacity to mirror others that can be fostered by experience into a skill that is vital for culture’s development and transmission. It can be neglected or developed in different ways and in different circumstances depending on the purposes and perspectives that surrounding culture

114

Roger Ivar Lohmann

and a person’s experience provide, as the chapters of this volume, taken together, illustrate. Empathy aids human sociality primarily by approximating an accurate understanding of others by imagining oneself in their positions, and secondarily by providing an impression—accurate or illusory—of common identity. Insofar as empathetic behavior accomplishes these tasks, it can be spoken of as a skill. Skillfulness in empathy can be improved or diminished through learning. By developing this skill, the anthropological endeavor and human sociality in general take shape and reach toward their potentials.

Bibliography Brunois, Florence. 2005. “Man or Animal: Who Copies Who? Interspecific Empathy and Imitation among the Kasua of New Guinea.” In Animal Names, ed. Alessandro Minelli, Gherardo Ortalli, and Glauco Sanga. Venice: Instituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti. Carr, Laurie, Marco Iacoboni, Marie-Charlotte Dubeau, John C. Mazziotta, and Gian Luigi Lenzi. 2003. “Neural Mechanisms of Empathy in Humans: A Relay from Neural Systems for Imitation to Limbic Areas.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100: 5497–5502. Davies, Charlotte Aull. 2008. Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Decety, Jean, and Philip J. Jackson. 2004. “The Functional Architecture of Human Empathy.” Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews 3: 71–100. Devereux, George 1967. From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. The Hague: Mouton. Dunbar, R. I. M. 2003. “The Social Brain: Mind, Language, and Society in Evolutionary Perspective.” Annual Review of Anthropology 32: 163–181. Geertz, Clifford 1984 [1974]. “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.” In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, ed. Richard A. Schweder and Robert A. LeVine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gobbini, Maria Ida, Aaron C. Koralek, Ronald E. Bryan, Kimberly J. Montgomery, and James V. Haxby. 2007. “Two Takes on the Social Brain: A Comparison of Theory of Mind Tasks.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19: 1803–1814. Goodale, Jane C. 2003. “Tiwi Island Dreams.” In Dream Travelers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the Western Pacific, ed. Roger Ivar Lohmann. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Goodenough, Ward. 1956. “Componential Analysis and the Study of Meaning.” Language 32: 195–261. Guthrie, Stewart. 2000. “On Animism.” Current Anthropology 41: 106–107. ——–. 1996. “Religion: What Is It?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35: 412–419. Halpern, Jodi. 2001. From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hollan, Douglas, and C. Jason Throop. 2008. “Whatever Happened to Empathy? Introduction.” Ethos 36: 385–401. Horton, Robin. 1960. “A Definition of Religion, and Its Uses.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 90: 201–226.

Empathic Perception and Imagination among Asabano

115

Iacoboni, Marco, and Roger P. Woods. 1999. “Cortical Mechanisms of Human Imitation.” Science 286: 2526–2528. King, Barbara J. 2007. Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion. New York: Doubleday. Klein, H. 1991. “Couvade Syndrome: Male Counterpart to Pregnancy.” International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine 21: 57–69. Kohut, Heinz. 1971. The Analysis of the Self. New York: International University Press. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1985 [1926]. How Natives Think. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lindholm, Charles. 1990. Charisma. London: Basil Blackwell. ——–. 2008. “Three Styles in the Study of Violence.” Reviews in Anthropology 37: 68–86. Lohmann, Roger Ivar. 2000. “The Role of Dreams in Religious Enculturation among the Asabano of Papua New Guinea.” Ethos 28: 75–102. ——–. 2003a. “Glass Men and Spirit Women in Papua New Guinea.” Cultural Survival Quarterly 27: 52–54. ——–. 2003b. “Introduction: Naming the Ineffable.” Anthropological Forum 13: 117–124. ——–. 2003c. “Supernatural Encounters of the Asabano in Two Traditions and Three States of Consciousness.” In Dream Travelers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the Western Pacific, ed. Roger Ivar Lohmann. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ——–. 2003d. “The Supernatural Is Everywhere: Defining Qualities of Religion in Melanesia and Beyond.” Anthropological Forum 13: 175–185. ——–. 2003e. “Turning the Belly: Insights on Religions Conversion from New Guinea Gut Feelings.” In The Anthropology of Religious Conversion, ed. Andrew Buckser and Stephen D. Glazier. Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield. ——–. 2006. “Field Methods.” In Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. H. James Birx. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1984 [1922]. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. Neisser, Ulrich. 1976. Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive Psychology. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company. Oberman, Lindsay M., Jamie A. Pineda, and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. 2007. “The Human Mirror Neuron System: A Link between Action Observation and Social Skills.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2: 62–66. Paddle, Robert 2002 [2000]. The Last Tasmanian Tiger: The History and Extinction of the Thylacine. Cambridge: Cabridge University Press. Poirier, Sylvie 2003. “‘This is Good Country. We are Good Dreamers’: Dreams and Dreaming in the Australian Western Desert.” In Dream Travelers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the Western Pacific, ed. Roger Ivar Lohmann. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Preston, Stephanie D., and Frans B. M. de Waal. 2002. “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25: 1–72. Rizzolatti, Giacom, and Laila Craighhero. 2004. “The Mirror-Neuron System.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27: 169–192. Robbins, Joel, and Alan Rumsey. 2008. “Introduction: Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds.” Anthropological Quarterly 81: 407–420. Saxe, Rebecca, and Lindsey J. Powell. 2006. “It’s the Thought That Counts: Specific Brain Regions for One Component of Theory of Mind.” Psychological Science 17: 692–699. Schulte-Rüther, Martin, Hans J. Markowitsch, Gereon R. Fink, and Martina Piefke. 2007. “Mirror Neuron and Theory of Mind Mechanisms Involved in Face-to-Face Inter-

116

Roger Ivar Lohmann

actions: A Functional Approach to Empathy.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19: 1354–1372. Stephen, Michele. 1989. “Self, the Sacred Other, and Autonomous Imagination.” In The Religious Imagination in New Guinea, ed. Michele Stephen and Gilbert Herdt. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Stewart, Pamela J., and Andrew Strathern. 2001. “Mind Substance.” In Humors and Substances: Ideas of the Body in New Guinea, ed. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Strauss, Claudia, and Naomi Quinn. 1998. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall 1991. The Animal Wife. New York: Pocket Books. Tuzin, Donald. 1980. The Voice of the Tambaran: Truth and Illusion in Ilahita Arapesh Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute N.S. 4: 469–488. Weber, Max. 1978 [1922]. “The Nature of Social Action.” In Weber: Selections in Translation, ed. W. G. Runciman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wikan, Unni. 1991. “Toward an Experience-Near Anthropology.” Cultural Anthropology 6: 285–305.

PART III Personhood, Morality, and Empathy

5 Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia C. JASON THROOP

Introduction

In this chapter I will explore the complex ways that empathy is configured in Yapese understandings of subjectivity, social action, and morality.1 Drawing from research I have conducted on the personal, cultural, and moral significance of pain and suffering on Yap, I will seek to detail the various levels at which differing, at times conflicting, understandings of empathy are implicated in Yapese social life. This will include: (1) outlining local understandings of subjectivity in which the virtue of self-governance is cultivated in the service of privacy, concealment, and secrecy; (2) examining the various communicative strategies regularly employed to foster ambiguity as a means to ensure expressive opacity on the part of interlocutors; (3) discussing those alternative expressive genres within which possibilities for an empathetic appreciation of others is encouraged; (4) exploring the impact of local views of empathy upon local theories of emotion, subjectivity, and expressivity; and finally, (5) detailing how, despite what may appear to be a generally muted valuation of empathy in the context of Yapese moral sensibilities, an empathically based dynamic of suffering (gaafgow) and compassion (runguy) is still viewed to be a crucial nexus for defining social relationships in the context of families, villages, and the broader Yapese community. While there is no one Yapese term that may be unproblematically translated as “empathy,” I believe that in discussing these various practices, beliefs, and assumptions I will be able to sketch a range of understandings (at times implicit on the part of social actors) that are directly implicated in Yapese perspectives on the possibility, limits, and value of orienting to others empathically.

120

C. Jason Throop

Empathy Defined, Briefly

Influentially articulated by Theodore Lipps (1851–1914), Einfühlung (literally “feeling into”) has long been understood in Western philosophical and social scientific traditions to be an act whereby an individual is able to gain some access, no matter how mitigated that access might be, to the subjective experience of another. For Lipps, who utilized the concept in the context of describing aesthetic appreciation, Einfühlung is tied to the subject’s (largely involuntary) ability to project her or his own feeling states into the perceptible movements and qualities of an aesthetic object. While understandings of Einfühlung, and its English derivative “empathy,” have since Lipps’s time been imbued with a variety of differing meanings, common to many of these views is the idea that empathic acts are characterized by at least three distinct moments: (1) a decentering of the self from its own self-experience; (2) imagining the perspective of another from a quasi-first person perspective; and (3) approximating the feelings, emotions, motives, concerns, and thoughts of an-other mind (Halpern 2001; Rosen 1995; Wikan 1992). While these philosophical and theoretical characterizations of empathy shed considerable light on how it is that individuals are able to empathically orient to another’s subjective life, the primary goal of this essay is not, however, to engage in a theoretical discussion of the merits of such an understanding of empathy from a Western social scientific and philosophical perspective. Rather, it is to provide a thick ethnographic description of the place that empathy and empathetic-like experiences have in the context of Yapese social life. Accordingly, I will not say much more about the rich and complex history of approaches to understanding empathy in the “West” (cf. Hollan and Throop 2008; Throop 2008, 2010a, 2010b). Instead I will turn to the task at hand, examining the various ways that access to another’s self-experience is implicated in Yapese morality, epistemology, and social action.

Empathy and the Virtue of Self-Governance

A socially competent person in Yap is understood to be a person who is able to sacrifice his or her individual desires, wants, wishes, feelings, opinions, and thoughts to family, village, and broader community dictates. The virtues of self-abnegation and self-restraint as realized through careful reflection and deliberation are essential to the cultivation of those qualities that inhere in a virtuous person—a person who acts thoughtfully, with self-control, humility, and concern for others.2 A person who is not able to cultivate these qualities, who acts impulsively, who transparently expresses personal feelings and emotions, who speaks without thinking or acts without regard to the concerns of

Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap

121

others, is a person that is thought to have a “weak mind,” not unlike a child. To wit, the capacity to master the ability to monitor and selectively share one’s emotions, feelings, thoughts, and opinions in the service of wider familial and community goals is one of the essential psychocultural bases of Yapese conceptions of ethical subjectivity and virtuous comportment. Significantly, the virtue of self-governance is one of the important roots of the valuation of privacy, secrecy, and concealment in Yap. Not sharing, not expressing, and not acting upon one’s “true” feelings, opinions, or thoughts—a pattern also widely noted in the context of other Polynesian and Micronesian cultures (Besnier 1994; Mageo 1998; Petersen 1993; Wilson 1995)—is indeed one of the core cultural values at the basis of Yapese social life. This understanding of ethical modalities of being thus ideally emphasizes a fundamental disconnect between individual expressivity and an individual’s inner life. An individual’s inner states, defined in terms of personal wants, desires, opinions, feelings, emotions, sensations, and thought-objects, are held to have, in many contexts, a non-direct, non-transparent connection to action and expression. It is instead purposeful, goal-directed thought oriented toward the consequences of one’s actions on the thoughts, feelings, and desires of others, be it others living in the village, one’s family, or the ancestors, that is ideally to guide one’s speech, expression, and action. Indeed, an orientation to the consequences of action and a tendency to go to great efforts to conceal personal motives, feelings, and opinions is embedded in one of the central Yapese terms used to refer to an individual’s personality—paqngin (or pagniin in the dictionary’s orthography). Paqngin encapsulates an emphasis on perceptible effects for, as Jensen (1977) notes, it refers both to the observable trajectories of an object’s “effects,” “action,” or “work” and generally to a person’s “behavior” or “personality.” There are, in fact, a number of important ways in which Yapese ethnoepistemologies are oriented, as Shore (1982) similarly claims for Samoa, to an emphasis upon “effects” and not “causes.” In this sense, Yapese epistemologies tend to value pragmatic (in the Peircian and Jamesian senses of the term)3 orientations to social action and personality structure, inasmuch as it is the perceptual effects of an act and not its hidden roots that are often the preferred orientation of social actors in judging or describing the behavior and personalities of others. Well in line with this tendency to focus on effects, the morally competent adult in Yap is thus seen to be an individual who always thinks (leam/taafinay) of the consequences of his or her action and speech before actually engaging in acting or speaking. More often than not, when an individual does speak or act, he or she is also thought to be ideally speaking or acting for another, and not merely for him- or herself. These two culturally patterned inter- and intrasubjective emphases, one focusing upon the merits of engaging in reflective action and the other based in a valuation of privacy, can thus be understood as mutually supporting. The

122

C. Jason Throop

process of evaluating the consequences of one’s actions, and thinking carefully before acting, gives rise to an opportunity to monitor carefully what an individual chooses to express to others prior to expressing it. Likewise, it is the ability to gain control over the disclosure of one’s emotions and desires through cultivating self-governance that is at the basis of enacting effective strategies of concealment, which makes thoughtful deliberate action itself possible. It is, in other words, an individual’s ability to think before acting that affords, and is afforded by, those efforts, often motivated by secrecy, at developing self-governance over the expression of personal emotions, opinions, and thoughts.

Ambiguity, Concealment, and Communicative Practice

The virtue of self-governance and the prevalent valuation of privacy, secrecy, and concealment clearly aligns with patterns in other Pacific societies,4 where the opaqueness of actors’ intentions (see Duranti 1984, 1988, 1993, 2006; Ochs 1988, Ochs and Schieffelin 1984; cf. Duranti 2001) is often rooted in an ambiguity that is fostered by communicative practices predicated upon the prevalence of indirect or “oblique” speech (see Besnier 1994; Brenneis 1984a; Goldman 1995; Strathern 1975). As Donald Brenneis observes, such oblique communicative practices are often well suited to dealing with dilemmas that arise when an individual wishes to “both act politically and avoid the appearance of such action” (Brenneis 1984a: 70).5 As Elinor Ochs observes (personal communication), there are ambivalences inherent in indirect speech, ambivalences that at least partially stem from the fact that oblique reference is well suited to engendering an explicit shift in interpretive weight from speaker to hearer, who in light of the utterance’s ambiguity, is required to actively fill in, and thus share responsibility for, co-constructing the meaning of the utterance. As such, the explicit assumptions of co-authorship implicated in indirect speech forms may have the effect of ensuring that a given speaker’s interlocutors become complicit in the speaker’s moral perspective (Besnier 1989). And it is this transference of responsibility from speaker to hearer implicated in oblique speech acts that can be held to mark such forms of talk as both potentially strategically beneficial and potentially dangerous for speakers and their interlocutors alike. For example, in Yap, it is common in everyday speech to hear interlocutors discussing the mood or emotional state of a third person through the use of oblique metaphorical reference to the positive or (more usually) negative state of weather conditions. This type of talk is most often heard in those situations where the target of the utterance is either absent and/or not paying direct attention to the speaker. In this way, such metaphorical statements as ke kireeb ea madaay, “the sea is stormy,” or ke kireeb yafaang, “the weather is bad,” are

Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap

123

employed as an indirect, often conspiratorial way in which to reference the current emotional state of another.

Truth, Falsehood, and Strategic Honesty

As noted above, Yapese orientations to privacy, secrecy, concealment, and truth share a number of strong resonances with patterns noted in other Pacific societies, and in particular with Glen Petersen’s (1993) observations in Pohnpei. In Yap, as in Pohnpei, truth and honesty are categories that are held to have ambivalent moral valences. As one elder explained to me—after confessing that much of the trouble he had gotten into during his life had stemmed from trusting too much in others and not being careful to censor himself when sharing personal information with them—unthinking honesty is considered to be a morally inappropriate practice in Yap. While it was certainly good to be yul’yuul (honest), he observed, it is not good to be yul‘yuul maqay, a phrase he defined as referring to a mentally deficient honesty without forethought. Thus, ideally an individual should be honest, but never completely so. Carefully timing the release of information is understood to be at the root of valued forms of truth telling. More specifically, he explained, an individual should always think of the network of social relations within which his or her interlocutors are implicated, even if there is a previously established trust between them. Taking into consideration who one’s interlocutors are related to, who their friends are, and who those friends and relatives might talk to with regard to what is shared in the context of a given conversation, is thus deemed to be necessary to ensuring that potentially powerful and/or dangerous knowledge does not fall into the wrong hands. He added that unthinking openness is thereby highly disvalued and is, in its most egregious cases, thought to be equivalent to a type of mental disability. As he explained, But if honesty is unthinking then you will be over truthful because … because this [truthfulness] in Yap, you will be honest, we are friends, you are honest with me.… I am honest with you but you have yours and I have mine, and neither of us should forget that there will be consequences. So you have your mind and I have my mind, we will be honest with each other but you had your mind and I had my mind. You don’t trust me and I don’t trust you real full. But you know that we are honest but I am thinking of you and I am thinking of me. This person is honest, he is keeping this [a secret]. So there are some things [people/relations] that Jason has in Yap that I don’t know if they are good or bad. You two will … talk and I will have thought about that thought to the end. Always wondering about what will happen or

124

C. Jason Throop

what will be done … and that Jason, can he keep his word? Okay, who is Jason’s girlfriend, this person’s girlfriend that is a person that has these relations that are like this. And you think and your thoughts return to that and that … tiny mistrust comes too.…That is the way that it is said in Yap: don’t be unthinkingly honest. Don’t you be unthinkingly honest. You be honest because honesty is good but keep your mind. You are honest with the person, you are wise. Don’t you go and jump your mouth … you will have breathed a bit before you jump. So that is the way of unthinking honesty. If you are unthinkingly honest then that is how you … you trusted that [person] there but you didn’t think of other consequences, only that thing [person]. That you put your trust in. Unthinkingly honest. It is in recognizing the privacy of each others’ minds, while keeping one’s attention focused on the potential consequences of revealing knowledge to others who are necessarily social actors positioned within complex webs of social relations consisting of many individuals who may not have the speaker’s best interests at heart, that is thus characterized, by this elder and many others, as a central basis for a socially valued form of strategic honesty embedded in, and arising out of, mutual concealment.

Communicative Strategies for Concealment

It is not easy to investigate the religion of this … people. The Yapese can be deceptive in this matter as well as in others. The superficial observer gets the impression that the Yapese, in religious matters, is a pretty indifferent fellow. The eager researcher, anxious to get to the bottom of things, will be assured, in the friendliest possible way, that his interlocutor really knows nothing at all about these matters. As a proof of his good will, he will refer the researcher to other persons, who, he says, are better informed. If you do find someone who is willing to talk, you get tales and stories in vast quantities; but after you have written until you get finger cramps you end up knowing as much about the essential matters as when you started. —Sixtus Walleser In Yap, indirect or oblique speech is an important means through which to produce and maintain ambiguity in the service of secrecy and concealment. That said, there are in fact a number of different verbal strategies that are used, often quite self-consciously, by speakers in their attempts to bring into being a communicative context within which a speaker’s intentions, motives, feel-

Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap

125

ings, goals, thoughts, etc., are rendered opaque. And it is this very opaqueness that helps speakers to ensure that they are able to adhere to expectations regarding a strategic honesty that allows for a morally valued partial disclosure of truth and a corresponding appropriate, empathically based respect for an individual’s privacy. While there are probably many more such strategies, there are seven whose frequency in the context of everyday interaction makes them worth noting here, albeit briefly. First, there is a practice that many of my teachers and friends labeled (using the English phrase) “talking in opposites.”6 I was repeatedly reminded in the first few months of my fieldwork that I should always be careful not to take what individuals said to me at face value, since the people I would be speaking to would often “speak in opposites.” That is, individuals would be likely to say “yes” when they meant “no,” they would claim to be poor when they were in fact wealthy, or they would proclaim that a particular presentation of gifts was worth very little when in fact it was quite expensive. As one friend explained to me, if you are looking for a person who has access to a specific type of medicinal knowledge, for instance, it is almost always the person who claims to know absolutely nothing about medicine that is most likely to have the knowledge in question. In contrast, the person who is readily willing to claim possession of such knowledge probably does not in all likelihood have access to it. A second strategy is tied to Yapese conversational norms, in which asking too many direct questions of another is considered to be extremely impolite.7 Equally disvalued is the act of interrupting an individual in the midst of speaking. A result of these norms is that the distinctly patterned forms within which talk is actuated are often such that interlocutors produce extended stretches of uninterrupted talk with little to no overlapping speech. I believe that these particular communicative norms help to create a balance between other-directed and self-initiated speech that is well suited to granting speakers opportunities to provide only the minimal amount of information possible when asked specific questions about intended actions or personal knowledge. This same strategy further grants individuals control over how such information is framed and revealed. That is, individuals seldom provide unsolicited information as to their plans, goals, or thoughts, without first being asked by another—which is a rather rare occurrence given the constraints imposed upon the appropriateness of direct questioning. Individuals can thus be certain that, when asked explicitly to part with information, they will often not be asked too may additional questions and that they will not be interrupted while formulating their responses. In this way, individuals are able to control the direction and content of their responses and as such can often effectively restrict themselves to answering only the specifics of the question at hand.

126

C. Jason Throop

A third communicative strategy that is employed by interlocutors in an attempt to foster non-transparency between internal states and forms of expression is tied to outright deception or lying (baen). While there is certainly a moral valence that may be assigned to lying depending on the context within which it occurs (a valence that I am somewhat inclined to see as resulting from colonial and Christian influence), it is also accepted that many people who have access to culturally valued knowledge, such as knowledge having to do with medicines, will, if pressed, lie to keep that knowledge private. Deception in the form of not providing complete or accurate knowledge regarding specific practices is common, especially when the possessor of such knowledge does not believe that the potential recipient has adequately demonstrated sufficient care, service, compensation, and/or respect in exchange for that knowledge (see also Keenan [Ochs] 1976). In other words, the individual in question has yet to demonstrate that he or she is a person of a particular moral worth deserving of that knowledge. Indeed, individuals often told me that even within families, the prevalence of such deception often made them quite uncertain with regard to who in the family had received what medicines, etc., and the extent to which the knowledge they personally had access to was accurate and/ or complete. A fourth prevalent strategy for eliciting uncertainty in one’s interlocutors is tied to the use of what I will call benign and derogatory sarcasm (moening and ke kuuq u waen). Benign sarcasm (moening) was characterized by a number of my teachers as a form of talk in which a speaker’s overt utterance is at odds with his or her feelings on the matter; e.g., saying Keam cheag!, “You are skilled!” in the face of ineptitude or unwarranted bravado over an individual’s own achievements. Of course, not all individuals are equally skilled in deploying benignly sarcastic statements, and there is always potential for insult, especially if such statements are interpreted by individuals who occupy positions of higher rank than the speaker to be tokens of a type of derogatory sarcastic utterance. Accordingly, despite the prevalence of benign sarcasm in everyday speech acts the effective use of moening is held to be a form of verbal art that is not equally perfected by all speakers. The most skilled at this art are those for whom their interlocutors are never just quite certain as to the extent to which their utterances are intended to be interpreted as literal or sarcastic. Closely related to the term that I am translating as benign sarcasm (moening) is the concept of ke kuuq u waen, which one teacher described as indicating a form of expressivity that is, like moening, similarly based on a discrepancy between what an individual says and what he or she is thinking or feeling “inside” his or her mind (mang ea be thaamiy laen ii yaen). It seems that the significant difference between ke kuuq u waen and moening, however, is tied to the fact that the former is held in a more negative light as a form of derogatory sarcasm in which the speaker is held to have negative feelings to-

Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap

127

ward the intended target of the utterance. Indeed, in Jensen’s (1977) dictionary the morpheme kuuq is defined as “to mock, criticize.” A number of individuals explained to me, however, that kuuq was seldom delivered in a expressive form that is directly evident to interlocutors (daar ma daag ea kuuq), and that often the only way to discern kuuq is through observing an individual’s overt behavior (ngoognol) in contexts outside of the moment within which an utterance is made; hence the expression that is used to explicitly highlight this hidden (sarcastic) form, kuuq is ke kuuq u waen‘ (literally, “there is mocking/ criticism in the mind”). Much like these benign and derogatory forms of sarcasm, a fifth communicative strategy to evoke uncertainty and ambiguity is found in the prevalence of joking (gosgoos) and teasing (galasuw) in everyday communicative forms. With regard to its impact as a strategy for fostering ambiguity, it is often (although certainly not always) the case that the target of a joke or act of teasing does not find out about it until well after the episode has occurred; sometimes hours, sometimes days or weeks later. And of course, I found myself at the receiving end of such teasing or joking, often only learning of it well after the fact. The individuals that I knew best, who were my friends, part of my family, and part of my village, all seemed to share a true appreciation for those individuals who could subtly and quickly employ their wit to effective ends in the context of joking or teasing. This was especially so when it was employed in the service of making fun of an individual who was acting in an overly prideful or insensitive manner. The ability to participate in such joking or teasing was also held by many to be tied closely to an individual’s intelligence. There is in fact a category of intellectual ability—maqay (the same maqay evoked in the context of unthinking honesty yul‘yuul ni maqay)—that was described by a number of different individuals as referring to a person who, while they might have knowledge and intelligence “inside” their mind, are unable to speak well, are unable to organize their speech in a coherent way, and are unable to participate in joking or teasing with another person (gosgoos, galasuw). The prevalence of “speaking-for” others is yet another communicative means to dissociate overt expressive forms from an individual’s personal thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc. “Speaking-for” others—whether those others be construed as the ancestors who represent the authority that is vested in a particular estate, parents for whom children are expected to pass messages from one household to the next, or chiefs “speaking-for” the village during community and municipality meetings—effectively distances an individual’s own subjective stance from the explicit content of his or her utterances. Given that it is well recognized that individuals often use their position in “speaking-for” others to advance their own personal motivations, agendas, and ambitions, it is often unclear to interlocutors, however, exactly what aspect of a given utterance reflects a strategic alignment of personal wishes with family or

128

C. Jason Throop

community obligations and which are indeed reflective of a relatively self-less adherence to such obligations. Finally, paralinguistic aspects of speech are also often aligned with both implicit and explicit attempts to ensure uncertainty in the context of interaction. Eye gaze, body position, and volume and tone of voice are all means by which individuals attempt to conceal their “true” thoughts, feelings, opinions, etc., from others. Indeed, one of the first notes I took when arriving in Yap concerned what I held to be a striking lack of direct eye contact when individuals spoke to one another and a marked tendency for speakers to turn their bodies and heads away from their interlocutors. In fact, it was not uncommon to observe individuals carry on complete conversations with their backs to each other, gazing off in opposite directions. Likewise, during community meetings individuals often sat with their backs against the beams supporting the community house facing out away from the meeting, gazing at the horizon, the dance ground, or other parts of the village center. One conversation I noted early on during my second stay in Yap in the summer of 2001, well before I had acquired the communicative competence necessary to follow along with an ongoing, multi-party conversation, included six individuals speaking for over an hour, none of whom were facing one another. In addition to body positioning and eye gaze, individuals are very adept at modulating the volume of their voice in such a way to ensure that only those who were sitting nearest to them can understand what they are saying. I noticed that to this end, individuals who wanted to carry on a private conversation in the midst of a group would often sit side by side, neither facing one another, nor facing the others surrounding them, and would speak only loud enough for their intended interlocutor to discern the content of their talk. This positioning of the body so that the stream of sound being produced by a given speaker is directed outward, away from others in the vicinity of the ongoing conversation, ensures that interlocutors’ voices remain muted. This paralinguistic strategy of concealment further makes it unclear to others surrounding the interlocutors in question as to whether or not a conversation is in fact ongoing between them. An additional benefit to such positioning of the body is that it further occludes an individual’s facial expressions from the view of his or her interlocutors; especially important given that the face, and more specifically the eyes, are thought to be a crucial expressive site for discerning another’s true feelings and thoughts (see below; cf. Robbins 2004: 138). Throughout my time in Yap, I was repeatedly amazed at how sensitive individuals were to the presence of potential unwanted audiences and how skilled they were at finding ways in which to carry on conversations that were just below the threshold for audibility of those who were not meant to be intentional recipients of the conversation. Together, all of these communicative strategies work to keep interlocutors in a state of uncertainty and not-knowing when it comes to having a clear

Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap

129

grasp of any given speaker’s intentions, motives, thoughts, and feelings. In such a way, a communicative context is often created within which individuals are left second-guessing the veracity, adequacy, or completeness of what has been told to them. The truth of any given statement is thus something that can never simply be taken at face value; one always has to assume that there is most likely a hidden “more” to what an individual expresses in any given situation. It is a recognized fact in Yap that even if part of what someone said is true, most likely some disinformation, a lack of information, or outright falsehoods are embedded in the utterance. Since individuals are never quite certain as to whether what is being said or done to them is the truth, a joke (of which they might be the brunt), an evasive tactic, a sarcastic statement, or an outright lie, often the best course of action in the face of such perduring uncertainty is to wait to see what will actually transpire on the behavioral level (again, a stance that is predicated upon deferring immediate reactions to sensory stimuli, in this case in the form of audible speech) (cf. Robbins 2004: 143–142). By talking in opposites, being elusive, facing meta-pragmatic restrictions on turn-taking and questioning, only providing the absolutely minimal amount of information necessary, being sarcastic, playing jokes, teasing, avoiding eye contact, or situating one’s body such that one’s voice is muted and one’s facial expressions are concealed from the view of others, individuals are thus able to ensure that their interlocutors are never able to garner a clear idea as to what they are really thinking or feeling. A significant benefit to engendering such communicative opacity, one elder noted to me, is that by putting one’s interlocutors off guard and off balance, and by making them uncertain as to one’s true feelings and motives, an individual is granted an advantage inasmuch as the speaker is the only one who truly knows what his or her plans are, which could perhaps be importantly used to his or her advantage at some later date. Yet another individual told me that indeed one of the main reasons that people are careful to not say or show what they are thinking or feeling is in order to ensure their “safety.” For instance, if in a given situation a person is scared, angry, or sad, he or she works to conceal these feelings so that other individuals are not then able to use this information to their advantage at some later date against them. I should note that these habits of concealment seem to be so deeply ingrained that even seemingly important information that would be of some concern for a given family is often only transmitted at the last minute or well after the fact. For instance, it was not uncommon for members of our family to return to or depart from Yap in order to conduct work or schooling off island. I was always personally surprised at how many times these events would be shared partially with only certain members of the family and not others. One particularly memorable example concerned the fact that the wife of one family member had left to conduct business off island and had been gone for over a

130

C. Jason Throop

week before the husband’s parents found out. During that time, the husband had been to his parents’ house numerous times to visit, and not once did he bring up the fact that his wife was off island. In another case, in a family that I was also close to, one of the elders was sick for almost a week before the wife of one of her sons (who lived in the same village) was made aware of the situation by her husband, who had been making daily visits to see how his mother was doing.

Faan ea Thiin: Meaning of Speaking

In Yap, there is thus a prevalent language ideology (Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998) based in part upon the assumption that the true meaning of any given speech act is most often hidden, and that an audience interested in determining the meanings that lie “behind” overt expressive forms must seek to discover faan ea thiin (the “meaning of speaking”) through alternate communicative channels. Much as Robbins (2004: 142–43) and Barth (1975) have noted with regard to a prevalent “epistemology of secrecy” among the Min peoples in Papua New Guinea, the very hidden-ness of such meaning provides for its ultimate social worth, value, and power. In my early language training, I was instructed by two different teachers on separate occasions that an important dimension to everyday communicative forms in Yap is rooted in what they termed faan ea thiin. Examples that they proffered for these expressive forms primarily included hand gestures (i.e., rotating a partially cupped hand to iconically represent an engine propeller, which is used to indicate, often conspiratorially, that an ongoing utterance is somehow deceptive) and facial expressions (i.e., raising one’s eyebrows once to indicate agreement with a request or statement and twice in order to signal disagreement). Because of this, I was initially convinced that the term faan ea thiin was a general term for nonverbal or paralinguistic forms of communication, in particular gestures. It was not until near the midpoint of my third period of field research on the island, in a conversation I had with an elder about different forms of “hidden meaning” in Yapese parables, that it became clear to me that faan ea thiin is not solely restricted to nonverbal communication. It seems instead, quite literally, to refer to the “meaning of speaking.” Given that there is such a deeply rooted assumption in Yap that the meaning of speaking is seldom rendered directly in the surface forms of an utterance’s explicit content, more often than not the term faan ea thiin ends up referring generally to those meanings that arise in the context of indirect, oblique, non-transparent, and hidden aspects of communication. This can be understood in the case of indirect communicative forms that emerge out of necessity, such as when individuals are gesturing to each other from a distance, or in circumstances in which interlocutors wish

Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap

131

to engage in some form of conspiratorial signaling to help each other disambiguate the “true” meaning of a given utterance (e.g., using the “propeller” hand gesture to indicate the deceptiveness of a statement or stretch of talk). And indeed, the term faan ea thiin is also significantly used to refer in the context of Yapese dances to those bodily movements and gestures that accompany the lyrics of specific chants that serve to point an audience to the deep or hidden meanings entailed within them (i.e., this is song is not really about gardening, but about sex).

Ke Luul ni Baabaay

The value of secrecy, privacy, and concealment is further evident in an oftenheard aphorism used to describe individuals who are unable to approximate ideals tied to effective self-mastery over their expressivity. The aphorism, ke luul ni baabaay, can be literally translated as “it ripened, a papaya.” As one of my teachers explained, this saying is used to refer to people for whom it is possible to tell immediately and transparently what they are thinking or feeling. In his words, “you just look at them and know if they are sad or angry.” In order to understand this statement, it is necessary to know that a papaya is a fruit whose interior ripeness can be discerned by merely looking at its skin, its color, and its exterior. That is, the state of the papaya’s “innerness” is reflected transparently in its exterior. In allowing one’s inner conditions to manifest directly in one’s external forms of expression, an individual is thus comparable to a papaya, and as such clearly marked as failing to approximate the virtues of self-mastery, concealment, and secrecy. Another person suggested to me that if ke luul ni baabaay represented a derogatory commentary on an individual’s lack of ability to manage her emotions and to compose her exterior so as not to reveal her internal states to others, another phrase, ke luul ni rowal, “it ripened, a football fruit,” represents the cultural ideal. In contrast to baabaay (papaya), rowal (Pangium edule, Flacourtiaceae, or “football fruit”) is a fruit with a rough brown exterior that does not in any way clearly evidence the state of its inner ripeness. As he noted, when looking at the exterior of a rowal it is impossible to tell what the state of its insides are. The fruit may very well be rotten, but by merely looking at its exterior an individual will have absolutely no idea as to the relative state of its ripeness. As he instructed, one of the only ways to determine the state of the interior of a rowal is to touch it. And as a number of different individuals pointed out to me, touching a rowal still does not guarantee that the entire fruit is edible; such an assessment can only be definitively determined by opening the fruit up and looking at its insides directly. While I heard many conflicting accounts as to whether or not the phrase ke luul ni rowal should be considered an idiomatic expression, a dialectical

132

C. Jason Throop

phrase used in only select municipalities, or merely an idiosyncratic example generated by one particularly perceptive individual who was trying to help clarify the meaning of the more commonly heard phrase ke luul ni baabaay, it is regardless quite interesting to note the extent to which this example draws on the same metaphorical play on relations between the internal and the external, a topic that I would like to now turn to explore in more depth below.

The Significance of Surfaces and Depths

The contrast between internality and externality is in fact at the heart of a number of other aspects of Yapese cultural logic in which metaphors based upon the images of surfaces and depths, the visible and the invisible, and the apparent and the hidden are recurrently played out. To wit, these metaphorically elaborated distinctions between what is directly perceptible and what is occluded from view operate at both the level of the political system and at the level of individual expression. For instance, I was told by a number of different elders that one of the house foundations in our village was responsible for taking care of the various machaaf (valuables) that had come to the village’s various estates in the context of traditional apologies or for rewarding services rendered to allies in times of war, conflict, or need. To say that a specific house foundation is responsible for taking care of the village’s machaaf, however, is not to say, these same elders maintained, that a particular foundation in any way possesses or is solely responsible for making decisions that bear directly on the use and allocation of these valuables. Instead, more accurately, the foundation serves merely as the awochean ea machaaf—“face or front of the valuables.” The term awochean is defined in Jensen’s (1977) dictionary as “his face, its front.” What is most interesting about the term is the extent to which it is used to highlight distinctions between outer expression and inner contemplation or decision making. Just as the term “voice” (luguun) is held to be a sensible surface manifestation of the combination of breath (faan) and thought (leam/ taafinay)—two phenomena that are otherwise hidden, invisible, and importantly connected in Yapese thinking to the effort of others—awochean similarly entails the assumption that behind the expressive field of an individual’s face lies an inner world of thought and feeling that is occluded from view. To say that a certain house foundation is the “face or front of the valuables” is thus to imply that, much like the human face, the foundation is responsible for expressing the results of otherwise hidden deliberations, negotiations, and decision-making processes pertaining to those valuables. At the level of the sociopolitical system, the notion of awochean is further associated with both feekthiin—“messenger”—and lunguun—“voice” or “au-

Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap

133

thority”—which are themselves implicated in the idea that the people who are actually making the decisions and giving the orders that later become manifest in the form of overt speech are themselves elided from view. In this system, it is most often low-status individuals who speak for higher-status decision makers. And it is these same lower-status individuals who then transmit orders to those, still lower in rank, who are then expected to undertake the work or services that have been requested. To wit, at the level of the village, when decisions are discussed at community meetings it is generally held by many participants that the “real” decision-making processes have already occurred. Again, decision making, thinking, and discussion are understood as accomplished largely behind the scenes, hidden from view. In contrast, the expression of those already formulated decisions is something that is publicly accessible and is often considered more to be a means to provide opportunities to engage in consensus building. At the level of the individual, awochean importantly points to the dichotomy between outer expression and inner experiences. This is especially evident in the context of the saying feal awochean, “good face,” which is used to refer to those individuals who are skilled at composing their exteriors in such a way that they do not express what they might be feeling or thinking to others, even when confronted with situations in which their interlocutors might be attempting to provoke an overtly emotional response from them. The phrase is thus linked to the idea that comprehension of another’s feelings, thoughts, etc., arises from the horizon of perception. And thus, what lies beyond or outside that horizon must remain unknown. Accordingly, an individual who is able to consistently maintain feal awochean is characterized as a person who is able to ma paag laen ii yaen‘—“he/she lets go of his or her innermost feelings, thoughts, etc.” Even despite this emphasis on maintaining an opaque exterior, it is interesting to note the extent to which the face, and particularly the eyes (laen mit, laen awochean) are held, in local configurations of subjectivity and social action, to represent that part of the person that is most susceptible to directly evidencing inner feeling states and thoughts (cf. Robbins 2004: 139). To this end, it is held that to pii awchaen fa daag awchaen, “give face or show face,” may be a very dangerous activity, since individuals believe that facial expressions may reveal to others those thoughts and opinions that they would otherwise ideally want to keep to themselves. As noted above, the fact that individuals habitually avert eye gaze when speaking, and the fact that they often turn their faces away from one another when conversing, are equally examples of the importance of ensuring that one’s face does not give away clues as to what an individual is thinking or feeling at the moment. The tendency for individuals to look down when walking past another’s house can similarly be understood to be tied to ensuring that they do not

134

C. Jason Throop

readily communicate their thoughts or feelings to others. Indeed, this idea is hyper-elaborated in the prevalent belief that envy (awaen) can be readily transferred from the eyes through the direction of an individual’s gaze to the object of his or her perception. In this way, whatever objects are perceived through an envious gaze—such as gardens, taro patches, or personal possessions—are thought to be susceptible to destruction or ruin. Bureag, the term that is used to refer to this phenomenon (as well as referring in other contexts to “butterflies”), is held to be a largely non-intentional capacity that certain individuals have more or less of than others. In other words, it is simply a combination of desire and gaze without any necessary intention to destroy another’s possession that is considered to be sufficient, depending on the characteristics of the individuals in question, to pose potential harm to those possessions. That the face is a somewhat privileged somatic site for performing practices of expressive quietude so valued in Yapese moral sensibilities is also closely linked to issues of respect (liyoer). It is not surprising in this light that looking at the ground (awochean nga buut) when in the presence of a higherstatus individual is held to be a way to show liyoer, whereas looking at such a person directly in the face is held to indicate a lack of concern and/or outright defiance (daariy faan fa togoopuluw ko leam). Finally, another, although admittedly tenuous, connection in Yapese cultural logic between inner states and their expression through the face or the eyes is found in the term for child: bitiir or simply tiir. In Jensen’s dictionary the morpheme tiir is held to refer to both a “child” and to the “pupil” of the eye. When discussing the term bitiir with my research assistant Manna, she argued that the term bitiir is actually a contracted form of the stative tense-aspect marker ba and the nominal morpheme tiir—batiir. If this local etymological assessment is indeed correct (which it may not be), the term may be literally translated quite awkwardly as “is eyes” or “is child.” When Manna first suggested this etymological link to me neither of us could quite figure out what, if any, connection there might be between the pupil of the eye and children. After giving it some thought, however, she suggested that one possible interpretation might be tied to the fact that the eyes were generally held in Yap to be a crucial site for expressing internal feelings, thoughts, and opinions, often quite independently of other paralinguistic cues or the actual content of a given utterance. Indeed, it seems that this observation aligns quite well with the assumption that a child has yet to learn how to control or discipline his or her desires, wants, and cravings. Children simply look at what they desire; they show no concern for hiding their intentions, emotions, needs, and cravings from others. They have thus yet to cultivate self-governance and have yet to learn to manage their emotions in such a way that there is less of a direct link between their inner feeling states and their expressivity.

Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap

135

So Ulum

There is in fact a term that is used in Yap to designate the undesirable subjective state that is induced in an individual who witnesses an overly transparent expression of emotion, particularly in those instances whereby another is inappropriately expressing their love, longing, or desire. The term, so ulum, is the same morpheme that is utilized to designate the physical reaction that is tied to the involuntary sympathetic nervous response in which the muscles surrounding the body’s hair follicles contract, what is commonly referred to in English as “goose bumps” and more specifically in medical literature as cutis anserine. While such a physiological reaction is understood in Yap to be evoked by a number of different causes, including exposure to cold or in the wake of fear, it is also held to arise when an individual is put in the uncomfortable position of having to experience another individual inappropriately evidencing the emotional content of his or her mind. As one elder explained to me, individuals who tend to speak their minds without hesitation and without attention to the possibility of making their interlocutors feel so ulum are said to be dar k‘adkaed ea thiin u lunguun—“words do not cause itchiness in his or her mouth.” That is, there is nothing about speaking their mind that is uncomfortable for them. I should add that the use of so ulum as indexical of the discomfort that is felt in the face of inappropriately displayed emotion is not merely a metaphorical elaboration upon this physiological reaction but is indeed experienced as an embodied subjective state. For instance, there were a number of occasions in which I heard individuals use the term while also gesturing to bring attention to the raised flesh on their arms while recalling situations in which an individual failed to live up to local expectations for expressive quietude and muted emotional expressivity. In fact, during the context of my interviews there were often times when my research assistants felt so ulum when hearing the more personal details of a given individual’s life. In one notable case, one of my research assistants was so distraught from hearing a very emotional retelling of an individual’s experience of losing a child that she had to physically remove herself from the interview. Later I discovered that she had become not only so ulum but also physically ill as a result of this particular emotional telling. The unpleasant sensation evoked in the wake of experiencing someone else’s pain can indeed be itself understood as a form of empathetic alignment. It also speaks, however, to the deep ambivalences that may accompany differing forms of empathy in everyday life in Yapese communities.

Emotion Terms and the Lexicalization of Expressive Channels

One insight that arose in light of my research on local understandings of subjective states in relation to the expression and experience of pain is the fact that

136

C. Jason Throop

the cultural valuation of privacy, secrecy, and concealment is also reflected in a salient lexical distinction that is made with respect to the extent to which, and the communicative channels through which, particular emotions are expressed to another. For example, there are a number of terms in Yapese that can loosely be glossed as varieties of “anger.” Examples of these terms include: (1) kaf ‘aen‘—“angry/upset” but not expressing that anger to others; (2) malaalngaen‘—“anger,” “annoyance,” or “irritation” that is often undetectable by an observer and that is not expressed verbally, but that can on occasion be detected through facial expressions, tone of voice, or the fact that a person is shaking her or his leg while seated; (3) thung—“anger” that is readily detectable by an observer through the person’s facial and bodily expressions and tone of voice but is not expressed through explicit utterances; (4) damuumuw—“anger” that is expressed or not expressed verbally but often indicates hidden anger; and (5) puwaen—the explicit verbal expression of “justifiable anger,” which is often utilized in the context of “scolding” a person who has transgressed local norms of comportment (cf. Lutz 1988). While it is true that these terms do index qualitative differences in the type and intensity of “anger,” it also appears that an equally salient distinction concerns the extent to which each variety of “anger” is detectable through either indirect/nonverbal or explicit/verbal means. Accordingly, these terms can be understood as culturally elaborated linguistic vehicles highlighting various degrees of explicitness in accessing the contents of another’s internal subjective state (in this case their subjective state of anger). In view of this, the tendency to hyper-cognize (Levy 1973) expressivity as a salient dimension of emotion in Yap seems to be tied precisely to the prevalence of concerns about privacy, secrecy, and concealment, as well as the appropriateness of “empathy,” in the context of everyday interaction. In addition, this lexicalized elaboration of expressivity may be tied to the fact that individuals are constantly faced with the prospect that what someone says, or the way that they say it, rarely, if ever, transparently reflects their personal feelings, thoughts, and/or opinions. Here then, due to the pervasiveness of actors seeking to conceal their thoughts and feelings from others, individuals are confronted with the necessity of having to closely monitor their interlocutor’s expressions in the hope of achieving some glimpse, however attenuated that might be (i.e., a shaking leg), into the “actual” subjective state of the person that they are interacting with.

Motivation and Gossip

That there are such pressures to maintain a non-transparent rendering of one’s inner life is not to say, therefore, that individuals are not interested in

Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap

137

determining the content of other individuals’ subjective states. Indeed, even acknowledging the difficulty in determining others’ motives for action, or perhaps in spite of it, there was also clearly much recognition by the people that I knew best that there is much of importance that is missed when one does not attempt to imagine what the possible motives for a particular individual’s actions might be. In Yap, where motivation is seldom directly asked of another and where it is also seldom freely expressed in the first person, gossip about others’ feelings, intentions, motives, and reactions is a central part of everyday talk and interaction. Indeed, it is in the context of third-person discourse in the form of gossip that a great deal of attention is devoted to analyzing motives for action. Instead of asking another directly why he or she did or did not act in a specific way, individuals will typically instead wait to covertly speculate with others about the reasons behind, and the consequences of, that person’s observed behavior. Much has been written on the social import of gossip in Pacific cultures (see Besnier 1989, 1990, 1994; Brenneis 1984b; Brison 1992; Firth 1967). This work has done much to reveal the key role that gossip plays in ongoing dynamics of conflict and affiliation, while further highlighting its relation to truth telling and the ways in which it may be put to use as a form of resistance. While it is not my intention to speak at length about the broader role of gossip in Yapese society, nor to enter into an explicit dialogue with this existing literature on the topic, here I would simply like to point to the ways in which gossip often serves as a privileged site for what I would like to term mitigated empathy. Forms of mitigated empathy enacted through the use of gossip thus provide a means for interlocutors to speculate on otherwise hidden aspects of social actors’ motivations, thoughts, feelings, and opinions. An excellent example of this use of gossip in everyday talk to speculate on a third party’s motives for acting, as well as her or his subjective responses in the face of others’ actions, can be seen in a stretch of talk I reproduce below. This excerpt was taken from a conversation that occurred between myself (JT) and two older women (AA, AB) about a disruption that occurred during a Christmas church service where a drunken man (DM) had entered the church and walked aggressively toward the priest (padre), all the while shouting largely incoherent statements to the congregation. Before anything too drastic happened, the man’s aunt (DG) stood up and escorted him from the church. Not a few minutes later, however, a cloth depicting Jesus that was hung in the back of the church fell to the ground for no apparent reason. 001 AA Gube yan gu saap nga laen mit facha ii padre ya gube taafinay naag I went to look at the face of the padre because I was thinking 002 uug gaar maang ea bayi yoeg ea chaqaney ea…ri baye damumuuw. he will reveal what that person was saying…he would be angry

138

C. Jason Throop

003 AB Maachnea gam naang ni faani noon make thile ton rok padrey ke thile lunguun But you know that when he spoke the padre’s tone changed, he changed his voice 004 ke thile to‘…ke…wun‘ug ke dake keyan lunguun nga buut ke [nervous laughter] he changed to [tone?]…he…in my mind his voice went lower [in pitch]…he [nervous laughter] 005 gumnaang nike gin padre. I think that it startled the padre 006 JT Umm,…sanaa ke gin Umm,…maybe he was startled 007 AA ii chanem…Gube leam naag… that person…I am thinking. 008 AB Sanaa ke gin, fa ke rus fa, gu ra damumuuw fa… Maybe he was startled, or he was scared, or, I would be angry or… 009 AA Ra damumuuw daabiy rus, ra damumuuw. He was angry not scared, he was angry 010 JT Umm. Umm. 011 AA Nen gube taafinay naag ea gube wonder ko faanmanga ngaki paer ea chaqaneam ii DM The thing I was thinking, that I was wondering what reason DM had for staying [in the church] 012 ma maang ea rariin ea chaqaneam ii padre…ii DG faram ea muguy— and what will padre do…DG is soft [implying quiet, not aggressive] 013 maachnea DG ea be nen ma bee roek, but DG she is the one that is responsible 014 JT Umm. Umm. 015 AA Gam naang faram u glasia…DG…yibe altar ngeki koel paa facha ii DG, You know that church…DG…she came to the altar and DG took his [DM’s] hand 016 man nga wen, man ngawen, kenoon nike danumuuw, ere yu… she went outside, she went outside, she spoke that she was angry, so [??]… 017 AB Maachnea DM bbkireeb loelugean. But DM is crazy [literally, “has a bad head”] 018 AA Bakireeb loelugean maachnea facha‘ ea kuma tong tong ngaak He is crazy but he was singing 019 AB Eh… Eh…

Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap

139

020 AA Kuma tong tong ko miti nenir He was singing that [??] 021 AB Ma bineme ea ba chingaaw, ere gag ea kug worry naag padre. But that [was because] he was drunk, so that is why I was worried for padre. 022 Nug gaara ri ni lii‘ padre fa fa mange ka buuch ku padre? My mind said that he will beat padre or, or, what will happen to padre? 023 Ra damumuuw, fange rus fa maang… He will be angry, or scared or what… 024 AB Maachnea faani muul fare gi kegin fare gi re nem ni aaw nga buut megin But when that cloth [of Jesus] fell to the ground he was startled. 025 AA Me gin. He was startled.

As this brief interaction attests, gossip provides an important and recurrent site for individuals to collaboratively discuss possible motives for a third party’s activity as well as the possible emotional reactions of interlocutors engaged in and affected by such activity. Of particular interest here is the fact that in lines 001, 003, and 004 we have examples of individuals looking to the face and to other paralinguistic cues (e.g., the tone of voice) rather than to the explicit content of talk or the situation itself in order to speculate on the possible feeling states of another. Also of note is that in lines 002, 005, 008, 009, 011, 019, 020, and 021 there are explicit discussions of the possible feelings of the Padre as well as the possible motivations or intentions for DM’s behavior. In line 008 there is further a very interesting shift of perspective undertaken by AB who goes from imagining possibilities for what the Padre was feeling to imagining how she might feel in a similar situation (“Maybe he was startled, or he was scared, or, I would be angry or….”). Finally, it is important to highlight the fact that such speculation is rendered both as a reflective assessment of DM’s and the Padre’s possible motives and emotions from the perspective of the interlocutor’s present frame of reference (e.g., lines 005, 008, 009, 018, 020, 025) and as a retrospective account of what both interlocutors were privately imagining to be DM’s and the Padre’s self-experience during the event itself (e.g., lines 001, 002, 007, 009, 011, 012, 022, 023). Again, an ethic of selfgovernance and expressive opaqueness does not thus perforce entail a lack of interest in determining the contents of other minds. Ultimately, however, if an individual continues to act in ways that are mostly in accord with community norms and values, it is often of little concern to others as to whether or not that individual’s personal motivations, opinions, and feelings truly align with community standards. For this reason, many individuals I spoke to highlighted the significance of simply watching and listening to others in an attempt to discern the extent to which their actual behavioral patterns aligned with their directly expressed motives for action.

140

C. Jason Throop

Suffering and Compassion

Perhaps the core virtue around which Yapese moral sensibilities are articulated is the virtue of “suffering-for” (gaafgow), a virtue that is also implicated in local understandings of empathy. To understand the centrality of this virtue in Yapese culture, it is necessary to say a few brief words about Yapese kinship and land tenure (see Egan 1998, 2004; Labby 1976, Lingenfelter 1975; Schneider 1984). Briefly, the Yapese kin system is a virilocal, exogamous, and matrilineal system. Since women marry into their husbands’ villages, and since clan affiliation is traced through the mother, the transfer of land from the wife’s husband to her and her children is in actuality a transaction between two different matrilineal clans as mediated through the husband, who represents the interests of his estate or tabinaw. In this system, the mother/wife and her children, as representatives of one matri-clan, are expected to suffer through working the land, expending their effort and labor in order to earn a right to claim that land in the name of their clan when the father/husband (who is necessarily of a differing clan than his wife and children) passes away. In Yapese ideology, the father/husband’s matri-clan must thus be paid off through the suffering, labor, and effort of those successive clans who come to occupy the land after they have departed. To this end, land itself can be understood as the accretion of past generations’ work, service, effort, striving, endurance, and suffering as crystallized into a material form. Work, effort, and striving in the face of suffering for the benefit of others, in particular others of higher status who currently hold title to the estate’s collective landholdings, are held to be the means through which estate titles are transacted from one clan to another, from one generation to the next. Indeed, an individual’s effort— magaer—is thus ideally directed toward the care and cultivation of the estate’s land holdings (tabinaw), which is significantly tied to an individual’s ability to athamagil—to strive to endure through one’s physical suffering (one’s exhaustion, fatigue, pain, hunger, etc.)—which is further tied to the individual’s ability to discipline his or her own feelings/desires/wants according to the dictates of broader family and community needs. The culturally appropriate response to the perception of suffering (gaafgow), or perhaps more accurately endurance in the face of suffering, is to feel runguy—a term that has a broad semantic range that at times appears to overlap with the concept of “empathy,” but which I will gloss here as “concern/pity/ compassion” (Jensen 1977; cf. Lutz 1988). The concept of runguy was first explored in some detail in the context of David Schneider’s (1949) dissertation, where he translated the term as “love.” Runguy is a complex term, however, with a broad semantic range that at times overlaps with the English term. This Schneider at least partially recognized when he noted that the “word ‘love’ (rungui) [sic] is not confined to heterosexual attraction, but includes the af-

Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap

141

fection between a parent and child and the affection which obtains between two persons of the same sex” (1949: 72). Moreover, he perspicaciously noted that, much like the usage of “love” in English-speaking North American and Western European communities, a great “value is set on love [runguy]” (1949: 93) in helping to define family relationships. That said, in the context of his dissertation, it seems that Schneider was largely drawing on his own culturally informed interpretation of “love” in his rendering of the concept of runguy, an interpretation that, I argue, does not clearly map onto local meanings. To be fair to Schneider, I should note that while never alluding to his own earlier interpretations of the term in his dissertation, he did, however, in the context of a much later work, draw on a personal communication with John Kirkpatrick, one of his former students, to assert that runguy was best glossed as “‘compassion’ and is … not to be confused with amity” (1984: 33). And it was also in the same book, A Critique of the Study of Kinship, that he perceived, and yet unfortunately did not much elaborate upon, the critical motivational import of runguy in establishing, maintaining, and contesting those asymmetrical dependency relationships that he understood as playing a significant role in defining so many spheres of Yapese social life.8 In perceiving his wife and children as gaafgow, seeing them endure through suffering and hardship, a husband is ideally to feel runguy. It is this feeling of runguy, as a form of compassionate concern or pity in the face of suffering, that is held to motivate the husband to help and care for (ma piiq ayuw ngooraed) his wife and children by granting them access to knowledge, land, and food. The bonds that are formed through the exchange of knowledge, land, and food are thus predicated upon a dynamic interchange of feeling. The wife and her children, through their striving, effort, and physical exertion, are perceived by the husband to be suffering (gaafgow); his response is to feel runguy, a feeling that is ultimately held to bind (m‘aag) the husband to his children. It is thus out of the dynamic interplay of runguy and gaafgow, between compassion and suffering, that titles to land are transacted from one clan to another. While devoting no more than a quick paragraph to this crucial insight, Schneider did note that it is thus precisely “runguy that makes a citamengen [father] [sic] care for his fak [child] [sic], that holds together those who are hierarchically related” (1984: 33). Moreover, it is the quality that propels exchange since it is “the motivating feature of the gift” (1984: 33). Accordingly, if any individual approaches another “saying, ‘Ah gafago’ [sic] (‘I am destitute’) then the other should have runguy, and help the destitute person, who will then be subordinated and owe an eventual return” (1984: 34). In this regard it is interesting that an elder once complained to me that in contemporary Yapese society there are far too many people who are toelaengaen’, “high-minded,” and that this is due to the fact that these same individuals do not know the true meaning of gaafgow (suffering). This high-mindedness,

142

C. Jason Throop

she said, has resulted in the fact that increasingly, instead of feeling runguy in the face of suffering, people in Yap often become makankanaen‘—“irritated” or “frustrated”—with people who proclaim that they are gaafgow. The prevalent perspective today, she argued, is that if someone is gaafgow it is because he or she is lazy (malmaal). In contrast, she claimed that in the past, a person who was gaafgow was certain to elicit help from others, for suffering could open the doors of even the highest chiefs. She maintained that if an individual showed up on the doorstep of a stranger and said kug gaafgow, “I am suffering,” it would not matter who that person was, what his or her caste was, or what relationship that person had with the person who owned the land. The morally appropriate response would be for the owner of the estate in question to feel runguy and thus be motivated to give help/care (ayuw) to the person who was suffering. One elder once told me that the very basis of social life in Yap is predicated on the fact that everyone, no matter what the rank of his or her estate, is born to a mother and thus has to directly experience from a firsthand perspective what it means to be gaafgow. If an individual does not learn to feel gaafgow u fithik ea doway, “suffering inside of the body,” that individual will never truly feel runguy for those who are suffering. Interestingly, this same elder suggested that those individuals who do not feel runguy in the face of suffering also tended to be individuals who are always falfalaen (happy). Now, happiness is certainly a feeling that is valued in Yap. And yet, to some extent, it is also understood to be a barrier to the cultivation of feelings of compassion toward those who are suffering, the assumption being that if one is happy, one is not focused on the well-being of others but on one’s own success and comfort. Happiness seems to also have a negative connotation inasmuch as it does not seem to engender an orientation to the future. It is instead suffering, and the realization that suffering and its avoidance that are understood to be tied to planning and thinking about what one can do in the present in the service of bettering one’s position (and one’s access to food, etc.) in the future. There is thus a future orientation that is embedded in local understandings of suffering, as well as an emphasis on it moral worth. And the very motivation for helping others, for caring and “empathizing” with others, is held to be directly rooted in the individual’s own experience of suffering (gaafgow). This relationship between suffering, compassion, and empathy is also evident in the fact that the dynamic interchange of feeling between a father and his children is held to shift directions once the father has grown too old to care for himself, for when a father (or a mother) is faced with the sicknesses and physical limitations that often accompany old age, he is transformed into the one that is suffering. At this time, the children, who were once the ones considered gaafgow, are now in the position of feeling runguy for their father and are thus ideally to respond by caring for him accordingly. Again, if the children

Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap

143

do not demonstrate the proper care for their father, they risk losing access to crucial knowledge associated with the estate (tabinaew). Significantly, it is not just land that is understood to be transacted from clan to clan, from one generation to the next, but also a variety of different forms of specialized, culturally valued knowledge, which traditionally included knowledge of massage, medicines, magic, architecture, navigation, etc. Indeed, these same ideals underpinning the transfer of land holdings from one generation to the next, from one clan to another, are the foundation for the transfer of these specialized forms of knowledge from parents and grandparents to their children and grandchildren. The picture that emerges here is thus of the various ways in which sentiment in the form of suffering and compassion is mediated through the material vehicle of land as manifest in the form of foundations, and their associated names, which are all indexical of ongoing histories of social relations. Closely related to this discussion of the interplay of gaafgow and runguy is the concept of amiithuun ea binaew, which can be understood as concern, attachment, love, and/or positive pride for one’s village. The phrase amiithuun ea binaew can be literally translated as “pain of the village.” The phrase is made up of the term for village (binaew), the noun phrase connector ea, and the term amiithuun, which is a combination of the morpheme amiith, a noun referring to the sensation of pain, and the directly suffixed third-person possessive -uun. The term amiithuun may be used in the context of describing the direct material cause of a physical pain (e.g., amiithuun ea gargael—“childbirth’s pain”), in referring to pains associated with specific varieties of illness (e.g., amiithuun ea maathkenyl—“maathkenyl’s pain”), or, in the case of amiithuun ea binaew, in indexing a feeling state very similar to that of runguy. Indeed, to say kab amiithuun ngeak (literally, “there comes his or her pain”) is to evoke the image of great care, love, compassion, and concern for another. Moreover, the term is also often used in the context of songs of love in which phrases such as be liyeg amiithuun (literally, “his or her pain is killing me”) are used to generate images of intense feelings of loneliness, longing, attachment, and love in the listener. One of the first individuals I questioned about the term explained that amiithuun ea binaew is a concept that is grounded directly in maruweel, “work.” As a number of others later concurred, amiithuun ea binaew is held to arise from collectively working and suffering together as a community. This collective work, endurance, and suffering is thus held to be responsible for generating feelings of mutual belonging, concern, and love for one’s village. This feeling, one individual argued, is only hard earned through effort, suffering, and work, and thus is experienced by many people with great intensity. It is important to note that there seems to be a parallel evident here between the way in which individuals understood the generation of feelings of attachment within the village and within the family. Much as one’s authority,

144

C. Jason Throop

rights, and title to a particular piece of land are understood to result from one’s suffering, effort, and labor, amiithuun ea binaew, one’s feelings of attachment, concern, love, and pride for one’s village are similarly tied to the suffering, striving, and enduring of a community that is collectively working toward a common goal of building and improving the village. As one elder put it, kaakaroom yaed ma athamagil ko maruweel ko binaew—“long ago, they put effort, endurance, striving, and perseverance into the work for the village.” The cultivation of amiithuun ea binaew was thus repeatedly described in terms of a cycle in which striving, enduring, and effortful suffering is seen as the generative source for feelings of amiithuun, which are then themselves the source motivating further works and further efforts for the benefit of the community. Here, there thus seems to be a recurring theme of suffering and pain as a basis for engendering compassion, attachment, pity, and love in another, a dynamic of morally valenced sentiments that serve to define the generation of social relationships at a number of different levels in Yapese society. As noted above, the term amiithuun is also often used in ways very similar to that of runguy, although, as one of my research assistants suggested, there is an important, yet subtle, difference between the two concepts. As she stated in English, My picture of the word [amiithuun] is that it is more like a bond of attachment that is painful. I think of it as deeply felt strings of pain that do not start from you but comes toward you from the object that is causing your pain. These strings bind you and pull you back toward that object or person. It is something that is felt both ways and is a bit different from runguy, which can sometimes be felt only in one direction. Finally, as one elder once told me, the presence or absence of amiithuun has significant consequences for the assessment of an individual’s moral worth. Thus to say baaq amiithuun roek chaney, “he or she cares for that person,” or chaney ea baamit ea amiithuun ngaak, “he or she has the quality of caring/ compassion/concern,” is to highlight a person’s virtuous qualities. Meanwhile, to say that a person is daariy ea amiithuun—“without caring/compassion/concern”—is to present a very negative assessment of his or her moral character. For instance, if a woman’s husband is ever to become sick and she does not express appropriate concern for him, merely going about her business as if there is nothing wrong, people will most certainly chastise her by saying daariy ea amiithuun room—“you have no caring/compassion/concern.” This, one elder maintained, would result in people believing that the woman in question therefore did not deserve to be her husband’s wife, since she did not properly express her “pain” for him by caring for him in his time of need.

Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap

145

Conclusion

In this essay my goal has been a modest one. Hoping to underscore the complex and at times competing ways that a given community may differently value, recognize, and/or enact orientations to another individual’s subjective life, I have provided a thick ethnographic description of the place of a number of Yapese assumptions, ideals, virtues, and practices that collectively provide, I believe, a sketch of a culturally inflected perspective on “empathy.” While there is no one Yapese term that can be easily glossed as “empathy,” I hope to have described a range of cultural ideas and values that coincide to some extent with a most basic definition of empathy as an imaginatively and emotionally based subjective act of approximating the quasi–first-person perspective of another’s internal life. In so doing I have outlined local assumptions regarding the moral worth of self-governance in the service of secrecy, concealment, and privacy, the prevalence of communicative practices engendering ambiguity and non-transparency among interlocutors, and the lexicalization of expressivity as a salient element in distinguishing between various forms of emotional experience. I have also detailed the ways in which forms of mitigated empathy arise in the attention that individuals pay to others’ inner lives in the context of gossip and oblique speech, ethno-epistemological perspectives on the often-hidden meaning underlying overt forms of expressivity, and the culturally elaborated role of “compassion/concern/pity” (runguy) and “concern/attachment/love for the village” (amithuun ea binaew) in sedimenting bonds between social actors. All told, I believe that together these various beliefs, ideals, values, and practices provide glimpses into an admittedly diffuse range of cultural understandings that yet overlap around a nucleus of meanings and practices that speak to the complex and dynamic place of “empathy” in Yapese social life. Notes 1. This research was funded through UCLA’s Department of Anthropology and the Social Science Research Council and Andrew W. Mellow Foundation’s International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship Program. I would like to respectfully acknowledge the Council of Pilung and the Yap State Historic Preservation Office (HPO) for all of their help and for granting me permission to conduct the project from which the data for this article was drawn. In particular, I would like to single out HPO’s former director Al Fanechigiy, current director James Lukan, and staff member Peter Tun for providing me with much needed guidance throughout my time in Yap. I am very grateful to Leo Pugram at the Yap State Department of Education, as well as to my two extremely knowledgeable and gifted language teachers Francisca Mochen and Charles Taman Kamnaanged, for sharing their linguistic expertise and their knowledge of

146

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

C. Jason Throop

Yapese grammar. I am further indebted beyond words to my two research assistants: Sheri Manna and Stella Tiningin. Thanks also to Jim Egan and Sherwood Lingenfelter for sharing their many insights into Yapese culture and for all of their support and encouragement over the years. Finally, I would like to especially thank the people of Yap for so generously accepting me into their lives and for sharing their cares, concerns, and understandings of what it means to lead a life the Yapese way. Siroew ngoomeed ma karimagaergad! Of course, any mistakes, omissions, or errors in this piece are the sole responsibility of the author. This moral orientation strongly resonates with Mageo’s characterization of Samoa, where she claims that the virtues of personal restraint (lototele), the effacement of personal concerns (lotomama), and personal abasement (lotofa‘amaualalo) serve to canalize awareness and action toward an ideal of an other-directed, role-conscious individual that “is not overcome by the exigencies of inner sentiments, retaining always a calm demeanor and encouraging others to do the same” (1998: 55). As Charles Sanders Peirce (1992 [1878]: 132) explained in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” pragmatism (or what he later referred to as pragmaticism) should “[c]onsider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conceptions to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object.” William James similarly argued in “What Pragmatism Means” (1995 [1907]: 18) that “[t]o attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it and what reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all.” Pacific societies are, of course, not alone in privileging indeterminacy and ambiguity in communicative practice. Indeed, Jean Briggs (1995, 1998) and Phyllis Morrow (1990) have noted very similar patterns for Inuit societies, wherein indirection, nonspecificity, and a philosophical orientation to multiple simultaneous reference are implicated in social phenomena that range from recognizing limits of human knowledge to avoiding the use of generalizations to deference politeness to transformative metaphors employed in ritual and artistic forms. Much as Petersen has noted in the case of Pohnpeian ethno-epistemologies, Morrow (1990: 153) asserts that for the Yupik, “there is not privileged point of view: the individuality and multiplicity of human experience and perception make definitive collective statements about the world impossible.” As Petersen himself notes, there are also important differences, however, between Pohnpeian epistemology and those Pacific cultures in which “disentangling” is advanced as a means of dispute resolution predicated upon the assumption that while truth is always difficult to discern, with effort there may be ways in which to uncover it (Watson-Gegeo and White 1990). According to Petersen, in Pohnpei (and I would argue likewise in Yap), while the former assumption is shared, the latter is not (1993: 339). Jean Briggs notes a very similar pattern in Inuit communities, where individuals “often say the exact opposite of what they mean—‘Don’t come to visit! When they mean ‘Do come’; and they often say what they mean in a tone of voice that means something else. In other words, contradictory messages may be delivered simultaneously in different modalities: affectionate words may be spoken in a rejecting voice and vice versa. The

Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap

147

emotional force of the dramas derives from the fact that small children do not understand their benignity; they do not read them as the adult players do” (Briggs 1995: 212.) 7. There was in fact a derogatory term used to designate such an individual—feekchilig. Jensen (1977a) defines the term as “Someone who nags, always asking for the same thing over and over.” It is both interesting, somewhat amusing, and more than a little disheartening, that this same term was used to translate the profession of “anthropologist” in the context of an announcement in the 6 October 1967 edition of the Rai Review 4 (39): “Sherwood Lingenfelter a ba Anthropologist (Fikchilig) [sic] u State University College u Brockport (New York) ni bai yib nga Waab e rofen ni Sunday ko binei e week, ni ngeb i par ni 20 e pul ni nge fil marngaagen yu Waab. Ra fil marngaagen e am nu Waab nike thilthil, salpiy riy nge rogone gidii nibe, par ulan binau. Re marwel rok‘ nem e ir e ngemang reb e hakese ri. Ra un leengin ngak nge bitir rorow ni 2 e duw yangren ngarabad nga Waab.” [sic] 8. I should note that in Yap there are a number of terms, aside from runguy, that overlap, at least to some degree, with those semantic fields encompassed by the English term “love.” For instance, there is the term adaag, which refers to anything from “liking” to “wanting” to “desiring,” and which can be used equally for objects and people. Tufeg, which connotes a form of “cherishing” and “caring,” is often used to describe an individual’s actions and not necessarily his or her feelings. There is also the term taawureeng, which is more closely related to runguy and is used to refer to those feelings invoked when one is separated from one’s spouse, lover, close friend, relative, community, etc. In addition, the term amiithuun, which I will discuss in more detail below, can literally be translated as “pain of ”; it refers primarily to feelings of attachment, care, and “love” for one’s village or one’s community. Interestingly, however, despite these various terms that resonate to some extent with the concept of “love,” I often witnessed individuals switching to English when they sought to express their feelings of love or caring for another. For instance, it was very common to hear parents and children alike tell each other “love you.”

Bibliography Barth, Fredrik. 1975. Ritual Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea. New Haven: Yale University Press. Besnier, Niko. 1989. “Information Withholding as a Manipulative and Collusive Strategy in Nukulaelae Gossip.” Language in Society 18 (1): 315–341. ———. 1990. “Conflict Management, Gossip, and Affective Meaning on Nukulaelae.” In Disentangling: Conflict Discourse in Pacific Societies, ed. Karen A. Watson-Gegeo and Geoffrey White. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1994. “The Truth and Other Irrelevant Aspects of Nukulaelae Gossip.” Pacific Studies 17 (3): 1–39. Brenneis, Donald. 1984a. “Straight Talk and Sweet Talk: Political Discourse in an Occasionally Egalitarian Community.” In Dangerous Words: Language and Politics in the Pacific, ed. Donald Brenneis and Fred Myers. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. ———. 1984b. “Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon: Style and Substance in Fiji Indian Conversation.” American Ethnologist 11 (3): 487–506.

148

C. Jason Throop

Briggs, Jean. 1995. “The Study of Inuit Emotions: Lessons from a Personal Retrospective.” In Everyday Conceptions of Emotion, ed. J. A. Russell et al. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. 1998. Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old. New Haven: Yale University Press. Brison, Karen J. 1992. Just Talk: Gossip, Meetings, and Power in a Papua New Guinea Village. Studies in Melanesian Anthropology, 11. Berkeley: University of California Press. Duranti, Alessandro. 1984. Intentions, Self, and Local Theories of Meaning: Words and Social Action in a Samoan Context. La Jolla: Center for Human Information Processing. ———. 1988. “Intentions, Language, and Social Action in a Samoan Context.” Journal of Pragmatics 12 (1): 13–33. ———. 1993. “Truth and Intentionality: An Ethnographic Perspective.” Cultural Anthropology 8 (1): 214–245. ———. 2001. “Intentionality.” In Key Terms in Language and Culture, ed. Alessandro Duranti. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2006. “The Social Ontology of Intentions.” Discourse Studies 8 (1): 31–40. Egan, James. A. 1998. Taro, Fish, and Funerals: Transformations in the Yapese Cultural Topography of Wealth. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of California, Irvine. ———. 2004. “Keeping-for-Giving and Giving-for-Keeping: Value, Hierarchy, and the Inalienable in Yap.” In Values and Valuables: From the Sacred to the Symbolic, ed. Cynthia Werner and Duran Bell. New York: Altamira Press. Firth, Raymond. 1967. “Rumour in a Primitive Society.” In Tikopia Ritual and Belief, auth. Raymond Firth. Boston: Beacon Press. Goldman, Laurence R. 1995. “The Depths of Deception: Cultural Schemas of Illusion in Huli.” In Papua Borderlands, ed. Alietta Biersack. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Halpern, Jodi. 2001. From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hollan, Douglas, and C. Jason Throop. 2008. “Whatever Happened to Empathy? Introduction.” Ethos 36 (4): 385–401. James, William. 1995 [1907]. Pragmatism. Mineola, NY: Dover. Jensen, John T. 1977. Yapese-English Dictionary. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Keenan [Ochs], Elinor. 1976. “On the Universality of Conversational Implicatures.” Language in Society 5 (1): 67–80. Labby, David. 1976. The Demystification of Yap: Dialectics of Culture on a Micronesian Island. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levy, Robert. 1973. Tahitians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lingenfelter, Sherwood. 1975. Yap: Political Leadership and Change in an Island Society. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Lutz, Catherine. 1988. Unnatural Emotions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mageo, Jeannette. 1998. Theorizing Self in Samoa. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Morrow, Phyllis. 1990. “Symbolic Actions, Indirect Expressions: Limits to Interpretations of Yupik Society.” Etudes/Inuit/Studies 14 (1–2): 141–158. Ochs, Elinor. 1988. Culture and Language Development: Language Acquisition and Language Socialization in a Samoan Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, Elinor, and Bambi Schieffelin. 1984. “Language Acquisition and Socialization: Three Developmental Stories and their Implications.” In Culture Theory: Essays in Mind, Self,

Suffering, Empathy, and Ethical Modalities of Being in Yap

149

and Emotion, ed. Richard Shweder and Robert Levine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peirce, Charles S. 1992 [1878]. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” In The Essential Peirce: Volume I (1867–1893), ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Petersen, Glen. 1993. “Kanengamah and Pohnpei’s Politics of Concealment.” American Anthropologist 95 (2): 334–352. Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papuan New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rosen, Lawrence, ed. 1995. Other Intentions: Cultural Contexts and the Attribution of Inner States. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Schieffelin, Bambi B., Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, eds. 1998. Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schneider, David. M. 1949. The Kinship System and Village Organization of Yap, West Caroline Islands, Micronesia: A Structural Account. Unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Social Relations, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. ———. 1984. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shore, Bradd. 1982. Sala‘ilua: A Samoan Mystery. New York: Columbia University Press. Strathern, Andrew. 1975. “Veiled Speech in Mount Hagen.” In Maurice Bloch, ed., Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society. New York: Academic Press. Throop, C. Jason. 2008. “On the Problem of Empathy: The Case of Yap, Federated States of Micronesia.” Ethos 36 (4): 402–426. ———. 2010a. Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2010b. “Latitudes of Loss: On the Vicissitudes of Empathy.” American Ethnologist 37(4): 271-282. Walleser, P. Sixtus. 1913. “Religiose Anchauungen und Gebrauche der Bewohnew von Jap (Deutsch Sudsee).” Anthropos 8: 607–629. (Translated for the Yale Cross Cultural Survey, Human Relations Area Files, 1968.) Watson-Gegeo, Karen Ann, and Geoffrey M. White. 1990. Disentangling: Conflict Discourse in Pacific Societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wikan, Uni. 1992. “Beyond Words: The Power of Resonance.” American Ethnologist 19 (1): 460–482. Wilson, Lynn B. 1995. Speaking to Power: Gender and Politics in the Western Pacific. New York: Routledge.

6 Do Anutans Empathize? Morality, Compassion, and Opacity of Other Minds RICHARD FEINBERG

Introduction

My interest in empathy as a topic for ethnographic investigation flows from a career-long involvement with Anuta, a Polynesian community in the Solomon Islands. During my initial fieldwork close to forty years ago, I was struck by the importance Anutans attach to aropa, the local version of a pan-Polynesian term. Anutans explained much of their behavior in terms of aropa. They spoke of it in church and on occasions of ceremonial exchange. It lies at the heart of their notions of kinship, and it has occupied a prominent position in many of my ethnographic publications.1 Familiar variants of aropa include aloha (Hawaiian), aroha (Maori), alofa (Samoan), and ’ofa (Tongan). There is no precise English equivalent, but I and others have provided such glosses as “love,” “sympathy,” “pity,” “compassion,” or “empathy.”2 Importantly, however, Anutans, like many other Polynesians, put relatively little stock in verbal proclamations of aropa; to be taken seriously, it must be actively demonstrated. Among Anutans, such action typically takes the form of economic assistance or sharing of economic resources, including houses, canoes, garden land, and—perhaps most importantly—food (cf. von Poser; Lohmann, both this volume). Aropa is among Anuta’s most cherished and pervasive values. Anutans define kin as those who demonstrate aropa in their interactions. All Anutans consider themselves kin to one another, and they identify their community as a place where aropa is put into practice.3 They often describe non-Anutans as deficient in this key respect and express admiration for members of their own community based on the degree to which their actions communicate aropa. Anutans go out of their way to act as if they have positive emotions, and in face-to-face interactions they try to hide such negative ones as suspicion and hostility—at least in part to avoid potentially disruptive or even violent conflicts. However, they readily express such feelings when speaking in pri-

152

Richard Feinberg

vate with a third party. But while Anutans demand that members of their own community express aropa for one another, they have no comparable expectations of non-Anutans, whom they often stereotype as stingy, violent, or prone to drunkenness and irresponsibility. In contrast with their treatment of other community members, Anutans feel no moral scruples about treatment of nonkin, and it is acceptable to take advantage of such persons should the opportunity arise.4 Here, I explore Anutans’ understandings of aropa in juxtaposition to such related concepts as imagination, projection, shame, guilt, and suffering. Anutans designate some of these with monolexemic linguistic labels (e.g., pakamaa, “shame”; maninia, “lust”; makau, “jealousy”; mamai, “pain”); others they do not. Anutans normally do not make the facile distinction drawn by English speakers between emotion (or feeling) and thinking, nor is the distinction between the mental and physical clear-cut. I will suggest that this is associated with the Anutan conviction that the everyday world is populated by spirits, and with their refusal to draw rigid boundaries between the spiritual and physical. My contribution shares with most other chapters in this collection a concern with the impenetrability of other people’s thoughts and feelings—the “opacity of other minds” (Robbins and Rumsey 2008b: 408 and passim). Empathy, as commonly understood, involves the ability to assess another’s mental state and, in some sense, share in his or her experiences. Yet many Pacific islanders insist that one cannot directly access someone else’s private thoughts or feelings.5 Under those circumstances, it might seem impossible to imagine oneself in someone else’s position, i.e., to empathize. This suggests such fundamental questions as whether anthropologists can ever hope to understand “the native’s point of view” (Geertz 1977; Outhwaite 1976; Lepowsky and Lohmann, both this volume) or ascertain the workings of their interlocutors’ psyches (e.g., Lohmann; Mageo; Hermann, all this volume). My concern is neither with Anutan psychodynamics nor the question of how anthropologists can access others’ thoughts and feelings. Rather, I attempt to explicate Anutans’ theory of empathic phenomena as revealed in their language and discourse (cf. White and Kirkpatrick 1985).

Empathy and Related Constructs

Empathy requires the ability to imagine oneself—as it is often expressed—in someone else’s place. I am not aware of an Anutan word that translates easily as “imagination.” However, Anutans do have a variety of terms that cover aspects of what English speakers mean by that expression. Perhaps the closest to a general equivalent is pakatautau, which means something like “as if,” “to

Do Anutans Empathize?

153

resemble,” “think of it in the following manner,” or, simply, “thus.” For example, in explaining what a word means, one might say “pakatautau” to suggest an analogy. I have recorded a historical narrative in which a man named Pu Teraupanga had signed on to work aboard a ship. The ship stopped at Rotuma, where Pu Teraupanga had a brief love affair. His lover and her family urged him to jump ship and promised to hide him, but Pu Teraupanga was convinced that he could not escape. The narrator says: “Pu Teraupanga e muna pakatautau, ko ia kairo reku. Paia ko te korii a te paparangi e aru ee rei mo ia. Te mea e reku, takiri ee rea e te korii.” A rough translation is: “Pu Teraupanga, speaking hypothetically, said he would not disappear. Because of the White Man’s dog who always accompanies him. When someone vanishes, the dog always finds him.” In another tale, a man named Pu Notau Taapikitua was asked about an attack on a European ship. One of the attackers was said to have had tattoos similar to Pu Notau’s on his arms and legs, and Pu Notau observed, “A ko te tangata rea, muna ki ei e pakatautau mai ki ona nima mo ona vae nei, toku taina, Pu Kirekirei,” or in English: “The man described as having arms and legs like mine is my brother, Pu Kirekirei.”6 In each case, pakatautau is used to suggest that the speaker is drawing parallels or comparisons, or imagining himself in a different situation. This may not precisely coincide with “empathy,” since it does not entail imagining oneself in the position of another subject. However, it does involve imagining oneself in a position different from that which one currently occupies. The gap between such ruminations and true empathy is, arguably, small. A more general term that includes imagination is maanatu, a word that means “to think.” It can refer to analytic thought or having an opinion. It also may be used for speculation or projection, although “to guess” is usually matea. Lastly, atamai is normally a noun referring to one’s “mind.” However, it applies to affect as well as cognition. Anutans do not typically speak in terms that are readily translated as “projection,” although it is arguably a form of imagination and could be covered by maanatu or pakatautau. “Shame,” by contrast, is a common topic of conversation. The Anutan word for shame is pakamaa, a term shared by many Polynesian languages. A shy person asked to perform in public might decline with the explanation “Kau pakamaa,” “I am pakamaa.” And, should one be accused of inappropriate behavior, a common reaction is pakamaa. Such behavior might include theft, failure to care for a sick or elderly relative, or failure to respect a chief, the church, or senior kin. Pakamaa can be a powerful emotion, leading to dramatic actions up to and including suicide. In 1980, two youths were accused of stealing watermelons. They proclaimed their innocence, but suspicions remained; the young men felt such pangs of pakamaa that they eventually sailed off in a canoe, voyaging to Vanikoro, over 200 miles distant.

154

Richard Feinberg

When, at length, a ship arrived, one of the youths returned home to Anuta. The other still felt pakamaa so strongly that he reboarded his vessel and sailed on to Santa Ana, about 300 miles farther to the west.7 Should one distinguish guilt from shame, pakamaa fits squarely in the latter category. The suspected watermelon thieves insistently declared their innocence. It was not pangs of conscience that drove them to their act of desperation, but rather the malignant gossip.8 Yet even embarrassment or shame requires an ability to place oneself, metaphorically, in someone else’s skin: it is a response to what one thinks another thinks of him or her. Other Anutan words that bear emotional content include maninia, makau, mamai, mataku, konokono, and vakivaki. Maninia is sharply differentiated from aropa in much the way that English speakers distinguish lust from love. It implies a powerful desire for something one does not have and, perhaps, ought not to have. Most commonly it involves either sexual longing that is not reciprocated or attraction to a married man or woman. In the latter case, maninia may lead one to resent the spouse, an emotion that Anutans call makau, perhaps best glossed as “jealousy” or “envy.” In one important tale, a chief named Tearakura “lusted” (ne maninia) after his sister-in-law. Motivated by sexual jealousy (pakamakau), Tearakura used his chiefly mana to cause his brother, Tauvakatai, to suffer a battle wound from which he eventually died. After Tauvakatai’s death, Tearakura married his deceased brother’s widow. Mamai means “pain” or “hurt.” Usually this refers to physical pain. However, Anutans also recognize emotional suffering. They may cry (tangi) in response to emotional trauma, such as the death of a loved one or the experience of being spurned by a lover. They compose poems and songs about such experiences, and they engage in ritual wailing when a relative dies or leaves the island—or upon suffering the almost equally traumatic experience of seeing one of their canoes destroyed.9 Pakarongo most often means “to listen” or “to hear,” but it can also refer to sensory or emotional awareness of various kinds. When a navigator feels the movement of the waves on his canoe, Anutans say e pakarongo, “he perceives” that movement. And Anutans understand that emotional reactions may have somatic consequences. One popular song (which Anutans borrowed from Tikopia, the neighboring island) depicts a man crying because of his feelings for a young woman living in another district: Nau taka i te tonga, e kau tangisia. “Young lady in the east, I cry for you.” Two lines later, the singer avers, Fiavare oku tino ki o nau taka. “My body goes crazy because of you, young woman.” In contrast with Western popular discourse—but in common with contemporary neuroscience—Anutans refuse to draw a rigid line between the mind and body. Also, in contrast with the West, where thought and feeling are situated in the head—or, more precisely, in the brain—Anutans center thought and emotion in the belly (te manava), an association that makes good sense in terms

Do Anutans Empathize?

155

of the connection between food, life (which requires ingestion of food), and sharing—particularly of food—as the centerpiece of aropa.10 I became aware of the association between thought and the stomach in 1972, when I asked my friend Pu Ngarumea a question about kin relations and, while answering, he patted his abdomen, much in the way that Europeans might scratch their heads. I asked about his behavior, and he confirmed that his mannerism was associated with the thought process. Upon further inquiry, I was told that thoughts originate in the stomach or abdomen and are transmitted to the head, where they are further processed and converted into language before being communicated in speech.11 The terms mataku, konokono, and vakivaki are used in more or less the same way as “fear,” “anger,” and “happiness” in English. Mataku describes a person’s reaction to danger and anticipation of unpleasant physical or social consequences. It is accompanied by an overwhelming urge to flee; if flight is impossible, a common reaction—particularly among children—is to cry. Konokono involves aggressive feelings—the feeling that one has been wronged and the wish to cause the guilty party injury. Vakivaki is a positive feeling that one experiences when events work out well. It is intimately associated with smiling and laughter, both of which Anutans call by the same term, kata (Feinberg 1989).12

Opacity of Other Minds

Halpern (2001) defines empathy as “a first person-like, experiential understanding of another person’s perspective” (see also Hollan; Lohmann; Throop, all this volume). In light of such definitions, one might question whether Anutans (or, more generally, Pacific islanders) empathize at all. Is “empathy” an appropriate gloss for aropa? The problem revolves around uncertainty about another person’s mental state. At first glance, aropa appears consistent with Halpern’s definition: it is supposed to indicate positive feelings and is expressed through acts of generosity. A morally virtuous person sees another in need of assistance and provides it. However, Anutans also assert the opacity of other minds, and if one is unsure of someone else’s thoughts or feelings, it would seem impossible to have a first person-like understanding of the other’s experience. Anutans affirm the opacity of other minds in myriad statements. One illustration comes from a story told by my close friend, Pu Tokerau, about his voyage to Tikopia during the 1960s. A canoe was headed for Patutaka, an uninhabited island 30 miles away that Anutans occasionally visit to hunt birds. While the sailors were at sea a storm arose, preventing the canoe from either progressing to Patutaka or returning home. Given the wind direction, the closest viable landfall was at Tikopia, 75 miles to the west. After many harrowing

156

Richard Feinberg

hours, the Anutans reached their destination. I asked Pu Toke if he had been frightened during his ordeal, and he replied that he had not, since he was confident of his seafaring skills. Some years later, I related this exchange to Pu Toke’s brother, the senior chief, who was also on the voyage. The chief replied that perhaps Pu Toke was unafraid; after all, one can never know what is in someone else’s mind. However, he could say with certainty that his brother “was crying, just like everyone else, about how we were all going to perish at sea.” In this instance, the opacity of other minds was invoked to give the benefit of the doubt to someone who had made a questionable assertion. More often, it is used to impugn others’ honesty or good intentions. For example, if one were to say, Kau aropa ki a te koe—roughly, “I love you”—but declined to provide the other with material assistance in times of need, the common Anutan conclusion would be that the speaker had uttered empty verbiage. In Anutan, one would say e ngutu roi, “he’s lying”; in Pijin, one would use bulsit, a variant of the familiar English expression “bullshit.” Observations such as these have led some commentators to conclude that Pacific islanders view one another’s thoughts as utterly impenetrable. At least for the Anutan case, I suggest a very different interpretation: their views are similar to those of Westerners; we are just more hypocritical. In fact, Anutans show intense concern about each other’s “real” intentions. In apparent contrast with New Guinea groups like the Bosavi (Scheiffelin 2008), Urapmin (Robbins 2008), and Korowai (Stasch 2008), where gossip and even semi-private speculation about another’s mental state are considered morally offensive, Anutans put enormous energy into trying to determine whether others are telling the truth. They view theft (kaia) and lying (ngutu roi) as moral defects. They recognize, however, that one cannot be absolutely certain of others’ thoughts or of whether they are telling the truth. So, instead, they weigh the evidence and make their best estimate. The procedure is more reminiscent of an American courtroom than a philosopher’s study. Anutans recognize that they may be mistaken, but they look for the preponderance of evidence, and when they accuse others of deception, theft, embezzlement, or fraud, they freely cite the evidence on which they have based their assessments. An American adage declares that actions speak louder than words. Anutans agree and base their understandings on that premise. The extent to which one can know what someone else is thinking, and whether overt representations are truthful, is problematic anywhere. Rather than invest a great deal of time in trying to determine other people’s mental states, Anutans tend to judge each other by their actions. If speech and actions correspond, Anutans are willing to take one another at their word, at least provisionally, and describe their verbal proclamations as “truthful” (ngutu mooni). If a person’s deeds appear to contradict his or her words, Anutans

Do Anutans Empathize?

157

conclude that the person is “lying” (ngutu roi).13 In short, Anutans frequently formulate hypotheses about what others are thinking and feeling. Cooperation is critically important to them, and they try to interpret the intentions behind others’ speech acts. Their view of other minds’ accessibility is fundamentally similar to that of Europeans or Americans. They recognize that one’s ability to read another’s thoughts is limited, but that limitation does not preempt their ability to empathize any more than it does ours. Anutans display empathy in a variety of contexts. They often use the metaphor of a seabird (te manu o te moana) to represent an ocean traveler. At the end of a long voyage, one is likely to be frightened, cold, and hungry, far from home, friends, kin, and emotional support. It is easy for Anutans to imagine how one would feel under such conditions.14 They often sail long distances in small canoes and risk being lost at sea—as some occasionally are.15 They experience cold, rain, wind, and rough seas. And they not infrequently risk their own comfort and safety to assist others in distress. One recent well-known case in which Anutans took such a risk occurred around 1990. A man named Sione escaped from a Tongan prison in a motorboat. After several hours on the ocean, he ran out of fuel and drifted to Anuta. The Anutans showed their aropa by offering him a home and caring for him. Eventually word of Sione’s whereabouts filtered to the Tongan authorities, who demanded that he be returned to their custody. The Anutan chiefs, however, stood firm against the combined pressure of the Tongan and Solomon Islands governments and police forces, refusing to release their guest. In their view, he had suffered enough and had come to them seeking protection, which it was their duty to provide. In the end, Anutans were spared retribution from the power of two national governments, but they could not have known in advance what reprisals their action might elicit.16 It would be difficult to account for such risk-taking, were Anutans incapable of empathy.

Empathy and Social Structure

Mageo (this volume) and Gershon (2007) suggest that empathy takes different forms depending on the social structure of the community in which it is found. For Anuta, aropa is at the heart of social structure and the kinship system. It is the centerpiece of moral behavior, and it takes on an asymmetrical, complementary character, reflecting the island’s ritual, political, and social hierarchy. As I have argued elsewhere (see particularly Feinberg 1981a, 1981b, 2004), Anutans define kin relations in terms of an intersection of genealogical and behavioral components. Kin normally have a genealogical connection but are expected to identify with and support one another. In other words, they

158

Richard Feinberg

should feel aropa and act upon those feelings by sharing gardens, canoes, food, and other resources. Members of the same domestic unit (te patongia) are joint owners of such resources, and they share a food basket at island-wide distributions. But if close genealogical relatives should have a falling out and fail to express aropa through mutual support, they may cease to be considered close kin. Conversely, people who have no genealogical connection but express aropa by sharing economic resources may find themselves incorporated into the kinship system as thoroughly as one who was born into the community. Many instances of such incorporation may be seen in the community’s historical narratives, and I also know of several current cases. Anuta has a classic Polynesian ranking system, based on genealogical seniority and mana. The senior chief is the most senior male patrilineal descendant of Tearakura, the chief whose desire for his sister-in-law I discussed above. The junior chief is the senior male patrilineal descendant of Tearakura’s younger brother, Pu Tepuko. Others are ranked in approximate proportion to their nearness to or distance from the senior line. Those with greatest genealogical seniority are believed, other things being equal, to possess the greatest manuu or “mana,” “spiritual power” (Feinberg 1996b). Men of the chiefly kainanga, “clans,” are known as maru, “protectors,” and are expected to use their manuu to ensure the welfare and prosperity of those below them. Members of the two non-chiefly clans are known as pakaaropa “sympathy-producing” or “pitiable”; Anutans expect them to honor and obey the chiefs and maru. The actors in both cases are expressing aropa. Maru demonstrate compassion by caring for those who lack the manuu to ensure their own welfare; pakaaropa express appreciation (also termed aropa) for those above them by ceding respect and obedience. Anutans associate moral virtue with aropa. Only by expressing aropa toward others may one come to be thought of as a “good person” (tangata rerei, “good man,” or papine rerei, “good woman”). To live comfortably on the island, however, it may also be important to evoke the empathy of others. This is accomplished most often through reciprocal interaction. If one is generous toward others, one hopes they will be generous in return.17 By emphasizing kin ties or common membership in a property-owning extended family domestic unit (patongia), one can usually count on economic and emotional support. By showing respect (pakamamapa) for others, particularly for Anutans of high rank, one also increases the likelihood of being treated with generosity. In addition, people sometimes exaggerate their degree of need, hoping to elicit support from those in positions of power—chiefs, spirits of deceased ancestors, pre-Christian deities, or the Christian God (cf. Firth 1970; Hermann, this volume). To portray oneself as pitiable in hopes of reaping material rewards, however, carries some risk. If such claims are too obviously exaggerated, or if

Do Anutans Empathize?

159

they create the impression that the supplicant is incompetent or lazy, feelings of compassion may morph into contempt. While aropa is positively valued and acting generously improves one’s social standing, the ability to express aropa through economic largesse also serves to support a hierarchical social system. Chiefs are thought to have a special relationship with divinity and, because of that relationship, to possess extraordinary spiritual power. Chiefs use their power to ensure the community’s prosperity and, in that way, express aropa. While a chief does this out of a sense of noblesse oblige, he also creates among his constituents a sense of dependency, and he issues an implied threat that if they fail to obey or respect him, they may suffer some material misfortune.18 While it is important to express aropa in one’s social relationships, it is also important to maintain a sense of balance. It is “good” (rerei) to empathize with and materially support one’s fellow islanders and kin, but massive acts of generosity that go beyond what is required and beyond the recipient’s ability to reciprocate lead to shame, embarrassment (pakamaa; see above), and perhaps resentment.19

Empathy and Non-humans

Normally, Anutans speak of aropa in relation to other human beings, particularly to other Anutans or to non-Anutans with whom they hope to establish a mutually beneficial social and economic relationship. On occasion, however, I have also heard Anutans express such feelings for animals including piglets, cats, or dogs for which they are caring and with which they have established an emotional bond.20 I have not heard Anutans use the expression in discussing the sea, the earth, coral reefs, or other natural features despite their concerns about environmental protection and understanding that their own well-being depends on the health of their surroundings. Anutans derive pleasure from their surroundings, speaking fondly of their clear salt water and extensive reefs, the island’s white sand beach, and its productive soil. However, they do not attribute human characteristics to their physical environment. English speakers may describe the sea as alternately “calm” or violently “angry.” Anutans also refer to a “calm” sea, but they use a different word when speaking of human emotions. In telling a person to “calm down,” they say “maarie.” A “calm sea,” by contrast, is marino, and the absence of wind is ngaaio. I can adduce explicit statements on Anutans’ ability to empathize with animals, but not with rocks, soil, sky, or ocean. One possible explanation is that animals are able to reciprocate expressions of affection, whereas the feedback gained from geographical, geological, or astronomic features seems mechanical and, in a way, abstract.

160

Richard Feinberg

In addition to establishing an empathetic relationship with animals, Anutans traditionally attempted to create such relationships with spiritual beings. Occasionally, they might imagine themselves in the position of a spirit and attempt, on that basis, to predict how spirits are likely to react to various stimuli. Most often, however, their concern was to persuade spirits to empathize (and sympathize) with them. They would do so by performing worship ceremonies, offering food and drink, and speaking to the spirits in ways that emphasized, or even exaggerated, their own pitiable state. The hope was that the gods or spirits would use their superhuman power to assist the worshippers by ensuring health, prosperity, and safety from foreign invasion. Firth (1970) makes similar observations about Tikopian religious practice and notes with more than a touch of irony that Tikopians regarded their traditional deities as extraordinarily powerful, but also rather gullible and susceptible to human deception. As is true of comparable ideas among Banabans (Hermann, this volume), aropa’s prominence in the Anutan value system appears to have evolved historically. The pan-Polynesian distribution of cognate terms, along with information gleaned from Anutan oral traditions, suggests that this has been an important cultural construct for centuries. At the same time, oral traditions depicting sometimes brutal warfare, the admiration that Anutans hold for powerful warriors, and the often self-centered or antisocial behavior of great culture heroes suggests historical complexity. This is perhaps best illustrated by the most important of Anuta’s culture heroes, the afore-mentioned chief Tearakura. Tearakura lived approximately ten generations ago and shaped Anuta’s current social system. Regarded as the most powerful chief ever to have dwelt on the island, he became the community’s premier deity after his death. As the island’s most important god, Tearakura cared for his descendants. A senior chief is his direct patrilineal descendant, and for that reason Tearakura is expected to have special rapport with his successors. Because of that rapport, he endows the senior chief with mana and is thus either directly or indirectly responsible for the island’s welfare. Yet while Tearakura, in some sense, is a paragon of empathy and virtue, many of the acts attributed to him during his life as a human being are morally dubious. Such acts include his reshaping of the island’s social order by joining with his two brothers and one brother-in-law to annihilate the remainder of the male population. Those men became the founders of Anuta’s four kainanga, “clans.” Then, having secured the island for himself and his siblings, Tearakura became infatuated with his youngest brother’s wife and used his mana to bring about his brother’s death (see above). Later he caused his daughter to take her own life and, in a fit of remorse, committed suicide himself. Anutans are ambivalent about Tearakura’s moral character. Some commentators cite extenuat-

Do Anutans Empathize?

161

ing circumstances that might justify his apparently antisocial behavior, and it could be argued that his suicide resulted from a belated sense of empathic identification with his unfortunate daughter. In any case, his followers’ ambivalence did not compromise the deference and respect with which he was treated before the church’s establishment in 1916. And Anutans may well have perceived him to be more empathetic as a spirit than he had been as a man.

Humans, Spirits, and the Moral Order

In Anutan oral traditions, empathy is often overshadowed by emotions of fear (mataku) and accompanying violence. Their tales repeatedly depict visits from elsewhere in Polynesia. The visitors most often are assumed to have been hostile and were met with deadly force. Since Christianity’s establishment, the period of violent clashes is termed an age of “darkness” (te penua ne nopo poouri). The church’s doctrinal emphasis on “love” gave aropa the upper hand in comparison with other values such as strength, martial skill, and physical courage. Thus, aropa assumed the pre-eminent position that it holds today. Still, empathy is specially reserved for kin, and outsiders are kept at arm’s length until they are incorporated into the kinship system. Thereafter, aropa becomes the order of the day. At the outset of this contribution, I suggested that Anutans often blur the boundary that separates feeling from thinking, the line between the physical and mental. The most common word for “feeling” is pakarongo, which usually means “to listen” or “to hear.” Feelings, very much like thoughts, originate in the stomach or abdomen. Thoughts and emotions often produce associated physical states, while physical experiences lead to certain thoughts and feelings. “Pain” (mamai) or “happiness” (vakivaki) have both emotional and physical components, and the same is true of “empathy” (aropa). I also suggested that the blurring of such boundaries is associated with the Anutan conviction that the everyday world is populated by spirits, and with Anutans’ refusal to draw a rigid distinction between the spiritual and physical. Elsewhere (Feinberg 1996c), I have argued that Anutans are consummate relativists. An action may be “good” (rerei) in some contexts and “bad” (kovi) in others. An object may be “big” (rai) or “small” (tii), “in front” (i mua) or “in back” (i muri), “black” (uri) or “white” (tea), or “sweet” (makara) or “bitter” (kona) depending on the context and on what is being compared. A titleholder is described as “chief ” (ariki) in relation to a person of low rank (pakaaropa), but low-ranking men are still ariki to their children; meanwhile an ariki may be pakaaropa—“pitiable” or “commoner”—in relation to important spiritual beings. Similarly, there is no firm dividing line to separate humans from spirits. When human beings die, they become atua, “spirits,” while the most im-

162

Richard Feinberg

portant gods and spirits are the ghosts of deceased ancestors.21 My argument is that the Anutans’ refusal to draw a firm distinction between the material and immaterial, the mental (or spiritual) and the physical, the natural and supernatural, is perfectly in keeping with their insistence that “empathy” (aropa) exists on both an economic and affective plane.

Conclusion

As in other communities discussed in this collection, Anuta has no single word that may be unambiguously translated as “empathy.” However, one expression—aropa—overlaps with it in several critical respects. Other possible glosses for aropa include “love,” “compassion,” “sympathy,” and “pity.” It is Anuta’s version of a term distributed throughout Polynesia, and similar constructs, often marked by different terms, may be identified in other parts of Oceania. On Anuta, it constitutes a kind of “core” or “master” symbol (cf. Schneider 1968) in terms of which the island’s social, ritual, political, and economic systems must be understood. The English glosses for aropa should be treated with caution, as they typically suggest internal emotional states. For Anutans, aropa is expressed in overt—usually economic—behavior. Yet “empathy” as commonly understood implies “imagining the perspective of another from a quasi-first person perspective” (Throop, this volume; see also Halpern 2001; Rosen 1995; Wikan 1992). As Mageo (this volume) observes: “Cognitively it refers to the ability to see as others see: to simulate their viewpoint. Affectively empathy is to feel as if one was the other: that is, to simulate oneness.” Moreover, it involves not only projection of one’s feelings onto another but accurate assessment of the other’s thoughts and feelings (Hollan, this volume). Thus, were mental states regarded as entirely internal and inaccessible to others, to speak of aropa as “empathy” would be problematic. Like many other islanders, Anutans say that one cannot be certain of what others think and feel. But if the mental states of others are inscrutable, empathy, it seems, should be impossible. Mageo (this volume) resolves the problem for Samoa by denying that alofa is a matter of imagination and emphasizing its material expression in the form of giving food or service. Likewise, Anutans are primarily concerned with one another’s actions rather than their inner states. Still, aropa involves an inner state as well as outward action, and Anutans are concerned with feelings and intentions as predictors of future behavior. I suggest in this respect that the Anutan view is very much in keeping with Western ideas dating back at least to Adam Smith, for whom empathy is a consummately social process involving imaginative projection.22 Smith (2002 [1759]: 1) observed:

Do Anutans Empathize?

163

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation … it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. I concur with Hollan (this volume) that empathy is not a matter of “mind reading.” Rather, it is an educated guess based on empirical evidence. If one guesses right, the other person issues signals that confirm the accuracy of the initial hypothesis. Thus, it is a two-way process, anchoring the social system and marking the cornerstone of moral sentiments and actions.

Notes 1. See, e.g., Feinberg (1981a, 1981b, 1996a, 1996b, 2002a, 2002b, 2004). 2. Mageo (this volume) systematically discusses the Samoan variant, alofa. Related concepts, often called by different terms, are found in many non-Polynesian Pacific communities. Examples considered in this volume include runguy on Yap (Throop) and nanoanga on Banaba (Hermann). 3. Throop and Hermann (both this volume) make comparable points regarding Yap and Banaba, respectively. 4. I encountered this most dramatically in an incident involving a Taiwanese fishing boat that visited Anuta for several days in 1973 (see Feinberg 2006). 5. Perhaps the most focused treatment of this topic is in a special section of Anthropological Quarterly, edited by Joel Robbins and Alan Rumsey (Robbins and Rumsey 2008a). 6. For more detail on these episodes, see Feinberg (1998). 7. See Feinberg (1991) for a full description of this event. 8. Since the protagonists insisted on their innocence, the best English gloss for their emotion might seem to be on the order of “justifiable anger” (Lutz 1988) rather than “shame.” However, the Anutans’ word for anger (konokono) does not specify whether or not the anger is justifiable. Pakamaa is cognate with terms found throughout Polynesia that are typically glossed as “shame” or “embarrassment,” and those translations seem equally applicable in the Anutan case. 9. In contrast with Yapese, who strive to avoid revealing their true feelings (Throop, this volume), Anutans readily express their emotions by smiling, laughing, or crying in socially appropriate contexts. They might be criticized for not acting on such implied emotions, e.g., for not helping a kinsperson in need. Anutans are not criticized, however, for expressing their feelings too openly. If anything, they might be censured for appearing stoic under emotionally loaded conditions. One who acts on feelings of stinginess or other antisocial sentiments is, not surprisingly, subject to criticism, but such disapproval is based on the specific content of the feelings, not the fact that they are openly expressed. Anutans typically do avoid confronting one another directly with suspicions of dishonesty, but their motivation is practical rather than moral, as they recognize that accusations of theft or lying may arouse anger and intensify the extant social discord.

164

Richard Feinberg

10. In many ways, Anutans’ propensity to equate food with empathy parallels that described for Papua New Guinea’s Bosmun (von Poser, this volume). 11. The contrast between Europeans and Anutans, of course, is not absolute, as Westerners associate “the heart” with emotion. “Heart” in Anutan is te patumanava ‘belly stone’. 12. Despite the apparent similarity of feelings depicted by these terms and their approximate English equivalents, some differences exist in the conditions that evoke them and the way in which they are expressed. Elsewhere (Feinberg 1989), I describe the Anutans’ association of smiling and laughter with happiness, including the beliefs that laughter is contagious and that one cannot laugh without becoming happy. This somewhat mechanistic view of the relationship between physical and emotional states, in turn, explains a tendency to laugh at people who suffer minor pain or misfortune—a practice Westerners are likely to condemn as bad manners if not downright insensitive and worthy of moral opprobrium. 13. In fact, “lying” is not quite accurate as a gloss for ngutu roi, since the English expression implies that one has uttered an intentional falsehood. A better translation is “to make a misstatement,” as an unintentional falsehood may also be described as ngutu roi. It is worth noting that the same melding of concepts occurs in Pijin, where laia, “liar,” may apply to utterance of unintended falsehoods as well as purposeful deception. 14. Banabans display a similar theme in their expressions of “pity” for visitors to their island (Hermann, this volume). 15. As recently as 2006, three men disappeared at sea while fishing in stormy weather. This was a major theme in a recent television documentary (BBC 2007). An inventory of Anutan voyages lost at sea through the mid 1980s appears in Feinberg (1988). For Anutans, voyaging is typically—but not exclusively—a male endeavor. The crew on an inter-island voyage often includes one woman who cooks and tends the fire. Although women rarely paddle, steer, or handle the sail, they have enough experience at sea to understand and express empathy (aropa) for others who suffer the danger and discomfort of a lengthy voyage. 16. Sione, sad to say, was not his country’s most distinguished emissary. According to reports that I was given in 2000, he never tried to fit into Anutan society. He refused to attend the local church or contribute economically. After a series of his alleged antisocial actions, the Anutans felt compelled to tie him up inside a house under constant guard. Eventually he managed to escape, stole a canoe, and sailed to Tikopia, where he was once more given sanctuary. In September 2007 I met Sione while on my way to Anuta aboard the ship MV Baruku. As of our meeting, his fortunes seemed to be improving; he had married a Tikopian woman and appeared to have become a productive member of his new adopted home. By mid 2008, however, he had worn out his welcome on Tikopia. The chiefs had handed him over to the Royal Solomon Islands Police, and he was returned to Tonga to serve out his prison sentence. 17. Notions of empathy as reciprocal kindness are associated with versions of the so-called golden rule, embodied in most of the world’s great religious traditions (see, e.g., Armstrong 2006: esp. chap. 6). 18. This is discussed in Feinberg (1978, 1979, 1980, 1996b, 2002a). It is also addressed by several contributors to Feinberg and Watson-Gegeo 1996. 19. When I left Anuta in 1973, at the end of my first visit, I distributed leftover supplies to the community. At a certain point, Pu Penuakimoana, an important community

Do Anutans Empathize?

165

leader, asked me to stop because the amount of food and equipment I had distributed was becoming something of an embarrassment. 20. In contrast with Hollan’s (this volume) description of Toraja, and what I have seen myself in other Pacific island communities, I have not witnessed Anutans willfully mistreating animals. That is not to say that it is never done, but it appears to be less commonplace than in some other locales. 21. In this respect, if Hawaiian views of the relationship between humans and spirits are anything like those on Anuta, the infamous debate between Marshall Sahlins (1981, 1995) and Gananath Obeysekere (1992) over whether Captain Cook was regarded as a god or “simply” a powerful chief is a heated struggle over a non-issue. 22. I am indebted to Ilana Gershon (2007) for calling my attention to Smith’s relevance for discussions of imagination and its role in generating empathy.

Bibliography Armstrong, Karen. 2006. The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. New York: Anchor Books. BBC. 2007. “Tribe” episode on Anuta. BBC Wales. Feinberg, Richard. 1978. “Rank and Authority on Anuta Island.” In Adaptation and Symbolism: Essays on Social Organization, ed. Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo and S. Lee Seaton. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ———. 1979. Anutan Concepts of Disease: A Polynesian Study. IPS Monograph Number 3. Lā‘ie, HI: Institute for Polynesian Studies. ———. 1980. “Supernatural Sanctions and the Social Order on a Polynesian Outlier.” Anthropological Forum 4 (3): 331–351. ———. 1981a. “What Is Polynesian Kinship All About?” Ethnology 29 (2): 115–131. ———. 1981b. “The Meaning of ‘Sibling’ on Anuta Island.” In Siblingship in Oceania: Studies in the Meaning of Kin Relations, ed. Mac Marshall. ASAO Monograph Number 8. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1988. Polynesian Seafaring and Navigation: Ocean Travel in Anutan Culture and Society. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. ———. 1989. “What’s So Funny about That? Fieldwork and Laughter in Polynesia.” In The Humbled Anthropologist: Tales from the Pacific, ed. Philip DeVita. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company. ———. 1991. “A Long-Distance Voyage in Contemporary Polynesia.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 100 (1): 25–44. ———. 1996a. “Outer Islanders and Urban Resettlement in the Solomon Islands: The Case of Anutans on Guadalcanal.” Journal de la Société des Océanistes 103 (2): 207–217. ———. 1996b. “Sanctity and Power on Anuta: Polynesian Chieftainship Revisited.” In Leadership and Change in the Western Pacific: Essays in Honor of Sir Raymond Firth, ed. Richard Feinberg and Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo. London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, Number 66. London: Athlone. ———. 1996c. “Spirit Encounters on Anuta, Solomon Islands.” In Spirits in Culture, History, and Mind, ed. Jeanette Marie Mageo and Alan Howard. New York and London: Routledge.

166

Richard Feinberg

———. 1998. Oral Traditions of Anuta: A Polynesian Outlier in the Solomon Islands. Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics, Volume 15. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2002a. “Elements of Leadership in Oceania.” Anthropological Forum 12 (1): 9–44. ———. 2002b. “A Polynesian People’s Struggle to Maintain Community in the Solomon Islands.” In Constructing Moral Communities: Pacific Islander Strategies for Settling in New Places, ed. Judith Modell. Special issue, Pacific Studies 25 (1/2): 45–70. ———. 2004. Anuta: Polynesian Lifeways for the 21st Century. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. ———. 2006. “Early European-Polynesian Contact Reenacted: Anutan ‘Handling’ of a Foreign Fishing Vessel.” American Ethnologist 33 (1): 114–125. Feinberg, Richard, and Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo, eds. 1996. Leadership and Change in the Western Pacific: Essays in Honor of Sir Raymond Firth. London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, Number 66. London: Athlone. Firth, Raymond. 1970. Rank and Religion in Tikopia. Boston: Beacon Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1977. “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.” In Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader in the Study of Symbols and Meanings, ed. Janet L. Dolgin, David S. Kemnitzer, and David M. Schneider. New York: Columbia University Press. Gershon, Ilana. 2007. “The Paradoxes of Representing Others: Maori Democracy, Settler Democracy in New Zealand, circa 1900.” Paper presented to a session entitled “‘From the Native’s Point of View’ Revisited: On the Problem of Empathy in the Pacific,” organized by Douglas Hollan and C. Jason Throop at the annual meeting of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania, 20–24 February 2006, Charlottesville, VA. (Cited with the author’s permission.) Halpern, Jodi. 2001. From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lutz, Catherine A. 1988. Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Obeysekere, Gananath. 1992. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Myth-making in the Pacific. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Outhwaite, William. 1976. Understanding Social Life: The Method Called Verstehen. New York: Holmes and Meier. Robbins, Joel. 2008. “On Not Knowing Other Minds: Confession, Intention, and Linguistic Exchange in a Papua New Guinea Community.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 421–429. Robbins, Joel, and Alan Rumsey. 2008a. “Social Thought and Commentary Special Section: Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds,” ed. J. Robbins and A. Rumsey. Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 407–494. ———. 2008b. “Introduction: Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 407–420. Rosen, Paul. 1995. Other Intentions: Cultural Contexts and the Attribution of Inner States. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Sahlins, Marshall D. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. ASAO Special Publications No. 1. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Do Anutans Empathize?

167

———. 1995. How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook for Example. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2008. “Speaking Only Your Own Mind: Reflections on Talk, Gossip, and Intentionality in Bosavi (PNG).” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 431–441. Schneider, David M. 1968. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Smith, Adam. 2002 [1759]. The Theory of Moral Sentiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stasch, Rupert. 2008. “Knowing Minds Is a Matter of Authority: Political Dimensions of Opacity Statements in Korowai Moral Psychology.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 443–453. White, Geoffrey M., and John Kirkpatrick, eds. 1985. Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wikan, Uni. 1992. “Beyond Words: The Power of Resonance.” American Ethnologist 19: 460–82.

7 Bosmun Foodways Emotional Reasoning in a Papua New Guinea Lifeworld ANITA VON POSER

Introduction

In this chapter, I shall investigate the realm of empathy or “emotional reasoning” (Halpern 2001: 11) among the Bosmun, a sociocultural and linguistic group of northeast Papua New Guinea (PNG). Empathy is a specific way in which emotional sensitivity is applied to comprehend intersubjective processes created through interpersonal encounters. Central to the notion of empathy is the idea of being able to grasp the “subjective experience of another from a quasi-first person perspective” (Hollan and Throop 2008: 387). Several Pacific societies consider the achievement of such a “quasi-first person perspective” impossible (see Feinberg; Lepowsky; Lohmann; Mageo; Throop, all in this volume). In Bosmun understandings of intersubjectivity, emotional permeability is thought to be possible between people who belong to the same food-sharing realm. Elsewhere, I have argued that long-term sharing of food amongst the members of kin groups creates mutual trust, which in turn opens people’s hearts and minds (A. von Poser 2009). People who share food feel justified in inquiring into their consociates’ lives and hence should not hide their feelings from one another. One’s emotional consociates are usually people related by kinship ties. However, trust is not something that automatically exists between kin members. Kin relations are severed if they are not maintained by proper foodways. To come to an understanding of each other’s self is, in fact, a social imperative, which is called ramkandiar in the local vernacular. Ramkandiar is at the core of Bosmun empathy. It is a particular code of conduct and the most essential and compulsory skill in regulating interpersonal relationships. It deals directly with food and emotion. Bosmun men and women are deeply concerned with the idea of helping others. The major “tool” for externalizing this ideal is the sharing of food (see also Feinberg’s portrait of Anutans’ expressions of empathy, this volume), which Mageo (this volume) classifies as a form

170

Anita von Poser

of “enacted empathy.” However, there are also other food strategies that operate in such a way that opposing dispositions like discontent or the intent to do harm might be equally signaled. I therefore argue that Bosmun foodways are critical for understanding their sense of empathy. In addition to the general nutritional importance of food in supporting the human organism biologically, anthropological contributions have convincingly put forward the idea of “foodways as an effective prism through which to illuminate human life” (Counihan 1998: 1). It has been shown that food issues connect to politics, identity formation, memory, body, and gender (Alexeyeff, James, and Thomas 2004; Counihan and Kaplan 1998; Counihan and Van Esterik 1997; Holtzman 2006; Manderson 1986; Mintz and Du Bois 2002; Sutton 2001; Watson and Caldwell 2005). Among those contributions are several ethnographic examples from places dispersed throughout PNG that reveal a particular social and moral dimension of food (Kahn 1986; Meigs 1984; Munn 1986; Obrist 1990; Whitehead 2000; Young 1971). Anthropologists have also expressed their gratitude to the people they have worked with by stating that good food was shared with them (Jebens 2005: xx; Leach 2003: xi; Meinerzag 2006: v). Such statements seem to suggest the possible emotional value that food can have in Papua New Guinean communities, as is definitely the case in the Bosmun context. Drawing on my Bosmun data, I illustrate that food in this particular sociocultural setting is inextricably linked to the negotiation and communication of social and, especially, emotional matters and meanings. Since Bosmun foodways permeate emotional spheres, they play a role in empathic processes as well. First, I shall provide the theoretical outline of what I mean by empathy. Then, I will argue that it is crucial to investigate local sociocultural premises, which give ideational substance to how and what people feel or are supposed to feel. In order to fully grasp Bosmun empathic processes, one must ask what it actually is that makes them feel well or upset, surprised or embarrassed, angry, irritated or appeased. Let me give a brief preliminary illustration of this pattern, which I shall explore in more detail below. At the beginning of my stay with Bosmun, I used to offer chewing gum to the children by asking them directly if they wanted to have some. My adoptive sister’s eight-year-old daughter, “Tiny Yombu” (LiklikYombu),1 was one of the first children I addressed this question to. Much to my surprise, she responded to my offer with what seemed to be feelings of embarrassment. Only later did I learn why it was that such a direct offering might embarrass her. Over time, I also learned how “to empathize” and act in ways that would avoid upsetting this likeable little girl. In the end, it was through analyzing Bosmun foodways that I was able to better comprehend the personal and collective emotional cosmos that underpins local understandings of empathy.

Bosmun Foodways

171

On Empathy and Emotional Reasoning

Empathy is a phenomenon of affection connected to an innate ability that all humans share: we “think-feel” as Reddy (2001: 15) has put the way in which we perceptually frame our worlds, following Barnett and Ratner’s (1997: 303) notion of “cogmotion.” In contrast to rationalist philosophy grounded in Cartesianism, it is now being acknowledged that emotions are not simply inner bodily states detached from thought or reason but states that also play a role in shaping human cognition (Ciompi 1997; Damasio 1994; Halpern 2001: 11, 67; Reddy 2001: 15). Drawing from work in medicine, psychology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, Halpern argues that empathy is biologically grounded, at least insofar as it has to be developed out of a reflex-like or spontaneous emotional resonance, which she takes to be a kind of “biological automaticity” (Halpern 2001: 48).2 However, she makes clear that the originally reflex-like resonance responses of the infant become enriched and individuated by the associative context in which they become embedded. What is rich about this view is that biological automaticity, far from limiting cognition, enables people to accrue emotional meanings that would otherwise not be developed. (Halpern 2001: 48) Halpern critically reexamines the early twentieth-century rise of objectivism in medicine that led to a condemnation of judgments based on emotional assessments. Instead, she advocates pre-modern Hippocratic ideas of healing, which consider emotions a reliable source of information (Halpern 2001: 20–22). While Halpern mainly deals with empathy as a useful skill to be reintroduced into current medical practice (which rather favors detached concern), she also states more generally that in “the interpersonal realm, emotions are crucial for understanding reality” (Halpern 2001: 33, original emphasis). Thus I consider her thoughts on human affect and, in particular, on empathy relevant for discussing emotional communication in general. Theoretically, Halpern situates herself as follows: Writers on empathy either base empathy in detached reason or sympathetic immersion. Against these models I describe empathy in terms of a listener using her emotional associations to provide a context for imagining the distinct experiences of another person. Therefore, empathy is a form of emotional reasoning. (Halpern 2001: xv) In praising the cognitive potential of emotion, Halpern defines emotional reasoning as an “emotion-guided activity of imagination” involving the process of “associational linking” (Halpern 2001: 11, 41, 50). Those who empa-

172

Anita von Poser

thize do so by imagining or associating ideas along with particular emotions and moods, thereby creating a platform for attuning to each other’s emotional world. What makes empathy of particular anthropological interest, then, is what Halpern calls the associative context. Like other human phenomena, empathic processes have a sociocultural dimension. With my ethnographic illustration I shall explore how the associative context in Bosmun life is layered with affective meanings and assessments that are tied to food. Hence, alternative modes of empathy exist that should come to the fore of anthropological analysis. One wonders about the hesitance with which anthropologists, as investigators of human social interrelations, have attended to the sociocultural dynamics of empathy. In a recent issue of Ethos, Hollan and Throop (2008: 385, 388–391, 396) have pointed to the fact that empathy has been a neglected topic for years in anthropology, and that this may be partly ascribed to Geertz’s (1984) critique of anthropologists who in claiming to be empathic were instead actually projecting their own ideas onto observed social phenomena (see also Rumsey and Robbins 2008: 416–417). In fact, Geertz himself proved his objections to be correct if, for example, one reads “Deep Play” (Geertz 1972) critically and follows some of his opponents like Crapanzano (1986). Putting this classic debate aside, however, Geertz’s unmaking of empathy, as suggested by Hollan and Throop (2008: 385), has had its effects. In their 1986 review on the anthropology of emotions, for instance, Lutz and White only briefly address empathy, as based on the idea that all humans have the ability to understand another’s emotional state. That understanding is effected through the special channels of empathic (and usually nonverbal) communication and is conceptualized as either an intellectual understanding or a more direct emotional one. (Lutz and White 1986: 415) Drawing on Renato Rosaldo’s (1988) claim that the ability to understanding another’s affective states requires the experience of similar causal conditions, Lutz and White conclude that empathic sensitivity becomes possible by “walking in the other person’s shoes” (Lutz and White 1986: 415). In another anthropological collection that focuses specifically on ethnopsychologies in the Pacific (White and Kirkpatrick 1985), discussions of empathy seem to be equally muted. Only Black (1985: 249–253) pays explicit attention to it in his contribution, which seeks to explore an attempted suicide within the context of a Micronesian community’s psychological world. Local concepts of empathy are not explored, however, as the parties involved in the empathic encounter are taken to be the ethnographer and the people “investigated.” Black notes that

Bosmun Foodways

173

as ethnographers, we are heirs to a long tradition of fieldwork in which the ability to comprehend (intuit may be a better word) the emotional life of people is virtually taken for granted. I am referring here to the notion of “empathy” which is widely regarded as a prerequisite for successful participant observation. Whatever else is meant by this very slippery term, it always connotes an identification between ethnographer and “native.” This identification is built on past learnings at the same time that it is used to develop further learnings. And most if not all of these learnings have to do with feelings. (Black 1985: 249) Basically, Black’s notion of empathy is in line with Halpern’s (2001). They both distinguish empathy as a process of mutual sensitivity going on, at least, between two affectively opened agents (Black 1985: 292; Halpern 2001: 41). Moreover, they both connect the empathic process to the realm of imagination or association and to the accumulation of affective knowledge. Thinking of it as evolving out of continual learning and interaction, Black (1985: 252–253) situates empathy theoretically between the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition and hermeneutics. Thus, empathy emerges primarily as a method applied by the sensitive fieldworker to produce successful intersubjective encounters and scholarly outcomes—the method whose feasibility Geertz once contested. Other disciplines locate empathy in a similar way, especially in the healing or counseling professions (Gassner 2006; Halpern 2001; Katz 1963), where empathy is understood to play a crucial role in defining the relationship between caregivers and their patients. But what about empathy as common human, interpersonal practice, as individually and socioculturally perceived, lived, or displayed? What about the various though overlapping factors explored in this volume that shape empathy differently, such as skin- and gaze-ship in infancy and childhood (Mageo, this volume), individual life experience (Hollan, this volume) or the politicohistorical embeddedness of empathy (Hermann, this volume)? As Hollan and Throop (2008: 389–390) claim, anthropologists should be aware of both the role of empathy in a fieldwork situation and the ways in which empathy is marked and articulated in different sociocultural worlds. What about empathy in local “hermeneutic circles,” and what about the variety of peoples’ interpretive modes? To my surprise, Bosmun daily social and emotional discourse itself turned out to be a hermeneutic circle in which multiple voices overlap and co-construct social reality ever anew. The fact that empathy requires a kind of intellectual effort emerges in most of its definitions, and this seems to be what makes it stand out against other related affective phenomena such as compassion or sympathy. Compassion is a form of affective attitude that is motivated by altruism and the intention to care for others (Halpern 2001: 36). The term sympathy implies an experiential,

174

Anita von Poser

emotional analogy or parallelism between self and other, and it is rather one’s own self that stays in focus (Buchheimer 1963: 63; Katz 1963: 8–11). According to Katz, sympathy indicates “a positive feeling but not cognition” (Katz 1963: 10), and Buchheimer states: A sympathetic person feels along with another person but not necessarily into a person. A sympathetic person does not need to interact with another person. To feel along with him, he may understand the other person, but he does not need to communicate the understanding to the other person. (Buchheimer 1963: 63; original emphasis) Empathizing agents instead strive to “understand” the emotional states of others (Buchheimer 1963: 63; Katz 1963: 8), and while compassion and sympathy principally answer the purpose of goodwill, empathy can be used to follow opposite goals as well (Halpern 2001: 36; Kirmayer 2008: 461). This is also underlined by Lohmann (this volume) and Hollan (this volume), who both remind us that negative intentionality and even cruelty are grounded in empathy. The very idea of empathy as a means to intellectually manage emotions in an effort to approximate the perspective of another may well have led to scholarly preoccupation with empathy and methodology. As a result, attention may have been drawn away from local empathic expressions. However, another reason scholars were committed to investigating methodological implications of empathy as opposed to its local manifestations emerges when we look to societal configurations of empathy, a point I will discuss toward the end of this essay. Specifically, I will question whether or not more “individualistic” cultures cultivate empathic skills as thoroughly as “collectivist” (Edge and Suryani 2002: 66) or so-called relationalist (Robbins 2004: 13, 293) cultures do.

The Bosmun Lifeworld

The Bosmun are river-dwelling people inhabiting a large area alongside the lower reaches of the Ramu, PNG’s fifth-largest river. In 2004–05, there were approximately 1,500 members of the group, whose numbers are increasing rapidly due to high birth rates today. Two languages are spoken: a Papuan vernacular, called Mbiermba kaam, and a local variety of Tok Pisin, the Melanesian Pidgin English. At local schools, children also learn English. Tok Pisin has become the dominant language of present everyday life and seems to be displacing the local vernacular rapidly. Proselytization in the Lower Ramu region had its beginnings in the 1930s, and nowadays most Bosmun consider themselves Catholic Christians. Occasionally, some individuals and their families turn toward alternative religious movements, such as Pentecostalism, which is flowing in from other parts of the country.

Bosmun Foodways

175

Bosmun society is divided into two moieties, that of sun and that of the moon, and these are further divided into several patrilineal clans. The people of Daiden, for instance, belong to the moiety of the sun and consider themselves descended from a large clan called Rom. Social and political decision-making processes are based on an egalitarian ethos. Decisions concerning communal matters are made in the men’s houses, where every adult male has the right to express himself politically. Women also have considerable influence. Prior to voicing one’s ideas in the men’s houses, a speaker is likely to have already aired these ideas in the shared cross-gender realm of the household. Apart from several separate ritual obligations in which men and women become differently involved during their lifetimes, gender complementarity plays a crucial role in maintaining an overall balance and sociable life. Economically, Bosmun nuclear families are self-sufficient units. Except for a few monetary enterprises, such as the selling of copra and fish in coastal towns or the running of village stores, most people continue to practice their traditional mode of subsistence. A household’s economic and social fortune depends on the cooperative labor of men and women. According to ancestral lore, couples are obliged to jointly produce sago, which, together with fish, constitutes the year-round staple diet. Once their children have become teenagers, parents usually hand over the procurement of sago to them. The parents have a responsibility to ensure that each child has a more or less same-aged opposite-sex sibling, since unmarried men need their sisters to make sago as much as unmarried women need their brothers for the same purpose.3 As Bosmun start to engage actively in the making and sharing of sago, they gradually reach social and emotional maturity and lose what my interlocutors termed rorer, which can be variously translated as “insanity,” “social immaturity,” or “unsociability.”

Bosmun Foodways

In this section I consider the Bosmun field of imagination in relation to emotional issues. Bosmun social, emotional, and bodily well-being is inextricably connected to whether a person has enough food to consume, share, and distribute amongst others. During my fieldwork, I was astonished by the amount of talk that went on concerning the topic of food. People engage in constant conversations about going out and procuring food (mainly by sago processing and fishing). People spoke of preparing food not only for special social events, but also for everyday consumption. Mythical narratives also highlight the foodways of the story’s protagonists. With every passing day, plates of prepared food move from household to household. Usually, women and children were expected to carry plates of food from one location to another, but men,

176

Anita von Poser

too, might also do so at times. To follow the plate bearers is to map people’s social and kinship relations. In so doing, it is possible to discover food’s placement in Bosmun networks of affection and attachment. The significance of food circulation in ritual and in daily life has been observed by Anderson (2003: 58–59) for the Wogeo Islanders of PNG. While she declares food to be “a key symbol in Wogeo” (Anderson 2003: 58; emphasis inserted), I argue that food is indeed the key symbol in the Bosmun cultural logic. Being Bosmun, or Bosmun personhood as I understand it, conflates aspects that have been split conceptually into three distinct analytic categories by Harris (1989) and others.4 For instance, Harris claims that an analytical differentiation should be made between the social, the psychic, and the biophysical aspects of our existence as social actors, which she terminologically translates as “person,” “self,” and “individual” (Harris 1989: 599–604). She admits, however, that these components can be interrelated differently in different localities (Harris 1989: 599). A benchmark study evidencing such distinctive configurations of embodied subjectivity is found in Michelle Rosaldo’s (1980, 1984: 145–148) study of Philippine notions of the self. Another groundbreaking work is Lutz’s ethnopsychological investigation on Ifaluk, a Micronesian atoll, in which she states: On Ifaluk, as elsewhere, the body’s structure and well-being are seen to be involved in an inseparable and systematic way with psychosocial well-being. What we might call “the emotional mind” of Ifaluk ethnopsychology is solidly embedded in moral and social life, on the one hand, and in the physical body, on the other. (Lutz 1985: 52) In Bosmun subjectivity, social, psychic, and biophysical states are held to be deeply interwoven. The medium through which such putatively distinct categories as “person,” “self,” and “individual” are articulated is food. Of course, food (aamarees for “cooked food,” ximir for “raw food”) is recognized for its nutritional importance and seen as vital to maintaining people’s bodies. Bosmun eating habits are definitely directed toward avoiding feelings of hunger. Consumption on a daily basis consists, at a minimum, of three large meals. A proper Bosmun meal usually consists of sago pudding (sago starch stirred with boiled water) that is topped with vegetables and either fish (all year round) or prawns and mussels (during the dry season). To be satiated is regarded as a positive state. However, this biophysical necessity is so deeply linked to the social and emotional realm that feelings of hunger may be ignored or downplayed in situations in which different codes of conduct need to be acknowledged. Communal mourning of a deceased person, for instance, is shown by food abstinence for at least three days. The next of kin even refuse for years to consume the kind of food that was part of the deceased’s last meal. To taboo

Bosmun Foodways

177

specific foods in the event of death is to express grief (outut, a term that also refers to bodily pain). If the last meal was sago, which is considered the only nutritional source that really fills up empty stomachs, then the suffering of a bereaved might turn into an experiential state of permanent hunger. In Bosmun communities, hunger is understood to be both a physical and an emotional state (see also Fajans [1997: 119] about configurations of hunger among the New Britain Baining of PNG). As a case in point, if a woman sends for her husband to come home to eat while he is in the presence of others, she is thought to have committed a terrible social faux pas. Eating in secrecy (ŋguŋguru aam) makes people turn into “faces that are covered with spoiled sago” (ŋgumu mbakmbak), which is the common expression for a selfish, stingy, or greedy person. To consume food at a hidden spot is, from a Bosmun view, what happens when a wife calls her husband to the hearth because the meal is waiting there for him, and it signals her refusal to be generous. To behave properly, she would have to carry the food plate to where her husband is and give him the opportunity to offer the meal to the others around him.5 I discussed this topic with a man I witnessed having a dispute with a woman who was to become his wife, after she had tried to call him away from some acquaintances in order to eat.6 I asked him if it was true that he would probably have to go hungry from time to time if she shared his meal with the others. He replied that being hungry in this particular situation was not an issue, even though there are cases in which a wife’s neglect of her husband in providing food can cause shame and dispute—metaphorically referred to as xaam mbitit (“an eating spoon that broke”). What did matter from his standpoint was that people would recognize him and his female partner as having the trait of ramkandiar. This trait or skill is externalized most explicitly through food generosity, which for the most part happens on a nonverbal level of affect-laden expression. Ramkandiar is the crucial force guiding people’s routines and interactions in Bosmun life. Elsewhere, I have referred to ramkandiar as “watching others and being watched” (A. von Poser 2009). Ndiar is a term used to describe any positive behavioral quality. Ramkandiar is on one level connected to the ability of sight, since ramak (on which ramka- is based) means “eye” and hence refers to visual perception. Blind people, however, might also have ramkandiar as long as they are capable of sensing others’ physical and emotional dispositions. A blind Bosmun listening carefully to what a third party says could gain such insight.7 Apart from that, a person with the ability of sight should, as a rule, watch and interpret the manners of others and then react suitably without confronting them with direct questions about their state of being (what Hollan and Throop term an “other-anticipating” stance in the introduction to this volume). In the Bosmun sensual apparatus, watching is not confined

178

Anita von Poser

to the visual sense alone. Watching includes drawing one’s own conclusions about one’s observations. The term vaas, which people use for saying that they “see” or “watch” something or someone, implies that they “think-feel” of/into something or someone. The crucial sign of Bosmun well-being is that someone has food and fire in the hearth. Therefore, what Bosmun should always look for is whether a household’s cooking area is currently being used. However, food-related questions like “Do you have enough food?” “Are you hungry?” “Do you want more to eat?” or “May I offer you something to eat?” are never to be posed in Bosmun discourse. Such explicit food-related inquiries demonstrate a clear lack of ability to anticipate another’s needs that often results in upsetting or insulting the people who are asked (ŋoi). Imagine now Tiny Yombu as I approached her with the chewing gum and then asked her directly if she wanted a piece. A person arriving with a food plate at another household will not declare, “Here is the meal I have come to offer you.” This, too, would be a mistake. On the way, the person might inform passers-by whom the food is meant for, but in the presence of the actual recipient the plate is put down without making any further explicit reference to one’s own intention. Perhaps the central edict in Bosmun social and moral theory is that a person should constantly strive to gain an accurate understanding of the (nutritional and emotional) needs of others in order to help transform these states into positive forms of satiations and well-being whenever possible. Asking straightforward questions about another’s wants is considered inept. Instead, Bosmun are ideally to employ an “other-anticipating” empathic strategy (see Hollan and Throop, this volume) in which careful observation, rather than direct interrogation, is used to discern the particular needs of another. Associational linkages in Bosmun imagination primarily emerge out of information gleaned through observing others. This empathic mode is the Bosmun ideal of human conduct and their conduit to interpersonal stability. In Bosmun ethnotheory, the ability to appropriately empathize with others is understood to be based upon two foundational capacities that are encouraged from an early age: vaas (“to watch carefully” or “to observe”) and taana tak (“to disclose oneself ”). Bosmun empathy requires its affective agents to disclose themselves and make themselves transparent to a degree, what Hollan and Throop term “self-projecting” empathy in this volume’s introduction. While such a “self-projecting” stance is valued in Bosmun, in some other Pacific communities such efforts at disclosing oneself to others are considered an overexposure of personal privacy or intimacy. A “self-projecting” stance is thus unlike the Yapese strategies of concealment that Throop describes (this volume). In Bosmun moral theory, concealment strategies are regarded as non-virtuous; whereas Yapese have to gaze off in different directions when talking to one another, Bosmun cause affront by

Bosmun Foodways

179

doing so. To present one’s back to someone is—in Bosmun body language—to indicate social or emotional trouble. Nevertheless, eyes have a meaning similar to that on Yap, where they “are thought to be a crucial expressive site for discerning another’s true feelings and thoughts” (Throop, this volume). Bosmun who feel emotionally close usually seek eye contact and try to turn their bodies to face each other. Gazing is, in fact, essential to social interaction. In avoiding eye contact, by contrast, a person signals that he or she is denying others the privilege of knowing about his or her feelings, but also that there is a problem that should be resolved. As in other regions of PNG (e.g., Keck 2005: 83, 117– 119), unresolved problems are believed to cause either illness or death. Therefore, Bosmun affective agents constantly seek to create an expressive context that allows others an insight into how one might feel at certain moments.

Cultivating Transparent Personhood

When leaving or entering village space or when meeting relatives or acquaintances en route, Bosmun usually state where they are coming from or where they are going. They also ask others about their plans. This is similar to Kulick’s observations that in Gapun (a village in the same overall region as the Bosmun lands) one is regularly “showered with questions” (1992: 230) about one’s past and future whereabouts (see also Throop, this volume). According to Bosmun perspectives, good people permanently localize themselves in social time and space. People who have grown up with the urge to cherish personal autonomy may find this a challenge. However, participating in this kind of talk can pave the way for understanding people’s realms of social relatedness. It reveals their connectedness in a specific point in time. To hear where others have come from, for instance, allows an individual to imagine whether his or her interlocutor has received food there, how long they have been walking through the bush, and whether they should be offered some food, now that they have arrived at their new destination. There are other forms of disclosure. A menstruating woman, for instance, must not cook, and she will not hide this fact. Instead of traveling to the sago swamps or to her usual fishing grounds, she might be cutting grass around her house or she might sit on the open veranda of her house doing chores that other, older or younger household members normally do. In making herself transparent in this way, relatives who pass by or live nearby should ideally become aware of her exceptional state and temporarily help in food preparation. Someone who returns from fishing with little yield will not say that he or she does not have enough to prepare a proper meal. What he or she will do is simply inform the others that there were not many fish in the net. Those

180

Anita von Poser

who can hear what one says will start to think about what an insufficient yield of fish might give rise to. If the listeners are well-disposed toward the person concerned, they will send a food plate later in the day. They, of course, might sympathize, but above all, they will empathize and create a cluster of wider meanings that becomes subject to regular expression within a relational group. Food experiences of all kinds are told and retold amongst the members of such groups. They are reflected upon and interpreted intensively, in ways that, in Bosmun subjectivity, lead people to understand each other. While living in the lively household of Nuŋgap and Samar, my adoptive parents, and when visiting other households, I gradually internalized this particular mode of “food-talk.” In 2004, Nuŋgap and his wife Samar were over the age of fifty with several (biological and classificatory) children, some of them married, and grandchildren. Many times, I would listen to a repetitive though engaging collective narrative genre in which each household member would narrate events anew and add personal remarks that would be taken up by the next narrator who further elaborated the story. Basically, everyone was allowed to share his or her personal views on what had or had not transpired. Children, too, would take part in the continuous evoking of reality by means of narration. Interestingly, it is the very ability to share food with others that marks the moment that children are allowed to partake in such forms of collective narration. Children are emotionally scrutinized from an early age. Caregivers interpret their behavior and attribute intentions to them. Kaake and Soma, the youngest grandchildren of Nuŋgap and Samar, for example, were about two years old when I left Daiden in 2005. I had regularly heard how the adults and older children of our household would comment on the boys’ activities and dispositions. For example: “Soma is crying because he likes to take the banana,” “Soma is eating sago and this makes him feel happy,” “Kaake saw his father and wanted to be carried,” “Soma took the battery away from Kaake and this made him feel angry.” On my return to Daiden in 2008, I observed that the parents and other family members were making efforts to integrate the boys into daily household conversations. Parents question their children in ways that motivate them to tell in detail what they have seen or heard.8 This way, the idea of inquiring into the thoughts and feelings of others, concerning their well-being, is consciously fostered in children. Empathy is rendered the appropriate mode to show one’s concern for others. It is only once children have internalized that it is proper to share food with others, however, that their adult tutors start to take them seriously. A significant way that individuals indicate to one another that they are inclined to inquire into each other’s lives is by means of verbal interruption. Interruption occurs regularly in Bosmun talk and does not have a negative connotation. This again contrasts with the Yapese case, where to interrupt

Bosmun Foodways

181

another’s ongoing talk is deemed to be impolite and disrespectful (Throop, this volume). Bosmun reactions to being interrupted during talk show that overlapped speech is often appreciated. In many cases it seems that speakers actually pause in order to encourage others to interrupt them. The failure to provide such a solicitation to join in the conversation seems to indicate that the speaker evidences a lack of concern for the listener.9 Cultivating a public moral self also includes the occasional expression of anger. Interestingly, verbal conflicts or fights also most often originate from inappropriate foodways. Usually, such food-based transgressions are events that are witnessed by third parties and thus occur in a public space. The Bosmun societal scheme is a “relational” one (Robbins 2004: 13). Directly connected to such relationality is the idea that individuals are “situated selves” (Carrier 1999: 28), embedded in social relations that compose, motivate, and guide their actions. In the Bosmun case, relationality is such that if two opponents come together, they will have in mind those who belong to their relational fields and who might become involved involuntarily because of their relatedness. Accordingly, even in moments of dispute others are very much expected to be present. Whether witnesses will intervene or not, these others will watch and listen to what the cause of the dispute might be and then draw conclusions, thereby enriching their associational potentials. I shall return to the notion of relationality in the conclusion. Expressing one’s anger publicly is a moral act since it is said to mitigate possible hatred. In Bosmun theories of emotion, hatred develops if negative feelings are suppressed for too long. Out of severe hatred, people might be tempted to make use of sorcery. It is acknowledged that people sometimes “eat the wrong food.” Anger (poŋ) is also described as nduŋnduŋ aam, “to consume a sea shell” (a type of saltwater shell that is not part of the local cuisine). Yet it is not anger that renders people suspicious but the insistence on hiding it. Kin members should remind each other to stay transparent. In negotiating their feelings—including negative ones—with consociates, family members protect each other from accusations of sorcery made by non-kin.

Creating Harmony and Causing Harm

Much of food’s social and emotional significance in Bosmun life is grounded in mythical narration. Despite the fact that Bosmun have been exposed to efforts of Christian missionization that began in Northeast New Guinea at the beginning of the twentieth century (Steffen 1995: 186, 190, 199), ancestral wisdom still plays a crucial role as far as food is concerned. If one looks at the activities of the mythical protagonists, the Bosmun occupation with and emotional articulation through food becomes explicable. For the sake of brevity, I shall

182

Anita von Poser

shall discuss only one example, which I consider the most powerful Bosmun myth. It is about the heroine Nzari, who is prominent in the myths of many sociolinguistic groups along the North Coast and in the Lower Sepik-Ramu inland region. She is also known as Jari (von Poser 2008), Zaria (Lutkehaus 1995) or Daria (Höltker 1965; Z‘graggen 1992). Amongst other important things, Nzari brought fire, sexual intercourse, and childbearing to humankind. Nzari is a major creator being (raaraŋ) and a female character who is open to men’s desires to get involved with her. As soon as they dare to disappoint her, however, she leaves them. One of her partners is Soŋe, whom she loves until her mother, a snake, is put to death by his people. Nzari takes revenge in a way that is at once an act of cruelty and an act of social importance. She kills and cooks their child and offers the meal to Soŋe, who at first wonders about the meal’s contents. Since he trusts Nzari he starts eating. When the meal is almost finished, Soŋe realizes that he is consuming his own child. He also realizes his mistake about Nzari. In that moment, she takes her belongings and disappears. When they met, it was Nzari who approached Soŋe by secretly placing food at a spot where he would find it. Later, they became sexual partners and partners in procurement and production of sago. The sleeping place of the child that springs up from Nzari’s engagement with Soŋe is the clay pot in which Nzari also stirs sago. In Bosmun understanding, there is a correlation between wombs and clay pots. This analogy is found in other places as well, for instance, in Amazonian notions of gender and sexuality. McCallum notes about the Cashinahua: “Cooking food … is analogous to making babies. Similarly, pots are analogous to wombs” (McCallum 2001: 52). Indeed, Nzari’s womb (nis) is the locus of origin for many things, and she bears all kinds of things and objects just as female bodies bear babies. From Bosmun perspectives, it is not only the act of cooking food that connects to the making of babies: the preceding step of sago procurement is crucial for procreation, too, and males and females equally join in this activity. Though it is a strenuous kind of labor, my interlocutors considered obtaining sago a life-affirming and psychically balancing activity, one that, in fact, creates positive emotions and makes people feel xuop (“contented” or “happy”). This is mirrored in the term ve, which Bosmun use to refer to sago labor. Ve also denotes the act of dancing, which most Bosmun enjoy. Against this backdrop, it can be said that in killing their child Nzari rejects not only the product of her sexual contact with Soŋe and their joint food labor but the very affirmation of their relationship. She divorces her husband by returning the “food” they once produced together. Selection of a partner and conjugal affection is usually expressed by saying that a couple have come to the point of mbairim raaŋ; that is, the two of them replace (raaŋ) their former eating spoons (mbair) with new ones.10 The story of Nzari is deeply anchored in what Bosmun consider to be their crucial values.

Bosmun Foodways

183

According to Bosmun morality or what they call tip yaaoŋ, behavior that is “good” or “sociable,” foodways should serve to make others feel good and secure. Bosmun immorality, on the other hand—linguistically referred to as tip yaakak, behavior that is “unsociable”—is associated with the intent to harm others; it, too, has its channels by means of foodways. Empathy serves both ends of morality, and Bosmun use their food-related empathic skills in both directions. If a woman has been discontent or angry with her husband for a considerable time, she will indicate her state by placing a food plate filled with water onto a high shelf hanging in the house. She will tell her partner to go inside and take his meal, something she normally does not do. Since she deliberately has filled the plate to the brim, the water is likely to slop over him. In this case, a Bosmun husband should realize he is behaving in a negative or unsociable way on the empathic “two-way-street” (Halpern 2001: 41) and should rethink his attitudes. His wife has sent an affect-laden message to him that should remind him of Nzari. She has signaled that there is a problem to be solved. Should he refuse to atone for his actions, a wife is likely to further disconnect from the relationship by no longer sharing food with her husband. In so doing, she evokes Nzari’s mythical actions. To be in conflict can also be described metaphorically as neŋneŋ, which means to offer someone a particular type of sago that is classified as pseudo sago (neŋ), as opposed to real sago (vees). Another way of indicating discord is to promise to bring food to another and then subsequently fail to follow through with the pledge, an act that is sure to bring embarrassment to one’s interlocutor. However, the use of empathy in the service of harming others is likely to be balanced or even reduced by other agents who counter-empathize. For instance, N and T are sisters. T is married to the brother of A’s father. N insulted A by promising her to bring food and not keeping this promise. What happened instead was that T came to A with a plate of food. Being related to both A and N, T wanted to keep a balance in her own relational surrounding. Since A and T were on good terms, T reduced her sister’s offense against A. So equilibrium might be upheld, even if single agents on some occasions do not behave according to the general moral code of the group. Relational mechanisms are applied for the benefit of a macro-emotional balance. By imagining the power that a violation of food morals in Bosmun life has, affective agents might willingly cause serious harm. This is especially the case in situations where the supposed receiver needs assistance in the arrangement of a feast or to erect a new house, events that depend on many food providers. If others refuse to help, enormous social pressure might lead to states of personal fear (tiaŋtaŋ) or states of insanity (rorer). In case of extreme mental disturbances, others will, at first, look to the foodways of the afflicted person to determine what food-related actions may have caused his or her psychic suffering.

184

Anita von Poser

Upon arriving for my second visit to Bosmun, I discovered that a young man from another village had just died. He went to have a wash in a tributary of the Ramu and did not return alive. His dead body was found drifting in the water. Since there were no signs of a crocodile attack, people reckoned that he must have gone mad because his mother did not prepare a meal for him after he had returned home from work. This was the first interpretation in a chain of further food-related analyses that would take into account not only the mother’s activities but also the actions of everyone else who was related to the young man. Bosmun emotional discourse, including the empathic to and fro it entails, is tied to a subtle complex of foodways. People investigate the ways in which food was prepared or how it was offered. Distrust or jealousy (ŋanzi) might likely be evoked, for example, if a meal is served too hot. A meal in Bosmun cuisine is never to be served hot. This would be a sign that the cook was in hurry, and being in a hurry while preparing food indicates to Bosmun that someone is trying to conceal something. Bad time management, of course, could be a reason why a meal is prepared in a hurry. However, Bosmun households consist of households within households and there are often many individuals who can lend a hand if the timing of meal preparation becomes an issue. For instance, men usually build their own houses, where they live with their wives, near their parents’ houses. Thus, there is almost always someone to look after the children or to fulfill other household tasks while the cook is given time to prepare the meal for the whole household. A close examination of Bosmun cooking practices reveals that people spend a lot of their time in food preparation. Cooking and serving a meal is ostensibly a slow-going activity through which people demonstrate relational harmony and order. If a meal is cooked in a good mood and with a smile, and if it arrives lukewarm, then there is no reason to be suspicious of another’s behavior. Whether or not an individual has cooked a dish with the required pleasure is in fact quite easy to discern. While there are times during strong sea winds when food is prepared on hearths within the walled sleeping house, for the most part Bosmun cooking is a public performance: it happens outside or on a roofed cooking platform that has no walls, where everyone can see the activities engaged in by the cooks. Another point Bosmun agree on is that regardless of whom a meal might be intended for—males or females, adults or children—every plate should be filled with the same amount of food. Nobody’s plate should be filled with less food than other plates. That said, an individual is also seldom forced to overeat, at least not in normal life situations. In ritual practices, however, dietary expectations can take on other dimensions. To make Bosmun communal feasts and events of personal importance successful, it is necessary that they do not pass without people eating a lot. For example, at the end of a girl’s initiation

Bosmun Foodways

185

feast I saw about thirty plates that had been brought along by relatives to mark her transition into female adulthood. To appreciate the donors, the girl had to taste something from every plate. In this particular case the girl was expected to overeat, for if she had refused food from any one plate her refusal would have been interpreted as an offense to the person or persons who had prepared it. As was previously discussed, the rejection of food is a recognized communicative means to externalize personal disapproval. Emotional processes are complex, and so are Bosmun foodways because they correlate with the former. Parents who do not accept their daughter or son’s partner choice, for instance, have the right to both express their disapproval and try to separate them. They do so by rejecting offers of food from the couple. If the couple stays strong and holds on to one another, the parents cannot interfere; however, they may reject the couple’s food for their entire lives. The family members might laugh with one another, talk to each other, and help each other, but if they do not eat together, some form of discord exists. Food and the practice of eating have a particular emotional significance even on a metaphysical level. Let me give one last example. During a so-called ndom taao, which is the feast for honoring the spirit of a deceased relative, I was able to witness an empathic interaction between several elder men and women, on the one hand, and the deceased man’s spirit on the other. Two pigs had been raised since the death of the man and were now fully grown. Domestic pigs are fed on cooked food, which creates a bond of attachment between the cook and the animal that eats the food. Due to these bonds of attachment, individuals feel compelled to “ask” the pigs for their permission to be slaughtered. In an effort to solicit such permission, the pigs are lured with a gift of boiled sago. After two days of chanting and dancing that was intended to encourage them to come, however, the pigs were still missing, wandering around somewhere in the bush. Something was definitely wrong, and people began to wonder what possible reasons the pigs could have for refusing to give their permission for the slaughter. In an effort to discern the pigs’ motives, several elders sat down together to eat. Consuming food is a medium that can also be used to make contact with the non-human realm. The elders started to discuss the matter over and over by directly addressing the deceased’s spirit with questions about what kinds of transgressions they each may have committed against him during his lifetime. Everyone considered actions that may have offended the deceased. The continuing absence of the pigs, however, was interpreted as a sign of the spirit’s ongoing resentment. Finally, the spirit’s sister, an old woman, admitted that she also should have provided yet a third pig for the feast—the two missing pigs had been provided by the spirit’s children. The children must have felt insulted, the woman concluded, since in her role as the deceased’s sister she, of course, should have given a particular sign of affection for her brother. Once

186

Anita von Poser

the anger of the man’s spirit had vanished, the two pigs returned from the bush, while a third one was bought in a nearby village. The following day, three pigs were consumed and the feast was finally able to come to an end. All of this resulted from the sister’s critical self-reflection and the openness of all those who engaged in empathic discourse with the spirit.

Conclusion: Melanesian Relationality and Empathy

In this essay I have sought to examine how empathy is situated in the ethnographic context of Bosmun communities. Let me now close with a brief discussion of the importance of relationality for empathic processes. Weiner (1994: 24) has described the Melanesian world as a “world of relationality.” Relationality as a distinctive form of sociality in Melanesian societies was first theoretically articulated in the work of Marilyn Strathern (1988) and has since then been elaborated by many other anthropologists working in the region (for example, see LiPuma 1998; Strathern and Stewart 2000). According to Carrier, in Melanesian communities it is often held that “motive and even sentiment spring from the relationships of which one is a part. Indeed, one’s very sense of who one is comes not from one’s self, but from the effects one has on others, the ways they respond to one’s actions” (Carrier 1999: 30). In recent years, scholars have increasingly noted the impact of nonlocal, individualistic modes of sociality on local forms of relationality. For instance, Dwyer and Minnegal (2007: 545, 551) have spoken of a “relational epistemology” among the Kubo of PNG, which is on its way to being replaced by an epistemology that promotes “individualism … and the gradual dissolution of an egalitarian ethos” (Dwyer and Minnegal 2007: 558). In his study of Urapmin religious transformations, Joel Robbins links the emergence of individualism specifically to the spread of Christianity, a tradition that views “the individual as the sole unit of divine judgment” (Robbins 2004: 293). Christianity’s emphasis on the individual as the primary locus of responsibility and ethical action, as well as its influence on a former relational scheme of morality, is also discussed by Hess (2006: 288–289) for the inhabitants of Vanua Lava in Vanuatu. In the Bosmun case, it could be said that people still favor a relational mode of life, but there is, of course, an openness to alternative notions of individuality that have gathered strength by means of an increasing orientation toward Christian values, on the one hand, and economic capitalism-based notions, on the other. Relationality is highly valued, not only in a social, moral, and emotional sense but also in regard to politics and economy. Bosmun decision-making processes do not depend solely upon the actions of single agents; there are instead always multiple actors working toward a possible

Bosmun Foodways

187

compromise. When individual voices do arise, they necessarily impact the relational matrix in which they are emplaced. Thus, some decisions might seem somewhat strange to an outsider uninformed about those relationships. In local theory, autonomy is a state not worth striving for. To be disconnected is, from a Bosmun point of view, the oddest way to live. In my opinion, the ability or desire to conform to a given social situation is, in fact, a potential, which encourages empathic processes to prosper. It is precisely this relational or situational selfhood that I would like to foreground here. It is, I argue, the willingness to socially attune to others, as relationality proposes, that encourages people to emotionally attune as well. At the beginning of this chapter, I referred to the fact that if empathy was discussed in anthropology it was most often addressed in the context of thinking through relationships between the investigator and the investigated. Actually, other disciplines have also treated empathy as a methodological tool to be applied in helping or counseling others (see Katz 1963). But what about empathy’s importance as a component of regular daily interpersonal life? Does it prevail equally in worlds where people strive for autonomy, as they do in individualist worlds? The idea of an autonomous and unfettered self, developed during the eighteenth century, came to dominate the modern Western image of the self (Carrier 1999: 24–27). While it did not completely propagate social detachment, it did, however, shift or augment the borders of our selves. As I have tried to show in this essay, Bosmun borders of the self are more transparent and fluid than those that are articulated in so-called “Western” theories. While Bosmun use empathic skills to create harmony as well as to cause harm, I hope to have provided some evidence to support the claim that empathy is more likely to flourish on the grounds of a relational model of sociality than an individualist one. Notes I warmly thank Douglas Hollan and C. Jason Throop for giving me the opportunity to contribute to this collection of essays. I also thank Rupert Stasch and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. Moreover, I would like to acknowledge Jürg Wassmann, Verena Keck, Alexis von Poser, Angella Meinerzag, Sabine Hess, and David Valpey. I conducted fieldwork among the people of Daiden, a Bosmun village, during the years 2004–05, 2006, and 2008. My research was made possible by the Volkswagen Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Marsilius-Kolleg of Heidelberg University. It is difficult to find apt words by which to express my deep gratitude to what I was offered by Bosmun and thus ŋgoona mboop: meser yaaoŋ, motor yaaoŋ, nuisi yaaoŋ. 1. “Liklik” is a Tok Pisin (Melanesian Pidgin-English) term for “small” or “tiny.” Nowadays, Bosmun are fluent Tok Pisin speakers and the Bosmun children I met even speak Tok Pisin as their first language. Calling Yombu “tiny” fits into how she was perceived

188

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Anita von Poser

and described by others: a self-confident and assertive child, but somewhat fragile in physical appearance compared to her same-age companions. See also Katz (1963: 62–97) for an earlier discussion on the origins of empathy in which he includes views from biology and sociology, too. In the Bosmun division of labor, men cut the sago palm, remove the bark, and scrape the pith that the trunk contains; then women rinse the pith and thus obtain a paste-like substance that can be used in cooking. The aspect of gender complementarity is also taken into account when a couple decides to adopt a child. If a couple has too many sons, girls are likely to be adopted and vice versa. For further theoretical elaborations on person, self, and individual see, above all, Mauss’s (1985) classic essay written in 1938, as well as more recent considerations of Shweder and LeVine (1984), Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes (1985), White and Kirkpatrick (1985), M. Strathern (1988), Csordas (1994), Morris (1994), Lambek and Strathern (1998), Strathern and Stewart (2000), and Köpping, Welker, and Wiehl (2002). To carry plates around is a female performance of pride and self-confidence in Bosmun life. It is not seen as a sign of oppression but as a sign of female power and independence. Bosmun women gain influence by means of their gender-specific foodways, and if they walk around with plates on their heads they do so leisurely and with good humor. Being important food procurers, they receive credit and hence can exercise control in certain social and political spheres. Apart from food’s affective role, Bosmun women and men, of course, also engage in what Appadurai (1981) has called “gastropolitics” in a South Asian context. Getting married in Bosmun is a rather processual act. A young couple flees together, then stays apart for a while, either somewhere in the bush or with other more distantly living relatives. After returning home, usually to the male spouse’s parents, the relatives of both gather for a meal, if they approve the onset of this conjugal relationship. At this gathering, the bride officially prepares the first meal for the groom. This is the first step that ties a couple in a formal way. The next step is that the two go out to process sago together. In the beginning, relatives might keep them from doing this work together since joint sago production between male and female that are not related in terms of kinship is what, in local theory, marks the start of their sexual reproduction. The couple’s first child, finally, is said to bind wife and husband together in a serious way. However, divorce stays a lifelong option for both partners, and relatives do not hesitate to encourage it if they see that one of them is suffering from the partnership. No one of my interlocutors could actually remember someone being born blind, and thus the answers I was given on whether or not blind people could have ramkandiar remained purely speculative. After all, children are invaluable “information givers” (Kulick 1992: 230) since they can move around freely, whereas adults have to adhere to proper movements in social space. Bosmun adults should approach other households to which they do not relate via food exchanges, by taking the official paths that interconnect residential areas (see also LiPuma 1998: 70–71). Sorcerers, it was explained to me, secretly approach residential areas and sneak below houses. Suspects are usually people who eat at other hearths, that is, people beyond the borders of recognized kinship. This type of “relational narration,” as I would call it, is by itself a phenomenon of discourse to be explored. In formal rhetoric style, it is similar to what Feld, in the context of the Kaluli of PNG, has defined as “lift-up-over-speaking” (Feld 1990: 251).

Bosmun Foodways

189

10. Mbair is the plural form of mbaak, which, like xaam, means “spoon.” Many words in the Bosmun vernacular that refer to material objects or features in the physical environment are also personal names. Xaam is such a word. It (1) refers to the eating spoon, (2) is a type of tree, and (3) is a male personal name. The Bosmun have a system of avoiding the personal names of certain in-laws. If the in-law whose name should be avoided is called Xaam, then the speaker may call him Mbaak. Bibliography Alexeyeff, Kalissa, Roberta James, and Mandy Thomas, eds. 2004. “Taste This! An Anthropological Examination of Food.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology, special issue 15 (1). Anderson, Astrid. 2003. “Landscapes of Sociality: Paths, Places and Belonging on Wogeo Island, Papua New Guinea.” In Oceanic Socialities and Cultural Forms: Ethnographies of Experience, ed. Ingjerd Hoëm and Sidsel Roalkvam. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Appadurai, Arjun. 1981. “Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia.” American Ethnologist 8 (3): 494–511. Barnett, Douglas, and Hilary Horn Ratner. 1997. “Introduction: The Organization and Integration of Cognition and Emotion in Development.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 67: 303–316. Black, Peter W. 1985. “Ghosts, Gossip, and Suicide: Meaning and Action in Tobian Folk Psychology.” In Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies, ed. Geoffrey M. White and John Kirkpatrick. Berkeley: University of California Press. Buchheimer, Arnold. 1963. “The Development of Ideas about Empathy.” Journal of Counseling Psychology 10 (1): 61–70. Carrier, James G. 1999. “People Who Can Be Friends: Selves and Social Relationships.” In The Anthropology of Friendship, ed. Sandra Bell and Simon Coleman. Oxford and New York: Berg. Carrithers, Michael, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes, eds. 1985. The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ciompi, Luc. 1997. Die emotionalen Grundlagen des Denkens: Entwurf einer fraktalen Affektlogik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. Counihan, Carole M. 1998. “Introduction—Food and Gender: Identity and Power.” In Food and Gender: Identity and Power, ed. Carole M. Counihan and Steven L. Kaplan. New York: Routledge. Counihan, Carole M., and Steven L. Kaplan, eds. 1998. Food and Gender: Identity and Power. New York: Routledge. Counihan, Carole M., and Penny Van Esterik, eds. 1997. Food and Culture: A Reader. New York: Routledge. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1986. “Hermes’ Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press. Csordas, Thomas J. 1994. “Self and Person.” In Handbook of Psychological Anthropology, ed. Philip K. Bock. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press. Damasio, Antonio R. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Grosset/Putnam.

190

Anita von Poser

Dwyer, Peter D., and Monica Minnegal. 2007. “Social Change and Agency among Kubo of Papua New Guinea.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 13 (3): 545–562. Edge, Hoyt, and Luh Ketut Suryani. 2002. “A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Volition.” Florida Philosophical Review 2 (2): 56–72. Fajans, Jane. 1997. They Make Themselves: Work and Play among the Baining of Papua New Guinea. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Feld, Steven. 1990. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Gassner, Burghard. 2006. Empathie in der Pädagogik: Theorien, Implikationen, Bedeutung, Umsetzung. PhD thesis, University of Heidelberg. http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ archiv/7224/. Geertz, Clifford. 1972. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Daedalus 101: 1–37. ———. 1984. “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.” In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halpern, Jodi. 2001. From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, Grace Gredys. 1989. “Concepts of Individual, Self, and Person in Description and Analysis.” American Anthropologist 91: 599–612. Hess, Sabine. 2006. “Strathern’s Melanesian ‘Dividual’ and the Christian ‘Individual’: A Perspective from Vanua Lava, Vanuatu.” Oceania 76 (3): 285–296. Hollan, Douglas, and C. Jason Throop. 2008. “Whatever Happened to Empathy? Introduction.” Ethos 36 (4): 385–401. Höltker, Georg. 1965. “Mythen und Erzählungen der Monumbo- und Ngaimbom-Papua in Nordost-Neuguinea.” Anthropos 60: 5–107. Holtzman, Jon D. 2006. “Food and Memory.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 361–378. Jebens, Holger. 2005. Pathways to Heaven: Contesting Mainline and Fundamentalist Christianity in Papua New Guinea. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Kahn, Miriam. 1986. Always Hungry, Never Greedy: Food and the Expression of Gender in a Melanesian Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Katz, Robert L. 1963. Empathy: Its Nature and Uses. London: The Free Press of Glencoe. Keck, Verena 2005. Social Discord and Bodily Disorders: Healing among the Yupno of Papua New Guinea. Durham: Carolina Academic Press. Kirmayer, Laurence J. 2008. “Empathy and Alterity in Cultural Psychiatry.” Ethos 36 (4): 457–474. Köpping, Klaus-Peter, Michael Welker, and Reiner Wiehl, eds. 2002. Die autonome Person—eine europäische Erfindung? Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Kulick, Don. 1992. Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self, and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinea Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael, and Andrew Strathern, eds. 1998. Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leach, James. 2003. Creative Land: Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. LiPuma, Edward. 1998. “Modernity and Forms of Personhood in Melanesia.” In Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, ed. Michael Lambek and Andrew Strathern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bosmun Foodways

191

Lutkehaus, Nancy C. 1995. Zaria’s Fire: Engendered Moments in Manam Ethnography. Durham: Carolina Academic Press. Lutz, Catherine. 1985. “Ethnopsychology Compared to What? Explaining Behavior and Consciousness Among the Ifaluk.” In Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies, ed. Geoffrey M. White and John Kirkpatrick. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lutz, Catherine, and Geoffrey M. White. 1986. “The Anthropology of Emotions.” Annual Review of Anthropology 15: 405–436. Manderson, Lenore, ed. 1986. Shared Wealth and Symbol: Food, Culture, and Society in Oceania and Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mauss, Marcel. 1985 [1938]. “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; The Notion of Self.” In The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCallum, Cecilia. 2001. Gender and Sociality in Amazonia: How Real People are Made. Oxford and New York: Berg. Meigs, Anna. 1984. Food, Sex, and Pollution: A New Guinea Religion. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Meinerzag, Angella. 2006. Being Mande: Personhood, Land and Naming System among the Hinihon in the Adelbert Range / Papua New Guinea. PhD thesis, University of Heidelberg. Mintz, Sidney W., and Christine M. Du Bois. 2002. “The Anthropology of Food and Eating.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 99–119. Morris, Brian. 1994. Anthropology of the Self: The Individual in Cultural Perspective. Boulder: Pluto Press. Munn, Nancy D. 1986. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Obrist, Brigit. 1990. “The Study of Food in Its Cultural Context.” In Sepik Heritage: Tradition and Change in Papua New Guinea, ed. Nancy Lutkehaus, Christian Kaufmann, William E. Mitchell, Douglas Newton, Lita Osmundsen, and Meinhard Schuster. Durham: Carolina Academic Press. Reddy, William M. 2001. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rosaldo, Michelle Z. 1980. Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1984. “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling.” In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosaldo, Renato I. 1988 [1984]. “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage: On the Cultural Force of Emotions.” In Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society, ed. Edward M. Bruner. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Rumsey, Alan, and Joel Robbins. 2008. “Introduction: Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 407–420. Shweder, Richard A., and Robert A. LeVine, eds. 1984. Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

192

Anita von Poser

Steffen, Paul. 1995. Missionsbeginn in Neuguinea: Die Anfänge der Rheinischen, Neuendettelsauer und Steyler Missionsarbeit in Neuguinea. Nettetal: Steyler Verlag (Studia Instituti Missiologici Societatis Verbi Divini, Sankt Augustin, no. 61). Strathern, Andrew J., and Pamela J. Stewart. 2000. Arrow Talk: Transaction, Transition, and Contradiction in New Guinea Highlands History. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sutton, David E. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. London: Berg. von Poser, Alexis T. 2008. Inside Jong’s Head: Time, Person, and Space among the Kayan of Papua New Guinea. PhD thesis, University of Heidelberg. von Poser, Anita. 2009. Bosmun Empathy: Person, Food, and Place in Papua New Guinea. PhD thesis, University of Heidelberg. Watson, James L., and Melissa L. Caldwell, eds. 2005. The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Weiner, James. 1994. “First Colloquium of Amazonianists and Melanesianists.” Anthropology Today 10 (4): 23–24. White, Geoffrey M., and John Kirkpatrick, eds. 1985. Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Whitehead, Harriet. 2000. Food Rules: Hunting, Sharing, and Tabooing Game in Papua New Guinea. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Young, Michael W. 1971. Fighting with Food: Leadership, Value and Social Control in a Massim Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Z‘graggen, John A. 1992. “The Myth of Daria.” In The Language Game: Papers in Memory of Donald C. Laycock, ed. Tom Dutton, Malcom Ross, and Darrel Tryon. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

PART IV Vicissitudes of Empathy

8 Vicissitudes of “Empathy” in a Rural Toraja Village DOUGLAS W. HOLLAN

Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary defines empathy as, “1: the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it 2: the capacity for participating in another’s feelings or ideas.” Note that the first part of this definition does not distinguish clearly between empathy as an accurate assessment of another’s feelings or ideas, and projection per se, which I would define as the attribution of one’s own feelings or ideas to another, whether those attributions match up well with the other’s feelings and ideas or not. Since I believe the distinction between empathy and projection is critical for analyzing how people understand and misunderstand one another, and because the second part of Webster’s definition captures more closely my own conception of empathy as a truly intersubjective process involving someone attempting to understand as well as someone needing or allowing him- or herself to be understood (see Hollan 2008), I use the second sense of empathy throughout this essay. But even if we can agree on this minimal definition, many interesting and difficult anthropological questions about the empathic process arise. What resources or capacities—biological, psychological, developmental, cultural, experiential, or otherwise—enable people to understand or have empathy for others? What are the social, cultural, political, and economic conditions that foster the development and use of empathy? And what are the conditions that suppress its development and use? Under what conditions is empathy used to nurture others? And when is it used to harm or manipulate them? Or does empathy imply a moral dimension that precludes doing harm? What are the varieties of local idioms through which empathy is manifested and deployed? My own operating assumptions are that nearly everyone, with the exception of those with certain kinds of brain injuries or limitations (see Damasio 1999), has the capacity “for participating in another’s feelings or ideas.” We are a highly social species with evolved capacities to know and relate to others, including the inborn tendency to respond to the emotional states and facial expressions of others. Indeed, emerging research on so called “mirror neu-

196

Douglas W. Hollan

rons” suggests that our capacity to feel for others may be much more biologically ingrained than we had ever imagined (Iacoboni 2008). Mirror neurons are those that become activated merely by observing another’s actions or behaviors. They are mirror-like in that they involve many of the same neurons that would be activated were the observer actually to perform or experience the observed actions. This incredible, unintentional capacity of the brain literally to “participate in” or reflect and embody the experience of an other is one of the reasons it becomes important to understand when and how empathic processes become inhibited as well as when and how they are socially and culturally magnified. Whatever its biological and evolutionary underpinnings, however, I also assume empathy is a highly complex social and emotional process, involving conscious forms of reflection and understanding, that can only become manifest through particular idioms of expression and within highly particularized cultural and moral contexts. Further, I assume that the capacity and willingness to empathize will vary, sometimes greatly, from individual to individual, even within the same cultural context. Some of this individual variation will come about because of differences in gender, social class, and so on. But some of it will stem from differences in people’s life experiences. For example, those who have lost important attachment figures, regardless of the cultural context, may be sensitized or hardened to the losses of others, depending on how their own grief experiences were interpreted and responded to. In the remainder of this chapter, I describe and analyze how people attempt to participate in the feelings and ideas of others in Toraja, Indonesia. I begin by describing how life in rural Toraja villages is organized, and I discuss when and why it becomes important to understand others and to be understood (see also Hollan 2008). I also describe the idioms through which concern for others is expressed and manifested, and I discuss why some people seem to be more empathic than others. I conclude with a summary of major points and some reflections on the cross-cultural study of empathy.

Contexts of Empathy in Rural Toraja Villages

Anthony Wallace pointed out long ago (1961) that much of social life goes on without intimate knowledge of others’ motives and intentions, through habit, routine, common expectation, and widely shared rules of social engagement and etiquette. If this is so, then we need to ask: When and why do people actually need to participate in others’ feelings and ideas, and when and why do they not? Life in rural Toraja villages (South Sulawesi, Indonesia) is organized around the cultivation of wet rice fields and gardens; the formation and perpetuation

Vicissitudes of “Empathy” in a Rural Toraja Village

197

of families (bilateral and neolocal); the attempt to preserve a hierarchy among high-status people, commoners, and dependents; and the propitiation of powerful numinous beings, including the Christian God, a variety of traditional gods and spirits, and ancestral beings, all of whom can have a direct influence on people’s fates and fortunes (Hollan 1996). All of these social activities involve a high degree of cooperation and reciprocal exchange among people: landowners need the landless to cultivate their fields, while the landless need opportunities for work. The staging of elaborate funerals and other communal feasts, during which the spirit world is honored and placated and social distinctions are made most visible and clearly marked, requires a complicated system of debt and return. Young children are dependent on the care and nurturance of their parents and other caretakers, while older people rely on the help of their adult children. And so on.1 What makes all this social interdependency and reciprocity possible? Why and how are people motivated to participate? There is, of course, a pragmatic side involved. Given the nature of the system, people know that if they do not cooperate with others, then others, including the gods and ancestors, will not cooperate with them. There is a widespread discourse, including gossip, on what happens to people who do not honor their obligations and responsibilities to others: they are mistrusted, rejected, despised, ostracized. But exchange is so deeply embedded in Toraja, so constitutive as well as symbolic of relationship, that there are strong moral and emotional aspects to it as well. You honor your obligations and responsibilities because, in essence, you feel you cannot do otherwise. Not to honor them would harm, humiliate, and anger others and shame and sicken oneself.

Appealing for Help and Concern

Elsewhere I have suggested that if empathy involves a truly intersubjective process, then it requires someone needing or allowing her- or himself to be understood as well as someone trying to understand (Hollan 2008). This is important to remember, since empathy is so often characterized and conceptualized as the mind reading capabilities of the empathizer alone. But our ability to understand others, to participate in their feelings and ideas, has very much to do with whether they want us to understand or not, whether they give us the appropriate cues for understanding. To emphasize this point, let me begin by outlining when and why people in Toraja seek to be understood, before turning to the question of when and why they attempt to understand. Wellenkamp and I have noted that one very common aspect of self experience among the Toraja is the sense of feeling vulnerable to or acted upon by other humans and outside forces (Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994: 94–96).

198

Douglas W. Hollan

There are many layers to this sense of vulnerability. Within Indonesia, the Toraja have long feared domination by their more numerous, lowland Muslim neighbors, the Bugis and Makassar, and they have long been disparaged as a relatively backward, primitive people who waste enormous amounts of money and livestock in their elaborate funerals and feasting ceremonies—despite the fact that it is these very ceremonies that have brought them so much tourist and international attention. Many people also feel entrapped and oppressed, literally consumed, by the very family and exchange systems they rely upon so heavily. Even higher-status people, for example, occasionally dream at night of being carved up, butchered, and eaten in just the way buffalo are killed, distributed, and consumed at funerals (Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994: 182–189). People are also deeply aware of how vulnerable they are to the many spiritual and ancestral forces surrounding them, which can be harsh and unpredictable. The sense of being acted upon and controlled by others is also conveyed through certain child-caretaker interactions, in which infants and children are taught to yield passively to the wishes and manipulations of others (ibid.: 96). People feel especially vulnerable to others and in need of understanding when they are overwhelmed by their duties or responsibilities to others and when their own needs go neglected or unfulfilled. In both instances, people can feel deep shame: in the first instance, the shame of letting others down, of proving oneself incompetent, and in the second, the shame of social invisibility and insignificance. Both types of vulnerability are directly linked to people’s involvement in and dependency upon a system of reciprocal exchange. So what do people do when feeling vulnerable and exposed in these ways? One option in certain contexts is to bring attention to one’s plight through what Wellenkamp and I have referred to as a discourse of persuasion, coaxing, and appeal. As Schieffelin has noted, appeal “exerts its force through the evocation of a sentimental intimacy, pathos, and compassion” (1985: 112). It conveys respect and humility and is an especially appropriate mode of interacting with and influencing social superiors. By presenting oneself as needy, helpless, or disadvantaged in some way, one openly solicits the help and understanding of others. Although people occasionally use this rhetoric and presentation of self in manipulative and coercive ways, it is also recognized as a completely legitimate and morally justified way of informing others of one’s circumstances. As such, its effectiveness does depend, as Schieffelin notes, on its power to evoke the caring, empathic responses of others, which I discuss below. When appeal is ineffective, on the other hand, either because one is perceived as being deceitful or manipulative or because others remain unresponsive or oblivious, one’s sense of vulnerability and shame can become even more acute. When this happens, people are sometimes driven by their shame and anger to ever more desperate and alarming forms of behavior. For example, children may defiantly run away from home when their appeals for help or

Vicissitudes of “Empathy” in a Rural Toraja Village

199

relief go unanswered (Hollan and Wellenkamp 1996: 46–49), and adolescents have been known to threaten or commit suicide (Hollan 1990), especially after being denied money for school. I should underscore again that legitimate appeals for aid and assistance are viewed as normal and justified. Without the least bit of shame or embarrassment, even adults tell stories of reaching a state of desperation, “crying” for help, receiving help, and then feeling appreciated and vindicated as a result (Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994: 73–75). Here is the reverse side to what we normally think of as empathy: the ways in which people assist our understanding of them through explicit or implicit cues (see also Hollan 2008).

Understanding and Nurturing Others

I have noted that people respond to the needs and concerns of others, in part because that is how the system of reciprocal exchange works: if I want others to help me, I must be willing to help them. There is a pragmatic aspect to exchange, and people know they will pay a high price if they cheat or fail others. But this is only part of the story. As I mention above, exchange is so central to sociality in Toraja, so basic to what is considered human, that there are powerful moral and emotional aspects to it as well. One responds to the legitimate needs and concerns of others because one feels compelled to, as if one had no other choice. For most Toraja, seeing a person in need, especially a kinsman appealing for help, evokes a powerful feeling of love/compassion/pity for that person. To “love” someone (ma‘pakaboro‘, ma-mali lako) means to be concerned about their welfare and to feel sorry for them and have compassion (mamase) for them in times of need. It also means to be accustomed to their presence and to think about them and yearn for them (ma ‘inaa-naa) when they are away (Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994: 57). This “love” and concern for the other comes close to what English speakers in some contexts refer to as empathy. One participates in the circumstances and feelings of the other, one is moved by the other’s plight, and one takes action to help. One cannot do otherwise. Many parents report, for example, that they can resist their children’s entreaties only so long. If children persist in their appeals or if they appear inconsolable, what can one do? One must oblige. This idiom of love/compassion/concern/empathy for others is one that is old and widespread in the Pacific, as Feinberg notes (this volume). And yet both he and Hermann (this volume) suggest that it is as salient as it is today at least partly because it has been reinforced and magnified by the spread throughout this same region of Christianity, a religion that also emphasizes the notion that one should have love and compassion for others, especially those who suffer. I suspect this is true for Toraja as well, where Dutch mission-

200

Douglas W. Hollan

aries began earnest Christianization in the 1930s. Terrance Bigalke (2005) has shown how the missionaries affected the traditional Toraja ritual and feasting system by tolerating the death/funeral ceremonies while discouraging those meant to insure health, wealth, and prosperity.2 But his study does not specifically address the extent to which Christian notions of love, compassion, and pity were disseminated at the local, village level. Given that, I can only presume that indigenous and Christian notions of love and empathy intermingled in the way they have elsewhere in the Pacific, but the historical details of such a process have yet to be written. There are other emotional and moral shadings to Toraja “empathy,” however. One has to do with the shame that surrounds a person in need. As Levy has suggested (1973), shame is a familiar, ubiquitous emotion in many interdependent, face-to-face communities, in which much of people’s behavior is open to public scrutiny and reaction. It is the sense of exposure people feel as they attempt to perform as culturally competent actors, as they manage the “fit” between themselves and others. In Toraja, shame and shaming or their possibility play a part in nearly every interpersonal encounter. This is especially true with regard to encounters between men and women and those of unequal social rank. People of higher status, whether social superiors, parents, or older people and older children, expect to receive signs of deference from those below; if they do not, they feel shame and anger. Conversely, those below rarely escape feelings of shame, knowing their behavior is under scrutiny and evaluation from those above. The social tension that is both the cause and consequence of this shame and shaming is made tolerable by observation of rather comprehensive rules of etiquette that channel behavior into fairly predictable patterns and routines, thereby minimizing, though certainly not eliminating, the chances for acute shame and embarrassment to arise. In a society that prides itself on its interdependency and mutual aid, those in legitimate need are an affront, regardless of whether they appeal for help. The very existence of the need is shameful, suggesting that some family, person, god, or ancestral spirit is not honoring its obligations. One participates in the shame of the other, who has been left in need. And one is ashamed on behalf of all those who have failed to help. One also is moved to help those in distress for fear of what will happen if one does not. Like the Javanese (Geertz 1961), Balinese (Wikan 1990), and many other Austronesian language–speaking groups (Watson-Gegeo and White 1990), many Toraja believe that upsetting emotional experiences of almost any kind can cause severe illness or even insanity and violence. One responds to others in distress to save them from even greater illness or distress and to avoid the possibility that in their distress, they might lash out and harm others. Indeed, there are a number of strategies people use to help sooth and

Vicissitudes of “Empathy” in a Rural Toraja Village

201

calm others, strategies that demonstrate considerable empathic participation and awareness. One is based, paradoxically, on avoidance. By learning to avoid people in distress or shame, one minimizes the chances of saying or doing something to magnify their distress and gives them a chance to calm down and regain composure. Regaining composure is important not only to avoid illness, but also to avoid the shame of losing even more control of oneself. This aversion of the potentially shaming gaze and interaction is one of the most common and sensitive forms of empathic communication in Toraja, and is deeply appreciated by those who feel exposed and ashamed. In a society where so much behavior is public and where so little is truly “private,” one must learn to look away, to not see, at appropriate moments. Once a distressed person can be approached without embarrassment or shame, it then becomes important to offer them “sweet” words of advice and comfort. Nene‘na Tandi is particularly eloquent about this. In speaking of grieving people, for example, he says: Even if it’s someone you don’t know, his/her heart must be medicated/ treated. They can’t be treated with money! And they can’t be treated with gold! Only with words. That’s the most powerful medicine there is! If someone has died and we bring pigs and buffalo to the funeral, those are debts [that must be repaid]. But if we give understanding or good advice, that’s what will nourish them. More so that buffalo, more so than gold! In another interview he returns to the topic of how important it is to give people comfort and assistance when they become upset: For worrying/ruminating, there is no medicine. Even according to doctors, there is no medicine, except for giving them medicines to sleep. So, as I’ve told you before, we give [distressed people] advice and comfort. We coax/flatter them so that their hearts become quiet, so that their thinking becomes healthy. Now that is effective. But when people realize someone is distressed and say or do nothing, that person will quickly die. Nene‘na Tandi indicates here the sincere need to help that some people feel toward the distressed, fearing for their basic health and sanity. On the one hand, such responses provide the distressed with the proximate gratification and soothing that “sweet” words of comfort convey. But they also offer a deeper, longer-lasting reassurance: that the system of mutual aid and dependency does indeed work, and that people will notice when one needs help and will respond appropriately.

202

Douglas W. Hollan

Contexts of Misunderstanding: When and Why Empathy Fails, Is Avoided, or Is Used to Hurt

As I suggest above, there are many contexts in all societies, including Toraja, where empathy is not usually expected, and some when it is explicitly inhibited if not prohibited, such as in the promotion of certain educational and martial activities. Many relationships that are explicitly contractual in nature do not require empathy, and many others are so routinized that it is rarely evoked or displayed, such as during ordinary greetings and partings and certain household routines. In some contexts, however, it is unclear whether empathy is appropriate or not, and people can feel confused and ambivalent about how to respond to others. While most Toraja do feel strongly compelled to come to the aid and assistance of those who appeal for help, their responses are always qualified by what they know of the appealers. Are they honest? Can they be trusted? Do they have a reputation for cheating or deceit or profligacy? What do others say about them? All of this becomes even more confusing given the nature of the informal exchange system and the ubiquity of gossip. Even under the best of circumstances, it is sometimes difficult to know whether an appeal for help is legitimate or not. Most exchange relationships in Toraja are informal and generalized. Given this, people are almost inevitably left asking: How am I coming out in this relationship? Am I giving too much? Will it all even out in the end? And how will I ever know? All of this uncertainty can arise whether or not the appealer is considered trustworthy. But in fact, reputations are almost always in play and open to question. Wellenkamp and I discovered that gossip is rife, much of it having to do with whether others are trustworthy or not. Many say that others are never what they appear to be, that words and surface behaviors can be deceiving. Indeed, there is a widespread discourse on how “clever” and tricky people can be—like the familiar trickster figure Dana‘, who lies, cheats, and deceives his way to the good life. While people can admire such cleverness, especially when it is used against outsiders or to rationalize the interests of one’s family or village, it is feared and despised when used against one’s own interests. So an empathic response can be tempered, if not completely inhibited, by an evaluation of the genuineness and authenticity of the other’s need. If the need is not genuine, if the appeal is false or deceitful, one may begin to feel anger and contempt for the other, rather than empathy.3 Even when the other’s appeal is perceived as genuine and one is moved to help, one’s response can be inhibited by awareness, either explicit or implicit, that the other’s need conflicts with one’s own. Here is the dilemma so many Toraja find themselves in: moved to love/pity/compassion by the other’s need or situation, but feeling too impoverished or needy themselves to respond adequately. Sometimes this dilemma is quite explicit, as when parents lament

Vicissitudes of “Empathy” in a Rural Toraja Village

203

their inability to pay for their children’s education and still honor all their other obligations. But often, the situation is more complicated. Because one is constantly being exhorted to share and to give, one has a tendency to hold onto one’s own limited resources, for fear of losing them. This in turn leads to more appeals and exhortations, since people perceive others to be hording or underestimating their ability to give or help—which in turn leads those asked for help to feel even more impoverished.4 This leads to an important question about empathy: beyond its most basic non-conscious, visceral components, is it a luxury that only those with adequate care and resources can afford? Can one be moved to participate in the thoughts and feelings of the other if one is impoverished and overwhelmed oneself (cf. Scheper-Hughes 1992)? In other words, what are the limits of empathy, both in terms of the factors and variables that interfere with or inhibit one’s ability or desire to act upon empathic feelings once mobilized and in terms of the factors and variables that interfere with or disrupt mobilization of the empathic feelings per se? How many people can one empathize with before feeling overwhelmed? Do face-to-face encounters demand a certain kind of empathic response that more distal, imagined relationships do not? Or can imagined communities evoke the same kind of visceral, empathic responses that face-to-face encounters sometimes do? In Toraja, there seems to be an outer limit to how much empathy, or love/pity/compassion, one can have for others. Even some of the most prosperous people we knew could at times feel overwhelmed, literally consumed, by the demands of others, which interfered with their ability not only to act on empathic feelings but to experience such feelings in the first place. What, then, happens to empathy when people begin to feel overwhelmed and desperate? In Toraja, as in most places, the accurate perception and understanding of the other’s plight—the very essence of empathy—becomes clouded by one’s own imagination. One begins to attribute to others thoughts, feelings, motives, desires, etc. that in fact they do not have. When this happens, empathy is replaced by projection. One begins to respond to other people not as they are, but as one imagines them to be. A fairly common occurrence in the villages we observed, this was the flip side of Toraja pity/compassion/love. Many people warned us that specific friends, neighbors, or acquaintances would try to cheat us or steal from us, and to be on our guard. Some of these warnings, issued by people who wanted to keep our friendship, resources, and reciprocity to themselves, were obviously self-interested. But others were quite genuine, coming from people who were fearful for us, imaging how others would take advantage of us if they could. Now, in fact no one did take gross advantage of us, though one would never know this given the warnings and descriptions of other people we received. This illustrates my point that the accurate perception and understanding of others becomes blurred when there is

204

Douglas W. Hollan

reason to be concerned about one’s own well-being. One tends to assume the worst about others in order to defend and care for oneself adequately. Unfortunately, many of our Toraja friends and neighbors found themselves in this precarious situation at times, living close enough to the edge of subsistence that they needed to be absolutely certain others were not taking advantage of them, and sometimes imagining the worst about people as a result. What I have described thus far is the relatively “innocent” form of projection, when one’s own vulnerability leads one, rather reflexively and single-handedly, to misperceive and misunderstand others. But sometimes projective-like processes become harnessed for more sinister purposes. The Toraja, like many groups, tend to scapegoat people at times. When this happens, the misperception of others becomes a social phenomenon. Individual misperceptions become magnified as they are validated and reinforced by the misperceptions of others. In Toraja, almost any non-kin or non-local person, but especially the Muslim Bugis and Makassar, can become the target of these socially sanctioned misperceptions. Such people are nearly always thought to be potentially dangerous, capable of theft, violence, black magic, or worse. People were often shocked by our willingness to travel without escort through “foreign” villages and neighboring provinces, and warned us against such naiveté. Although socially shared misperceptions of this kind endanger one’s communication and relationship with “the other,” they often have the indirect effect of reinforcing intragroup cooperation and solidarity by supporting an “us versus them” attitude. This, of course, is why they tend to persist and are so difficult to correct or undermine. I have discussed how empathy can become inhibited or undermined in an unknowing or unintentional way. Sometimes, however, the problem is not that empathy is clouded, but that it is used to harm rather than to help. The other side of people’s sensitivity to shame in themselves and others is that they know how to shame and humiliate, should they care to. In private contexts, I saw this happen most often when people were supposedly “teasing” someone, knowing just when and how to irritate or embarrass. But occasionally it would happen in public contexts as well. Reputations are most at stake in Toraja during communal feasts, when seating, food, and drink are all very visibly distributed according to one’s status and prestige. Although hosts and meat dividers usually try not to offend people during these distributions, they sometimes have reason to assert one person’s status over another, and they know just how to do this in the most visible, humiliating way—for example, by giving a high-status person a small and inferior piece of meat when they deserve a large and preferred one, or by not displaying a prize sacrificial animal prominently enough, thereby depriving the donor of his or her proper recogniton. Lastly, and very briefly, I want to mention empathy or its lack with regard to animals. Toraja raise chickens, pigs, and buffalo for consumption, pigs and

Vicissitudes of “Empathy” in a Rural Toraja Village

205

buffalo being the most prized animals and the ones that are featured at communal feasts, where they are proudly displayed for all to see before they are killed and butchered, and their meat distributed. While the killing of these animals can be quite violent—pigs are often killed with a stab to the heart, while buffalo are slashed across the throat with a machete—their care and grooming beforehand can be surprisingly tender. Pigs are sometimes fed a special cooked mash of assorted grasses and vegetables, and buffalo can be brushed, groomed, and fattened almost the way dogs are in the US. Of course some of this attention comes from the fact that they are prize animals, to be displayed before being killed and eaten. A fat, healthy-looking animal brings recognition and prestige to the owner and host. But because pigs and buffalo are usually killed at funerals, there tends to be a close association between them and the deceased as well. Indeed, according to the traditional religion, the spirits of the slaughtered pigs and buffalo accompany decedents to the afterworld, where they form the basis of their wealth and prosperity. This close association between humans and pigs and buffalos may help explain why the care given the latter is so human-like in some ways, and why people sometimes dream at night of being killed and butchered in just the way buffalo are at funerals. This kind of empathic connection does not extend to all animals, however. We often saw children playing with birds, insects, and other small animals in fairly cruel and harsh ways, poking them with sticks, smashing them, etc. And treatment of dogs, which many people keep to warn of approaching strangers, can be downright sadistic. Most of the ones in our hamlet were half-starved, diseased, and frequently beaten or stoned. Such explicit lack of empathy in some contexts raises another interesting question: what is the overall balance of empathy and its lack in a community? If people are empathic toward certain people and animals, does that necessarily mean they will be less than empathic toward others? How do people justify the differential use of empathy, if they do?

Variations in Display of Empathy

Thus far I have discussed contexts in which displays of empathy or their inhibition or suppression are likely to occur. But it is important to remember that actual responses vary by individual. For example, children are usually less empathic than most adults because they are still learning when and where it is appropriate to share with others, and to feel or recognize shame and other social emotions. On the other end of the life cycle, elderly people, too, may sometimes appear less empathically responsive because, having already paid their social and economic dues to family and community, they are given more license to feel and fend for themselves and to be cared for by others (see Hollan

206

Douglas W. Hollan

and Wellenkamp 1996: 168–173). From a strictly quantitative point of view, higher-status and wealthy people have more opportunities to display, suffer, or suppress empathic responses because so many people turn to them in time of need, following the social logic of asking help from those above you while helping those below. Empathic responses vary by gender as well, though more in terms of expression than in feeling or motivation. For example, because women spend more time in the household and village and less time in the fields and gardens than men do, and because they have the primary responsibility for caring for newborns and very young children, they are the ones responding most immediately and directly to the needs and concerns of children. And it is women as well who most obviously tend to the needs of friends and visitors, since it is considered women’s work to offer food, drink, and other concrete signs of concern and respect. Yet as far as Wellenkamp and I could ascertain (Hollan and Wellenkamp 1994, 1996), men were just as likely to feel love/compassion/pity toward others as women were. Indeed, while most men would be embarrassed to assume directly the woman’s role of preparing food or drink for someone, they are often the ones who initiate such offers or orchestrate them from behind the scenes. And it is often men to whom children and other relatives turn when they have complaints about mothers or other women being too harsh or unfeeling. Apart from these variations in empathic response due to social role and expectation, there are variations due to differences in life experience as well. These developmental differences may be quite significant, yet many anthropologists overlook or ignore them. For example, Nene‘na Tandi, the elder I quoted above who speaks so eloquently about the importance of using “sweet” words to sooth and comfort people, was sensitive to the needs of others, in part, because of his own troubled upbringing and early adulthood. He had been a wild and rambunctious youth whose family had actually exiled him to a distant corner of Tana Toraja for several years because of his constant misbehavior. As an adolescent and young adult he remained defiant, traveling to Irian on the western side of the island of New Guinea in an attempt to make his fortune as a trader. But once there, he found the province in chaos as the Indonesian military invaded and sought to establish control over the area. He was penniless there and nearly starved, he reports.5 It was during this period of great suffering and uncertainty in his life that he began to think, along very traditional religious lines, that he was being punished by God and the ancestors for his defiant, self-centered behavior. After barely escaping Irian and returning to Toraja, he attempted to develop, contritely, a more conventional life for himself: he moved back to his home district, married a woman his parents approved of, and began to farm the family’s rice fields. Eventually he became the accomplished farmer, leader, and orator

Vicissitudes of “Empathy” in a Rural Toraja Village

207

I knew during my fieldwork. But even so, he and his wife were never able to have their own children. This was a great misfortune for him, since the Toraja consider children to be the most important emotional, social, and economic resource a person can have. Nene‘na Tandi never stopped worrying that his childlessness was a sign that God and the ancestors were continuing to punish him for his earlier misbehavior in life, despite the many offerings and prayers he had made over the years. Hardships such as these can sometimes make a person bitter and unsympathetic to the plight of others (especially to those whom one imagines have suffered less than oneself), but they seem to have had the opposite effect on Nene‘na Tandi. By Toraja standards, he was an unusually kind and generous man who used his exceptional oratorical skills to soothe and comfort people. Some of this was rhetorical: he was using a well-established genre of speech to influence others and to bring attention to himself. But he was also quite sincere in his urge to comfort. He knew what it was like to suffer, to be abandoned, to feel small and forgotten. He used his words to reach out and comfort in the way he had wished others would do for him at various points in his life. Part of the “advice” he often gave people was to listen to those more wise and knowledgeable than themselves, as he had failed to do as a youth—for which he continued to suffer. He was sensitive to others’ misfortunes, in part, because he had suffered so many himself, and he wanted to help others avoid the kind of mistakes he had made. In contrast, Nene‘na Limbong appears to have grown up with many of the things that Nene‘na Tandi did not: high status, stable caretaking, a relatively prosperous family, two marriages that produced thirteen children and numerous grandchildren, and positions of leadership from his youth onward. He was considered one of the wealthiest men in the community I studied, and certainly he wielded considerable political and economic influence. Yet in many ways he was less empathic and responsive to others than was Nene‘na Tandi. Some of his “hardness” and suspiciousness of others can be related to the fact that he was indeed a wealthy man to whom many people turned in times of need. He had learned through many years of playing the role of patron that people did sometimes lie about their circumstances in order to receive help or resources, and that he needed to protect himself and his family from the community’s nearly insatiable demands. He was one of the Toraja I knew who would sometimes dream of himself at night as a sacrificial animal that was being killed, butchered, and distributed to the community in just the ways that pigs and buffalo are at public feasts. But his suspiciousness and wariness of others went beyond the immediate demands of his social role. He could recall, for example, how politically unstable and dangerous the Toraja highlands had been when he was a young man, during the Japanese occupation in World War II and up until the solidifying

208

Douglas W. Hollan

of the Indonesian national state in the 1950s. The Japanese were harsh with everyone, Nene‘na Limbong reports, but especially toward people like himself who had worked with the previous Dutch-controlled government. This identification with the Dutch haunted him even after the Japanese were defeated, as a number of Islamist and federalist militias fought to establish and maintain a new, locally controlled political order in South Sulawesi. During this time, anyone who had been associated with the imposition of Dutch or Japanese rule was at some risk, and many Toraja feared that their Muslim neighbors to the south would overrun them. Nene‘na Limbong was frightened enough for his own safety in those days that, after dreaming he had been stabbed and thrown in a river, a dream he took to be prophetic, he fled to a coastal city for a time. Such scary dreams in which Nene‘na Limbong saw himself being attacked or harmed by others were not unusual for him, dating back to his childhood but continuing into adulthood (see Hollan 2003). In one that was particularly upsetting to him, the spirit of his deceased father attacked him and tried to drag him off to the afterworld, which again, according to Nene‘na Limbong, portended his own death. We see, then, that Nene‘na Limbong’s wariness of others dates back to his childhood and seems characteristic of the way he engages others. Later experiences, as someone suspected of being a Dutch sympathizer and as a wealthy patron fending off countless requests for aid and assistance, contributed to and reinforced his wariness of others, but in turn, his long-standing wariness has led him to be more contentious and less diplomatic in his patron role than he has needed to be (compared to other patrons), and certainly less “empathic” than others in the community, such as Nene‘na Tandi. I discuss these differences in the way people typically engage with others to underscore the fact that while one can identify contexts and situations in Toraja in which displays of compassion and concern are more likely to occur than in others, actual displays are very much affected by the histories and characteristics of the people involved. Those who have become wary of others, such as Nene‘na Limbong, have a more difficult time identifying and responding to others’ needs, even when those needs are considered socially and culturally legitimate. Conversely, people like Nene‘na Tandi may go out of their way to engage with others and help them, even when that help is not culturally expected or rewarded. Of course there may be patterns to such intracultural variation in the display of empathy. For example, it may be that adults born higher in the birth order are generally more empathic than those born lower down, since in Toraja, it is these firstborn children who must learn early on to suppress their own needs in order to help tend children even younger than themselves. Or it may be that certain kinds of psychological wounds or nurturing experiences eventuate in empathic responsiveness while other kinds of

Vicissitudes of “Empathy” in a Rural Toraja Village

209

wounds or nurturing experiences eventuate in bitterness, defensiveness, and lack of empathy. The point is that individuals internalize and enact culturally constituted values in different ways depending on how those values are learned and either reinforced or undermined throughout life, and that this process of internalization is highly dynamic with many unintended and sometimes idiosyncratic outcomes. People who have suffered may sometimes identify with the sufferings of others and display compassion, even when that is not culturally expected. Those who are expected to show compassion and concern do not sometimes, too caught up in their own neediness or wariness.6 Displays of empathy and compassion (or their absence) are shaped, then, not only by the cultural values and expectations in which they are embedded, but also by the unique proclivities of the participants involved, and by the history of those participants’ real or imagined interactions together.

Discussion and Conclusion

In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1985 [1902]), William James argued that we needed to document all the varied forms and contexts of religious experiences before we could begin to build a more general theory about them and their significance to human life.7 James’s point applies to the study of most other emotional states and experiences as well, including empathy. As Jason Throop and I have suggested (Hollan and Throop 2008), empathy has been and remains an elusive concept and experience, sometimes quite difficult to distinguish from other attitudes of understanding and concern. Given this, it is important for us to study it ethnographically, as it ebbs and flows in the course of everyday life in a variety of cultural settings, before we too quickly assume we know how to define it or understand its role and significance in human life. At a minimum, though, the concept of empathy implies that one can gain more or less accurate understanding of another’s thoughts and feelings. It is the “accuracy” part that distinguishes empathy from mere projection, the attribution of one’s thoughts or feelings to another, whether accurate or not. In the present chapter, I have identified contexts and circumstances in which Toraja encourage and utilize empathic-like understandings among themselves, as well as those in which they discourage, interfere with, or even prohibit them. My use of the term “empathic-like” here is intended. The Toraja, like several of the other societies examined in this volume, do not have a single word that easily glosses as “empathy.” Rather, they have words and phrases that translate roughly as “love/compassion/concern,” which, when taken together, come close to capturing the meaning of “empathy” as we usually use that term in English.

210

Douglas W. Hollan

But note the different semantic and emotional shadings as well. In Toraja, “empathy” implies more than merely understanding others’ thoughts and feelings from a first-person perspective. It implies a non-erotic love, compassion, pity, and concern for them as well, all of which usually entail further feelings of moral obligation toward these others. Conversely, a lack of empathy in Toraja implies not only that one does not understand others’ thoughts and feelings, but that one is not moved by their plights, feels no need to intervene in them, and does not oneself feel diminished or hurt by them. Such shadings are important and should encourage us, I think, to reexamine our own ways of defining empathy and how it differs (or not) from other closely related concepts and experiences, such as love, compassion, and sympathy. One of my major points in this chapter is that since empathic understanding is an intersubjective accomplishment that implicates the imaginative and emotional capacities of the person who is to be understood as well as those attempting to understand (Hollan 2008), we need to examine how and when it is that people promote or hinder understanding of themselves, even to the point of merely imagining themselves to be understood or misunderstood at times. As I have noted, one of the ways Toraja actively promote understanding is to utilize a discourse of persuasion, coaxing, and appeal to seek help and concern. Such appeals can be quite direct and public at times, and when they are considered legitimate, they may trigger very powerful feelings of love/compassion/empathy from others. Appeals from kin or close neighbors seem to elicit the most powerful and positive responses from others, in conformity with Mageo’s hypothesis (this volume) that empathy serves an important boundary-maintaining function among groups. But at least some of the Toraja I have known and observed were loath to remain impassive to a legitimate appeal for help or concern, no matter who it came from. It seems, then, that empathy can be used to create and reinforce boundaries among people, but also to bridge and overcome them (see Hermann and Feinberg, this volume), depending on circumstance and the moral frameworks within which it is embedded (cf. Levinas 1998). Another point I have made is that the experience and display of empathy in Toraja is contingent. While certainly there are situations and settings in which people are more likely to empathize than in others, especially when triggered by an appeal for help, whether they do in fact respond empathically depends very much on their own state of affairs: whether or not they have the emotional and material resources to respond, whether or not they feel overwhelmed by existing responsibilities, whether or not they have fallen prey to negative gossip and rumors about others, and so on. Such contingencies may affect not only one’s ability to act upon feelings of empathy, but also one’s very ability to experience them at all.

Vicissitudes of “Empathy” in a Rural Toraja Village

211

Previous life experience may also affect people’s ability and willingness to empathize. Nene‘na Tandi, a man who suffered many hardships and indignities as a youth, identifies strongly with others who suffer and struggle, so he tends to empathize with people and come to their assistance even when such help is not culturally expected. Nene‘na Limbong, on the other hand, grew up feeling assaulted by others’ needs and appeals and is often wary and suspicious of them. Others perceive him as being relatively ungenerous, harsh, and unempathic, even though he is one of the wealthiest and most secure people in the community. Contingencies such as these remind us that though cultural values and expectations may encourage empathic responses in certain situations, they cannot determine them, if other factors intervene. Unfortunately, then, in some situations, empathy can become a luxury that only those with adequate security and resources can afford. The Toraja idiom of empathy also brings into question the tendency to assume that everyday forms of empathy require unusual or highly practiced forms of discernment—whether of symbols and meanings (Geertz 1984 [1974]), social “positionality” (Rosaldo 1989 [1984]), emotional and behavioral “resonance” (Wikan 1992), or neurobiological “mirroring” (see Hollan 2008 for a discussion of these various perspectives). Empathy as exceptional discernment presumes that we do not know much about others and their circumstances, and that others will be unwilling or unable to foster our understanding of them. And indeed, this may in fact be a safe presumption in many urban and contemporary societies, where people are often disconnected from one another, ignorant about the basic circumstances of each other’s lives, and ashamed of appearing weak, incompetent, or dependent. But in more closely knit, face-to-face communities, such as the rural villages of Toraja, or in places where life is more routinized, public, and predictable, people do know a lot about each other’s lives, including others’ relatively “intimate” needs, concerns, and fears. Such knowledge and circumstances do not make other people’s thoughts and feelings transparent by any means, but they certainly make them easier to understand, especially if there are culturally encouraged ways of communicating about oneself, such as the Toraja discourse of appeal. Indeed, as Throop and I have suggested (Hollan and Throop 2008), it may be that “marked” forms of empathy involving exceptional forms of discernment are necessitated by just those times and places in the social fabric when more direct ways of understanding others are limited or undermined by politics, anxiety, fear, or ignorance. If this is so, then the benefits of mutual understanding can be gained not only by promoting more and better forms empathy per se, but also by eliminating the veils of ignorance and deception that keep people apart and make them strangers to one another and to themselves.

212

Douglas W. Hollan

Finally, the Toraja case and all the others presented in this volume remind us that no matter what the biological and evolutionary underpinnings of empathy turn out to be, empathic understanding of others is a highly complex social and cultural process that can only become manifest through particular idioms of expression and within highly particularized cultural and moral contexts. Given this, ethnography should be considered a primary tool in its investigation, not a secondary or optional one. Notes I am extremely grateful to my co-editor, Jason Throop, for our many illuminating conversations about empathy and for his dedication to this project. I also thank Rupert Stasch for his many helpful comments on an earlier draft. 1. For a more complete and detailed description of Toraja social and cultural life, see Hollan and Wellenkamp (1994, 1996), Volkman (1985), and Adams (2006). 2. “Smoke descending” rituals, rambu solo’, were directed toward the spirits of the deceased. Since these were the most frequently held rituals, the ones the Toraja were most dedicated to, and the ones that could be most easily assimilated as a type of funeral ceremony, early Dutch missionaries tolerated them. But they adamantly opposed and discouraged “smoke ascending” rituals, rambu tuka‘, which they considered pagan-like offerings to non-Christian spirits and gods. 3. Though it is certainly possible to empathize with another’s need to lie or deceive. 4. For several examples of how exhortations to share and to give are linked to the tendency to protectively guard one’s own interests, see Hollan and Wellenkamp (1994: 150–157). For comparative purposes, see Knauft (1985) and Lindholm (1982). 5. For further analysis of this case, see Hollan 2004. 6. There is a growing body of evidence in the field of social neuroscience suggesting that “personal distress” may interfere with one’s ability to empathize or empathize accurately. See, for example, Ickes (2009), Eisenberg and Eggum (2009), and Decety and Lamm (2009). 7. The structure of the book reflects that argument: it begins with rich, detailed descriptions of religious experience and phenomenology and only later turns to more general comments and ideas.

Bibliography Adams, Kathleen. 2006. Art as Politics: Re-crafting Identity, Tourism, and Power in Tana Toraja, Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Bigalke, Terrance. 2005. Tana Toraja: A Social History of an Indonesian People. Leiden: KITLV Press. Damasio, Antonio R. 1999 The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace. Decety, Jean, and Claus Lamm. 2009. “Empathy versus Personal Distress: Recent Evidence from Social Neuroscience.” In The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, ed. Jean Decety and William Ickes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Vicissitudes of “Empathy” in a Rural Toraja Village

213

Eisenberg, Nancy, and Natalie D. Eggum. 2009. “Empathic Responding: Sympathy and Personal Distress.” In The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, ed. Jean Decety and William Ickes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1984 [1974]. “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.” In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geertz, Hildred. 1961. The Javanese Family. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Hollan, Douglas. 1990. “Indignant Suicide in the Pacific: An Example from the Toraja Highlands of Indonesia.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 14: 365–379. ———. 1996. “Cultural and Experiential Aspects of Spirit Beliefs among the Toraja.” In Spirits in Culture, History, and Mind, ed. Jeannette Marie Mageo and Alan Howard. New York: Routledge. ———. 2003. “The Cultural and Intersubjective Context of Dream Remembrance and Reporting: Dreams, Aging, and the Anthropological Encounter in Toraja, Indonesia.” In Dream Travelers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the Western Pacific, ed. Roger Ivar Lohmann. New York: Palgrave. ———. 2004. “Self Systems, Cultural Idioms of Distress, and the Psycho-Bodily Consequences of Childhood Suffering.” Transcultural Psychiatry 41: 62–79. ———. 2008. “Being There: On the Imaginative Aspects of Understanding Others and Being Understood.” Ethos 36: 475–489. Hollan, Douglas, and C. Jason Throop. 2008. “Whatever Happened to Empathy? Introduction.” Ethos 36 (4): 385–401. Hollan, Douglas W., and Jane C. Wellenkamp. 1994. Contentment and Suffering: Culture and Experience in Toraja. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996. The Thread of Life: Toraja Reflections on the Life Cycle. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Iacoboni, Marco, 2008. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Ickes, William. 2009. “Empathic Accuracy: Its Links to Clinical, Cognitive, Developmental, Social, and Physiological Psychology.” In The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, ed. Jean Decety and William Ickes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. James, William. 1985 [1902]. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin Books. Knauft, Bruce M. 1985. Good Company and Violence: Sorcery and Social Action in a Lowland New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. On Thinking of the Other. New York: Columbia University Press. Levy, Robert I. 1973. Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lindholm, Charles. 1982. Generosity and Jealousy: The Swat Pukhtun of Northern Pakistan. New York: Columbia University Press. Rosaldo, Renato. 1989 [1984]. “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage.” In Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schieffelin, Edward L. 1985. “Anger, Grief, and Shame: Towards a Kaluli Ethnopsychology.” In Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies, ed. Geoffrey M. White and John Kirkpatrick. Berkeley: University of California Press.

214

Douglas W. Hollan

Volkman, Toby. 1985. Feasts of Honor: Ritual and Change in the Toraja Highlands. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Wallace, Anthony. 1961. Culture and Personality. New York: Random House. Watson-Gegeo, Karen, and Geoffrey White, eds. 1990. Disentangling: Conflict Discourse in Pacific Societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wikan, Unni. 1990. Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992. “Beyond the Words: The Power of Resonance.” American Ethnologist 19: 460–482.

1 Empathy and Anthropology An Afterword ALAN RUMSEY

In a recent feature story in the Times Higher Education Supplement entitled “The Great Divide,” Hannah Fearn (2008) declares that Today, anthropology is at war with itself. The discipline has divided into two schools of thought—the social anthropologists and the evolutionary anthropologists.… Put crudely, social anthropologists describe and compare the development of human cultures and societies, while evolutionary anthropologists seek to explain it by reference to our biological evolution. Not the least of this collection’s virtues is that, if there is such a war going on, the contributors have apparently not heard about it. All of them seem to agree at least implicitly with Douglas Hollan’s operating assumptions that: 1) We are a highly social species with evolved capacities to know and relate to others, including the inborn tendency to respond to the emotional states and facial expressions of others. (Hollan, this volume) 2) whatever its biological and evolutionary underpinnings, … empathy is a highly complex social and emotional process that can only become manifest through particular idioms of expression and within highly particularized cultural and moral contexts. (Ibid.) If we accept both of these assumptions, there is really no need for warfare between biological-evolutionary approaches and sociocultural ones, nor any basis for a reduction of the phenomena of empathy to either one of these two domains. Rather, as Lévi-Strauss argued years ago regarding the incest taboo, they lie at the interface between the two. The comparison with ideas about incest is apt in another way as well, for as several of the essays in this collection show, just as differences among culturally specific understandings about what constitutes correct mating practice have figured in stereotypic, evaluative construals of one society by another, so have ideas about differences in the amount or quality of empathy that they feel.

216

Alan Rumsey

This is evident, for example, when Elfriede Hermann tells us that the Banabans “have integrated the concept of empathy as an integral part of their ethnic self, the better to represent themselves as capable of expressing ‘pity’ for others, but also as entitled to receive the ‘pity’ of others” (Hermann, this volume). Likewise, Feinberg reports that “while Anutans demand that members of their own community express aropa for one another, they have no comparable expectations of non-Anutans, whom they often stereotype as stingy, violent, or prone to drunkenness and irresponsibility” (Feinberg, this volume). Conversely, Hollan shows us that in the Toraja highlands those negative projections that are inverse of true empathy (insofar as they are inaccurate) are directed outward at other ethnic groups, in this case especially the Muslim Bugis and Makassar (Hollan, this volume). If empathy “can only become manifest through particular idioms of expression and within highly particularized cultural and moral contexts,” how is it be identified for comparative purposes? Here it should be noted that, notwithstanding the exclusive focus of this volume on empathy as a human phenomenon, the relevant comparative field has been taken to include a wider range of species by many investigators, including Preston and de Waal, whose (2002) article on the subject is cited approvingly by Lohmann (this volume). In that publication they lay out a number of useful distinctions among kinds of “empathy” that have been attributed to many different species, and they cite some remarkable examples, especially among our closest primate cousins, the chimpanzees and bonobos. One of these examples is described more fully in a subsequent book by de Waal in the following terms: When a bonobo named Kuni saw a starling hit the glass of her enclosure at the Twycross Zoo in Great Britain, she went to comfort it. Picking up the stunned bird, Kuni gently set it on its feet. When it failed to move, she threw it a little, but the bird just fluttered. With the starling in hand, Kuni then climbed to the top of the tallest tree, wrapping her legs around the trunk so that she had both hands free to hold the bird. She carefully unfolded its wings and spread them wide, holding one wing between the fingers of each hand, before sending the bird like a little toy airplane out toward the barrier of her enclosure. But the bird fell short of freedom and landed on the moat. Kuni climbed down and stood watch over the starling for a long time, protecting it against a curious juvenile. By the end of the day, the recovered bird had flown to safety. The way Kuni helped this bird was unlike anything she would have done to another ape. Instead of following some hardwired pattern of behavior, she tailored her assistance to the specific situation of an animal totally different from herself. The birds passing by her enclosure must have given her an idea of what help was needed. This

Afterword

217

kind of empathy is almost unheard of in animals since it rests on the ability to imagine the circumstances of another. Adam Smith … must have had actions like Kuni’s in mind (though not performed by an ape) when … he offered us the most enduring definition of empathy as “changing places in fancy with the sufferer.” (de Waal 2005: 2) When de Waal says that this kind of empathy—which Preston and de Waal (2002) call “cognitive empathy”—“is almost unheard of in animals,” he is presumably referring to species other than apes, since a large sample of other reports of it in apes is referred to in Preston and de Waal (2002: 19). It is perhaps understandable that such cases are not considered in a book such as the present one, which is focused largely on cultural construals of empathy, but even within this focus it is important to bear them in mind in relation to the first of Hollan’s two working assumptions cited above. Such examples also provide a useful—indeed humbling—corrective to cultural stereotypes of the kind that that I have referred to. In practice, most of the authors in this collection seem to assume a single working definition of empathy that is something like the one that Jason Throop takes from Theodor Lipps and subsequent literature, according to which it involves: “(1) de-centering of the self from its own self-experience; (2) imagining the perspective of another from a quasi-first person perspective; and (3) approximating the feelings, emotions, motives, concerns, and thoughts of another mind.” (Throop, this volume). Notwithstanding Jeannette Mageo’s reservations about the specificity of the notion of “imagining” that is assumed by this definition (Mageo, this volume), all of the essays show that the ethnographic cases they treat under the rubric of empathy involve some or all the features in this definition. However, I think they also demonstrate the relevance of two more features that it does not include. The first is that, in keeping with the etymological connection between empathy and pathos—“pain, suffering”—and with Adam Smith’s wonderful definition of empathy as “changing places in fancy with the sufferer,” the feelings, emotions, and thoughts that we and our ethnographic subjects are said to empathize with are typically painful ones. This is well exemplified by Maria Lepowsky’s comment that the Vanatinai Islanders often “express compassion, pity, or sorrow for the predicted or imagined suffering of others by ritually, quite literally, crying for another’s pain” (Lepowsky, this volume). Most of the examples discussed in all the essays involve empathizing with the suffering or needs of others: the dispossession of the Banabans as described by Hermann, the hunger of one’s fellow Bosmun as described by von Poser, and so forth. None of the examples involves approximating or identifying with positive feelings such as joy. If they did, I think we would wonder whether that could really be described as empathy. Given how that word is used in English it would sound odd to say, for example, that I empathized with my colleague’s joy at

218

Alan Rumsey

being appointed dean—odd enough to be interpreted as ironical, the idea being that from my point of view there is something painful about the matter even if my colleague does not see it that way. But in that interpretation I am not really seeing the situation from my colleague’s viewpoint, but from mine, so it is not empathy as understood here, which assumes a “quasi–first person” point of view. The second additional characteristic that most of the ethnographic examples have in common is that, insofar as the empathizer’s quasi–first-person knowledge about the other informs his or her actions in respect of that person, it is typically used to benevolent ends rather than malevolent ones. Following Halpern (2001: 36), von Poser points out that “while compassion and sympathy principally answer the purpose of goodwill, empathy [as “understanding”] can be used to follow opposite goals as well” (this volume), and she illustrates this with some good examples. But in most of the other chapters, empathy is associated more or less exclusively with benevolent intentions. In Hollan’s essay, this is said to be so as a matter of principle, at least in Toraja understandings of the matter. He says, “In Toraja, ‘empathy’ implies more than merely understanding others’ thoughts and feelings from a first-person perspective” (this volume). Among other things it implies “compassion, pity, and concern for them as well, all of which usually entail further feelings of moral obligation toward these others” (ibid.). All of these things also seem to be entailed by the Anutan notion of aropa and its variants around the Pacific, including the cognate Samoan notion of alofa discussed by Mageo. In this sense, a, if not the prototype of empathy is the mother-child relationship as discussed by Mageo in terms of attachment theory as developed by Bowlby and Ainsworth. I find the argument of Mageo’s chapter interesting, in that it is both the most universalistic in its claims about the ultimate ontogenetic grounding of all forms of empathy in what she calls “skinship” and “gaze-ship” and the attachment between mothers and infants that arises from it, and the most relativistic, in its claims about the differences among the ontogenetically later forms that empathy takes in different societies. She distinguishes between “self-other empathy”—based on intersubjectivity—which she sees as having first developed only with the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, and “enacted empathy,” which is an inter-group relation and is “the constitutive practice of what Mauss calls ‘gift economies’” (Mageo, this volume).1 On the face of it, this claim to would seem to be incompatible with von Poser’s suggestion that empathy per se “is more likely to flourish on the grounds of a relational model of sociality than an individualist one” (von Poser, this volume). I find both of these views in need of qualification, in ways that largely remove the apparent contradiction between them. First, with regard to mother-child relations, we need to pay more attention to differences between

Afterword

219

the Ainsworth-Bowlby account and the Freudian one, and also to the way in which these have been dealt with in more recent work on infant intersubjectivity by researchers such as Colwyn Travarthen, Daniel Stern, Peter Hobson, and Michael Tomasello. Compared to Freud’s conception, attachment theory as developed by Bowlby, Ainsworth, and others has a radically different starting point—one in which the infant is viewed as psychologically isolated and as achieving human connectedness through active processes of attachment, in the first instance to the mother. The Freudian account, on other hand, begins with an original “oceanic” state of oneness between mother and infant, and views the psychological development of the child as an active process of separation from the mother. Attachment theory has been more solidly based on empirical observation of mothers and their infants than was Freud’s account, which was based entirely on retrospective reconstruction through his interviews with adult patients. But as Mageo (this volume) points out, the observational basis of attachment theory too has been limited, initially to the experimental setting called the “Strange Situation,” in which a mother accompanies her child into a room and then leaves. More recently, psychologists such as Travarthen and Stern have engaged in much more long-term, naturalistic observation of mothers and children, on the basis of which they have developed a rich account of processes of what they call affective attunement between them. These involve what Mageo calls gaze-ship and skinship, but also prelinguistic forms of vocalization, as well as what is known as amodal perception (Stern 1985: 47–53), through which, long before the beginning of language acquisition per se—indeed, according to Travarthen (1980), within a few hours of birth—the infant begins to engage in what Bateson (1979) calls “proto-conversations,” which very early on come to involve exchange of roles and perspectives with its caregiver (cf. Travarthen and Aitken 2001). On the basis of this work, Stern has developed a layered model of senses of self, and of self-with-other, in which (contra both Freud and Bowlby) both of these senses are present at every phase of growth and develop in relation to each other, so that, for example, when language and verbal skills begin to develop, a radically new domain of relatedness to others and of self-reflexivity is opened up, along with new kinds of gaps between self and other, and between different aspects of the experience of self (Stern 1985: 162–182 and passim). Another recent body of work in developmental and clinical psychology that I see as highly relevant here is the research by people such as Michael Tomasello and Peter Hobson on the role of joint attention in early face-to-face interactions, and the differences between autistic people and others in that respect (e.g., Hobson 2004; Tomasello et al. 2005). A prime example is what Mageo calls gazeship, in that this involves not only infant and caregiver looking at each other, but moments of shared attention in which both of them direct their

220

Alan Rumsey

gaze at the same third person or other object that lies outside the circuit of exchange between them—or in which, for example, the infant attends, through back-and-forth eye and head movements, to the gaze direction of the caregiver and to an object that the infant is reaching for or crawling toward. Here again, as in processes studied by Stern and Travarthen, individuation and connection to others, rather than being opposing processes, are two sides of the same coin. Through the process of attending jointly to a common object, and sharing and exchanging perspectives toward it, the infant simultaneously develops a sense both of self-with-other and of self as distinct from other. So far, almost all this research has been done in Western settings, and the models that have been developed from it may have to be modified in certain respects as similarly rigorous studies of infant intersubjectivity and joint attention become available from elsewhere. But the dialectic of individuation and connectedness that has been elucidated by these studies is, it seems to me, a core feature of the human condition—as also emphasized by many other psychologists and philosophers going back at least as far as Hegel (1977 [1807]) and including, for example, George Herbert Mead (1934), Lev Vygotsky (1978), and Jerome Bruner (1990). So, in short, I heartily agree with Mageo that aspects of the relationship between infants and caregivers form the basis for all later relationships of what we call empathy. But in keeping with the work I have been discussing, I would not see empathy as ever simply a matter of simulated “oneness,” but as always necessarily involving a self-other relation, in which neither self nor other can be taken as entirely given—as existing prior to the relationship. Rather, both are always in part produced by that relationship and others like it over the course of social interaction. I think this holds true independently of Mageo’s valid point that societies differ in what they take to the kinds of actors that engage in these relationships (“individual” versus “group,” etc.) and, accordingly, in the normative locus of empathy (the individual imagination vs. the public space of social action). As shown by many of the chapters in this volume, selfother relations are not limited to ones between or among individuals, but can also involve social entities or categories such as Banaba (Hermann), Toraja (Hollan), Anuta (Feinberg), or a particular age-grade cohort among the Samoans (Mageo). Nor is the individual psyche a unitary entity with respect to the self-other dialectic. One can, for example, be Banaban through one’s mother and Kiribati through one’s father—or, as von Poser points out, an affine in the presence of one’s wife’s brother, an agnate in the presence of one’s father’s brother’s son, a son in the presence of one’s mother, etc. And, in less institutionalized ways, one can feel self-conflicted or, as my Ku Waru friends from the Papua New Guinea Highlands put it, “have many minds,” through the internal opposition among introjected social voices that populate the psyche in the “individualis-

Afterword

221

tic” West just as much as in the more patently “socially oriented” (Mageo, this volume) or “relational” societies that are the subject of this volume. It is at the level of that self-other dialectic in general that I would I would place all the more culturally and historically specific elaborations of “empathy” that are so interestingly explored in these essays. As shown by several of the essays, one of the ways in which that dialectic is played out is through the use of narrative. This is a central theme in Lepowsky’s chapter, which reflects extensively upon the use of narrative by Lepowsky herself, as a way of allowing her readers to empathize with her ethnographic subjects, the Vanatinai, and in particular to empathize with their understandings of empathy as a human attribute. Narrative comes into von Poser’s paper in another way, namely through the evidence she draws from an important myth (of a female creator figure named Nzari) for her account of Bosmun understandings of what she calls “food-related empathic skills.” This is an excellent example of how the evidential base of our attempts to understand people’s ideas about the nature of human social life can be broadened beyond the more usual of sort of evidence that is used in discussions of this kind, namely people’s meta-level discourses about the processes in question—in this case empathic ones. Narrative provides a different sort of evidence insofar as it represents, from an insider’s viewpoint, instances of the practices in question rather than comprising second-order talk about those practices. Or, as linguistic anthropologists would put the matter, it provides evidence from representations of discourse pragmatics rather than from metapragmatic discourse. This is especially valuable, given that, as shown by recent work on language ideology, metapragmatic discourse can never simply “reflect” the practices that it is about, and may even systematically misrecognize them in particular, interested ways. This point is borne out by Lohmann’s report that in his fieldwork, the Asabano showed widespread agreement with the notion that one cannot “know” with certainty what other people think or feel unless they tell. Laurie [a young man whom Lohmann had trained as a linguistic informant and translator] confirmed that this is regarded as common knowledge. This tenet implies that empathy, as accurate knowledge of another’s inner state, is impossible. Nevertheless, both linguistic and narrative evidence contradict this explicit assertion. (Lohmann, this volume) The idea that one can never know with certainty what others think and feel—what Robbins and Rumsey (2008) call the doctrine of the “opacity of other minds”— is also attested in other chapters in this volume, by Lepowsky for the Vanatinai Islanders, and for the Samoans and Anutans by Mageo and

222

Alan Rumsey

Feinberg. It is in fact one of the most widely attested commonplaces in the folk psychologies of the world.2 In the Ku Waru region of Papua New Guinea (approximately 200 kilometers to the east of the Asabano in an otherwise quite different part of the Highlands) I have found, just as Lohmann has among the Asabano, not only that in-principle assertions of the opacity doctrine are common, but that they are contradicted by other things that people do, including the stories that they tell. For example, in a genre of sung tales of courtship that are composed and performed in the region, at the point in the story when the lovers first meet, there is often a passage such as this: “Right then he wanted to marry her. / That’s what the man was thinking. / And she thought the same about him. / The minds of both, you see / Were working completely as one.” In other words, given the lovers’ strong mutual attraction, it is possible for each of them to know what is in the other’s mind because it is the same as what is in his or her own. In the publication from which this example is taken, I also discuss two other examples of Ku Waru practices or discursive commonplaces that seem to contradict the locally espoused doctrine of the unknowability of other minds (Rumsey 2008: 464–466). What all the examples have in common—and share with most of the examples of empathy that are discussed in the present volume—is that the evidence from which the mental state of the other is inferred is not an explicit declaration of it, but some other aspect of their behavior or bodily condition. Thus, Lohmann tells us that the Asabano trust their senses as sources of relatively sure knowledge. Since they regard it impossible to directly witness, in any state of consciousness, the interior experiences of other people, certain knowledge of another’s felt experience is for them likewise impossible. Yet, through a combination of what they regard as sensory perceptions of the outside world and internally derived images, the Asabano do engage in empathetic exercises. (Lohmann, this volume) The capacity that makes this possible is sosat-, which Lohmann glosses as ‘heart-togetherness’. In order to understand this concept it is important to note that the Asabano—in common with the Banabans as described by Hermann and the Vanatinai Islanders as described by Lepowsky—do not distinguish sharply between “thought” and “feeling” and, accordingly, that they do not posit a separate organ of thinking such the brain, but see the heart as the locus of all varieties of what Lohmann calls “mentation,” including thinking, feeling, imagining, and planning. I take it that one reason why Asabano believe “heart-togetherness” to be possible is that they assume that, even though people’s thoughts/feelings may differ, their hearts all work in basically the same way. If so, they are in agreement with the Ku Waru people, who do posit a

Afterword

223

separate organ of thought, the numan, and among whom there is a standard saying that even though the color of people’s skins may differ, we all have the same heart (mudumong tilupu), the same mind (numan tilupu), and the same eyes (mong tilupu).3 This being the case, as pointed out to me by one of my Ku Waru interlocutors, John Onga, even when people are trying to deceive each other, by observing their actions it is possible to discern the thoughts that motivate those actions. This of course depends on those actions being based in a common lifeworld, or as Lohmann (this volume) puts it, “an environment and situation that are partly known,” so that “in heart-togetherness one imaginatively creates an experiential scenario from the perspective of the empathizee that is likely to be at least partially accurate” (ibid.). So too does the anthropologist, as discussed by Lohmann and several of the other contributors to this ethnographically rich, highly cohesive, and timely volume. Perhaps its single most valuable feature is the imaginative way in which the problems and prospects for the discipline of anthropology itself are placed within the same analytical frame as the phenomena that it explores in crosscultural perspective—our capacity for empathy, its varying cultural construals, and the uses to which these are put within particular socio-historical settings. Notes 1. Mageo asserts that “only with the rise of capitalism and individualism during and after the Industrial Revolution does empathy become an inner state in which one imagines another’s inner state” (Mageo, this volume). She says that “[i]n industrialized cities … individuals learned to strive for gain against one another. Hence they also learned to define themselves and their interests in counterdistinction to others. Freud called this singular form of the self ‘ego.’ Meanwhile, the early modern period also occasioned the development of intersubjectivity” (Mageo, this volume). Concerning inter-group empathy, see Mageo’s related claim that “[i]n Western societies, people understand the social actor as the individual, but in socially oriented societies they understand it to be the group” (Mageo, this volume). 2. For examples from Nepal, the Philippines, Kenya, and the Ku Waru region of Highland Papua New Guinea see Rumsey (2008: 466 and passim). For examples from elsewhere in Papua New Guinea and Papua see Robbins (2008), Schieffelin (2008), Stasch (2008). 3. The Ku Waru notion of numan is similar or identical to that of noman among the neighboring Melpa as described by Andrew Strathern (1981). Bibliography Bateson, Mary Catherine. 1979. “The Epigenesis of Conversational Interaction: A Personal Account of Research Development.” In Before Speech: The Beginning of Human Communication, ed. Margaret Bullowa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruner, Jerome S. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

224

Alan Rumsey

de Waal, Frans B. M. 2005. Our Inner Ape: The Best and Worst of Human Nature. London: Granta Books. Fearn, Hannah. 2008. “The Great Divide (Social vs. Evolutionary Anthropologists).” The Times Higher Education Supplement, 20 November 2008. Halpern, Jodi. 2001. From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, Georg W. F. 1977 [1807]. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hobson, Peter. 2004. The Cradle of Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Preston, Stephanie D., and Frans B. M. de Waal. 2002. “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25: 1–72. Robbins, Joel. 2008. “On Not Knowing Other Minds: Confession, Intention, and Linguistic Exchange in a Papua New Guinea Community.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 421–429. Robbins, Joel, and Alan Rumsey. 2008. “Introduction: Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 407–420. Rumsey, Alan. 2008. “Confession, Anger, and Cross-Cultural Articulation in Papua New Guinea.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 455–472. Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2008. “Speaking Only Your Own Mind: Reflections on Talk, Gossip and Intentionality in Bosavi (PNG).” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 431–441. Stasch, Rupert. 2008. “Knowing Minds is a Matter of Authority: Political Dimensions of Opacity Statements in Korowai Moral Psychology.” Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 443–453. Stern, Daniel N. 1985. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books. Strathern, Andrew J. 1981. “Noman: Representations of Identity in Mount Hagen.” In The Structure of Folk Models, ed. Ladislov Holly and Milan Stuchlik. New York: Academic Press. Tomasello, Michael, Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne, and Henrike Moll. 2005. “Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (5): 675–735. Travarthen, C. 1980. “The Foundations of Intersubjectivity: Development of Interpersonal, Cooperative Understanding in Infants.” In The Social Foundation of Language and Thought, ed. D. R. Olson. New York: Norton. Travarthen, Colin, and K. J. Aitken. 2001. “Infant Intersubjectivity: Research, Theory and Clinical Applications.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 42 (1): 3–48. Vygotsky, L. S. 1978. Mind in Society: the Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Notes on the Contributors



Richard Feinberg (PhD, 1974, University of Chicago) is Professor of Anthropology at Kent State University. Since 1972, he has studied Polynesian communities in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. He has chaired the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (2005–06), served as president of the Central States Anthropological Society (2004–05), and chaired Kent State’s faculty senate (1997–98). He currently serves on the Section Assembly of the American Anthropological Association. Elfriede Hermann conducted research on emotions, selfhood, ethnicity, and historicity, beginning with the Ngaing of Papua New Guinea and moving on to the Banabans of Rabi Island (Fiji) and Banaba Island (Kiribati). She holds degrees from the University of Tübingen (MA and PhD) and from the University of Göttingen (Habilitation), where she has taught and researched since 1995 in the Institute of Cultural and Social Anthropology. Since 2005 she has also been a research fellow with the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Hawai‘i, looking at transformations of cultural traditions in Oceania. Douglas W. Hollan is Professor of Anthropology and Luckman Distinguished Teacher at the University of California, Los Angeles, an instructor at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, and president of the Society for Psychological Anthropology (2009–11). He is the author of numerous articles examining the relationships among cultural, psychological, and emotional processes, co-author of Contentment and Suffering: Culture and Experience in Toraja (1994) and The Thread of Life: Toraja Reflections on the Life Cycle (1996), and co-editor of the 2008 special issue of Ethos entitled, “Whatever Happened to Empathy?” Maria Lepowsky is Professor of Anthropology and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Fruit of the Motherland: Gender in an Egalitarian Society (Columbia University Press, 1993) and Dreaming of Islands (Alfred A. Knopf, in press). She is currently working on a book entitled Toypurina and the Shaman and the Children of Earth. Roger Ivar Lohmann is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Trent University. His interests include Melanesia, religion, cultural dynamics, dreaming,

226

Notes on the Contributors

imagination, and perception. He is the editor of Dream Travelers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the Western Pacific (2003), “Perspectives on the Category ‘Supernatural’” (Anthropological Forum, 2003), “Gendering Religious Objects” (Material Religion, 2007), and “Biographies of Anthropologists” (Reviews in Anthropology, 2008). Jeannette Mageo is Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University. She is a psychological and historical anthropologist and has published numerous articles and books on cultural psychology, cultural history, and religion, as well as on sex and gender in the Pacific. Her book, Theorizing Self in Samoa (Michigan University Press), appeared in 1998. She has also edited or co-edited several volumes: Power and the Self (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Cultural Memory (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), and Spirits in Culture, History, and Mind (Routledge, 1996). She is past editor of the Association for Social Anthropology’s monograph series. Alan Rumsey is Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. His research fields are Highland New Guinea and Aboriginal Australia, with particular focus on relations among language, culture, and intersubjectivity. Recent publications include “Rhetoric, Truth and the Work of Trope” (in Culture and Rhetoric, ed. Ivo Stecker and Stephen Tyler, Oxford: Berghahn, 2009) and, with Joel Robbins, an edited collection entitled Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds (Anthropological Quarterly, 2008). He is currently involved in a major, five-year research project on “Social Cognition and Language.” C. Jason Throop is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork on pain, suffering, and morality on the island of Yap in the Western Caroline Islands of Micronesia. He is author of the book Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain on Yap (University of California Press) and co-editor of the volume Toward an Anthropology of the Will (Stanford University Press, 2010). Anita von Poser earned her doctorate in Social Anthropology from Heidelberg University in 2009, based on research carried out since 2004 on notions of empathy, person, food, and place among the Bosmun people of Papua New Guinea. She has taught anthropology at the Divine Word University in Madang. She has contributed to interdisciplinary collaborations in “Theory of Mind” research and in a project on “Human Dignity” as a doctoral fellow at the Marsilius-Kolleg of Heidelberg University. Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, doing research on aging in Bosmun life.

Index

Action deliberate, 122 reflective, 121 Aesthetics, 120 Affect, 69, 76, 89 Ainsworth, Mary, 70–72, 218, 219 Age, 15, 142 Agency, 5 historical, 26, 32, 35–37 Ancestors, 15 Alofa, 77, 79, 88, 218 Ambiguity, 122, 124, 127, 128, 146n4 Ambivalence, 123, 135 Ancestors, 127, 140 Anger, 1, 3, 129, 131, 136 justifiable, 136 Anuta, 15 Anutans, 216, 220, 221 Architecture, 143 Aropa, 10, 216, 218 and animals, 159 and economy, 151, 158–159, 162 and imagination, 152 and oral traditions, 160 definition of, 151 demonstration of, 157, 160 empathy and, 155 expression, of, 151 food and, 155, 158 kinship and, 151, 157–158, 161 moral virtue and, 158, 161 non-humans and, 159 rank and, 161 social relationships and, 159 variants of, 151 ASAO, 8 Asabano, 14, 15, 98–99, 222 Atamai, 153 Athamagil, 140 Attachment insecure, 70, 73



theory, 218 Attention joint, 219 Authority, 127, 133, 143–144 Anthropology, 5, 147n7 Attachment, 10, 12, 13, 17, 141, 143–144, 147n8 Autonomy, 10 Banaba, 11 Banaban Dancing Group, 33–34 Banabans, 25–37, 216, 217, 220, 222 Benedict, Ruth, 52, 56 Barth, Fredric, 130 Bateson, Mary Catherine, 219 Belonging, 143 Benjamin, Jessica, 80 Bigalke, Terrance, 200 Biology, 1 Boas, Franz, 5, 56, 61n6 Body, 14, 15, 128, 131, 142 Bonobos, 216 Bosmun, 12, 169–187, 188n5, 188n6, 189n10, 217 Boundaries, 12 Bowlby, John, 218, 219 Brain, 1 Breath, 132 Brenneis, Donald, 122 Briggs, Jean, 146n4, 146n6 Bruner, Jerome, 220 Bugis, 198, 216 Care, 31, 35, 140, 142, 143–144, 147n8 Cargo Cults, 58, 61n7 Ceremony, 76, 78–79, 87–88 Chants, 131 Chiefs, 127 and divinity on Anuta, 160 Anutan succession of, 158 Child, 134

228

Index

Christianity, 11, 126, 60n1 among Toraja, 199–200 and love, 29 and pity, 29, 37n2 establishment on Anuta, 160 Clan, 140, 143 structure of on Anuta, 161 Co-Authorship, 122 Code-Switching, 147n8 Cognition, 69, 76 Compassion, 5, 11, 13, 25, 29–36, 37n2, 140–141, 143, 199, 209, 210, 218 Concealment, 6, 10, 11, 17, 121–124, 127–129, 132, 134, 136–137 Colonization, 11, 13, 126 Communication, 125 Communitas, 79, 81 Community Meetings, 133 Consensus, 133 Conversation, 128 Courtship tales of, 222 Criticism, 127 Cross-Cultural Comparison, 2, 9, 11 Cruelty, 106, 107 Daiden Village, 175, 180, 187 Damasio, Antonio, 195 Dance, 131, 133 Dance Theatre Play and Appeal for Empathy, 33–34 Decision-Making, 133 Deception, 124, 126, 130–131 Desire, 122, 134, 135 De Waal Frans, 216 Difference, 13, 32, 35–36 Discourse metapragmatic, 221 of appeal in Toraja, 198–199, 210 pragmatics of, 221 Dispute Resolution, 146n5 Distancing Practices, 72, 75, 79–80 Dream Interpretation, 7, 208 Economy, 15 and aropa, 151, 158–159, 162 Effort, 140, 143–144

Einfühlung, 120 Embodiment, 3, 142 Emotion, 2, 3, 4, 10, 12, 14, 16, 25–26, 28–29, 44, 45, 46, 50–53, 121, 122, 123, 133, 134, 135, 138–139, 142, 143, 144 Emotional Maturity, 175 Emotional Permeability, 169 Emotional Reasoning, 169, 171 Empathy, 43–59 accuracy of, 3, 12, 103–104, 110, 112, 195, 203, 209, 212n6 and action, 76–77, 83–84 and animals, 85, 159, 204–205 and avoidance, 201 and boundaries, 71, 73, 85, 210 and contingency, 210–211 and culture, 4, 5 and enactment, 170, 218 and ethnography, 2, 9, 17, 19, 209, 212 and exploitation, 32 and fear of illness, 200–202 and gender, 15–17, 32, 35, 141, 142, 206–209 and heart, 29–30 and idioms of expression, 196, 210, 211 and imagination, 76–77, 83–84, 103, 104, 110, 152 and love, 141, 199, 209, 210 and life experience, 206–209, 211 and morality, 125–126, 133, 144, 158, 200–202 and neurobiological mirroring, 211 and reciprocity in Toraja, 199 and resonance, 211 and senses, 102 and shame, 200–202 and social/cultural process, 211 and social positionality, 211 and social structure, 157, 205–206 and strangers, 13 and symbols and meanings, 211 and temporality, 142 and variations in display of, 205–209 as a human specialty, 96–98 as a skill, 113–114

Index

as anthropological method, 109–110, 111–113, 173, 174, 187 as knowledge, 101–102 as neutral understanding, 12 basic, 4, 5, 17, 18 biology of, 1, 96, 195–196 “bodily”, 103–104, 106–107, 108 defined, 2–3, 120, 195, 209, 210 emotional vs. cognitive, 100, 208, 217 in non-human primates, 216 lack of, 3, 11, 107, 204–205, 210 legitimate vs. illegitimate appeals for, 202 limits of, 8, 15, 17, 202–203 marked and unmarked forms of, 7, 136, 211 mitigated, 137, 145 negative vs. positive, 13, 106–107, 135 other-anticipating, 18, 177, 178 other-approaching, 18 other-interrogating, 18 passive vs. active, 107 performing, 11 reenactive, 4, 5, 17, 18 role in cultural transmission, 113 self-concealing, 18 self-projecting, 18, 178 self-revealing, 18 used to harm, 204–205 Embarrassment, 15 Embodiment, 14, 15, 135 Endurance, 140–143 Epistemology, 9, 10, 130 ethno-, 12, 130, 146 n5 Erkalren vs. Verstehen, 4 Estate, 127, 140 Ethnographic Authority, 57 Ethnography, 2, 5, 9, 16, 17, 209, 212 Envy, 134 Erikson, Eric, 86 Ethnicity, 25–28, 32, 35–36 Eveny (Siberia), 55, 61, 62n10 Evolved Capacities, 1, 3 Evolutionary Anthropology vs. Cultural Anthropology, 215 Exchange (Material), 11, 12

229

Exhaustion, 140 Exploitation, 33–34 Expressivity, 120, 126, 128, 136 Eyes, 133 Eye Contact, 128 Face, 132, 133, 134 Facial Expression, 128, 130, 133 Family, 126–127, 140–141, 143–144 Farmer, Paul, 56 Fear, 4, 12, 129, 135 Feinberg, Richard, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 38, 51, 60, 61, 76, 77, 98, 155, 158, 161, 163, 164, 165, 169, 199, 210, 216, 220, 222 Fieldwork, 17 First-Person Perspective, 3, 4, 6, 18 Freud, Sigmund, 219 Friendship, 123 Folk-Psychology, 16 Food, 12, 13, 15 and morality, 183 sharing of, 169 foodways, 169–170, 175–178, 181, 183–186, 188 Fortune, Reo, 52 Funerals, 17 Frustration, 4, 142 Gaafgow, 140 Gardens, 134 Gaze, 134 -ship, 70, 74, 76, 81–82, 85, 87, 218 Geertz, Clifford, 5–6, 8, 43 Gender, 15–17, 140, 142, 144, 206 Gesture, 130–131 Goose Bumps, 135 Gossip, 16, 47, 49–50, 61n3, 136–139, 202–203 Grief, 17 Groark, Kevin, 7 Habits, 129, 133 Hallowell, A. Irving, 44, 61n10 Halpern, Jodi, 2, 3, 218 Happiness, 142 Harm, 134, 204–205

230

Index

Healing, 7 Health, 15 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 220 Heidegger, Martin, 2 Hermann, Elfriede, 11, 13, 25, 26, 27, 33, 36, 37, 60, 98, 100, 152, 158, 160, 163, 164, 173, 199, 210, 216, 217, 220, 222 Hierarchy, 13, 126, 134, 140, 142 Historicity, 26, 32–35, 36–37 History, 11, 140 Hobson, Peter, 219 Hollan, Douglas W., 1, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 25, 26, 31, 35, 37, 38, 43, 60, 61, 78, 81, 83, 85, 88, 89, 107, 109, 110, 112, 120, 155, 162, 163, 165, 169, 172, 173, 174, 177, 178, 187, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 215, 216, 217, 218, 220 Honesty, 123–124, 127 Hospitality, 30–32 Human Sciences, 4 Hypercognition, 136 Iacoboni, Marco, 196 Identity, 13, 14 Illness, 130, 135, 142, 144 Imagination, 2, 14, 15, 145 Anutan equivalent of, 152–153, 163 relationship to aropa, 152 Incest Taboo, 215 Indirection, 10, 122, 124, 130, 146n4 Individuation psychic, 220 Inequality, 14 Intelligence, 127 Intentionality, 1, 5, 9, 124, 129, 134, 137, 139 Intersubjectivity, 5, 7, 8, 195, 197, 210, 218 James, William, 121, 146n3, 209 Japanese, 208 Jensen, John T, 121, 127, 134, 147n7 Joking, 127, 129 Keane, Webb, 10 Kirkpatrick, John, 141 Kin, 10

Kinship, 13, 140 and aropa, 151, 157–158, 161 and domestic groups on Anuta, 158 Kiribati, 27 Klein, Melanie, 75, 80 Kula, 46 Ku Waru, 220, 222 Land, 140, 142, 143, 144 Language Ideology, 130, 221 Lepowsky, Maria, 17, 46, 49, 53, 61, 81, 98, 100, 112, 152, 169, 217, 221, 222 Levinas, Emmanuel, 210 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 55–57, 61n6, 215 Levy, Robert, 200 Lexicalization,135–136 Lingenfelter, Sherwood, 147n7 Lipps, Theodor, 2, 120, 217 Lohmann, Roger Ivar, 11, 14, 15, 17, 30, 37, 60, 97, 100, 101, 102, 108, 112, 151, 152, 155, 169, 174, 216, 221, 222, 223 Loss, 135 Loneliness, 143 Longing, 143 Louisiade Archipelago, 46 Love, 10, 12, 135, 140, 141, 143–144, 147n8, 199, 209, 210 Lying, 126 Anutan view of, 156–157 Maanatu, 153 Mageo, Jeannette, 11, 12, 13, 15, 37, 38, 60, 61, 70, 76, 78, 86, 87, 98, 121, 146, 152, 157, 162, 163, 169, 173, 210, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 223 Magic, 48, 59, 143 Makau, 154 Makassar, 198, 216 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 43, 52, 56 Mamai, 154 Maninia, 154 Mataku, 155, 161 Massage, 143 Marrow, Phyllis, 146n4 Mauss, Marcel, 218 Mead, George Herbert, 220 Mead, Margaret, 56

Index

Meaning, 131 Medicine, 1, 126, 143 Mental Disability, 123 Meaning, 130 Messenger, 132 Metacommunication, 7 Metaphor, 122, 132, 135 Min People, 130 Mirror Neurons, 1, 110, 195–196 Missionization, 13 Mind, 124, 126, 135 Mistrust, 124 Misunderstanding, 3, 17 Mood, 122 Morality, 5, 7, 10, 11, 120, 125–126, 133, 134, 140, 142, 144, 146n2 and Anutan social structure, 158, 163 and aropa, 158 and non-kin on Anuta, 152 defects of on Anuta, 156 of Tearakura, 160 Mortuary Ritual, 49, 52–53 Mother, 69, 72, 75, 81 -child relationship, 218 good/bad, 75–76 Mourning, 17, 49, 50 Motivation, 8, 137 Myth, 175, 181–182, 183 Names, 143 Narrative, 17, 221 and empathy, 53–59 use in anthropological writing, 55–58, 61n6 “Native’s Point of View” 43 Navigation, 143 Obligation, 128, 218 Opacity of Other Minds, 9, 10, 43, 60n1, 125–127, 129–130, 133, 137–139, 152, 155–156, 221 Oral Traditions and aropa, 160 and empathy, 161 and fear, 161 and historical complexity on Anuta, 160

231

Other Minds Anutan view of, 157 Pacific, 9 Pain, 140, 143, 144, 147n8 Pakamaa, 152, 153–154 Pakatautau, 152–153 Paralinguistic Cues, 128, 146n6 Papua New Guinea, 130 northeast, 169 Paranoid Ethos, 52 Peirce, Charles S. 121, 145n3 Perception, 15, 99–100, 103, 104–105 amodal, 219 Personal Causation, 52 Personality, 121 Personhood, 7, 43–46, 47, 60, 61n2, 120, 133, 144 autonomy, 48, 60, 61n2 relational, 47, 60, 61n2 transparent, 179–181 Perspective, 112–113 assumed of animals and supernatural beings, 97 Petersen, Glenn, 123, 146n5 Philosophy, 1, 120 Pity, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 25–26, 29–36, 144, 210, 218 Pohnpei, 123, 146n5 Politeness, 125 Politics, 7, 132, 133 Possessions, 134 Power, 7, 13, 14, 15, 130 Pragmatism, 121, 146n3 Preston, Stephanie, 216 Pride, 127, 144 negative, 141 positive, 143 Privacy, 18, 121, 125–126, 136 Projection, 97, 109, 110, 195, 203, 204, 209 Psychic Privacy, 99, 101 Punishment, 75 Psychology, 1 Radin, Paul, 61n6 Ramu River, 174, 182, 184 Rank, 16, 126, 132, 134, 140, 142

232

Index

in Anutan relationships, 158, 162 Rationality, 4, 5 Reflective Action, 121 Relationality Melanesian, 181, 186–187 Relativism on Anuta, 161 Religion, 7, 11, 124, 97 Renuanga, 44, 45, 46, 50–51 Ritual, 7 Robbins, Joel, 9, 130, 221 Romance, 84–85 Rumsey, Alan, 6, 7, 9, 10, 37, 38, 43, 60, 99, 152, 163, 172, 221, 222, 223 Runguy, 140 Sadness, 131 Safety, 15, 129 Sago, 175, 176, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183, 185, 188n3, 188n6 Sameness, 28, 31–32, 35–36 Samoa, 13, 121, 146n2 Samoans, 220, 221 Sarcasm, 126–127, 129 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 56 Schneider, David, 141 Schutz, Alfred, 2 Schwartz, Theodore, 52 Secrecy, 10, 121–122, 129, 136 Self, 25–30, 36, 37n1 and feelings of vulnerability in Toraja, 197–198 Self-Boundaries, 7, 13 Self-Governance, 120–122, 131, 134, 145 Sensation, 102, 105 Sensory Modalities, 8, 14 Self-Monitoring, 121 Sentiments, 5, 141, 143, 144 Service, 12 Shame, 4, 200–202 Shore, Bradd, 121 Simulation Theory, 3 Skin -ship, 70, 74, 76, 82, 85, 87–88, 218 Smith, Adam, 217 “Speaking-For” 127 Social Bonds, 12

Socialization, 16, 134 Social Relationships, 141, 143 Social Structure and empathy, 157, 205–206 and morality on Anuta, 158, 163 Songs, 143 Sontag, Susan, 55–56 Sorcery, 47, 48, 50, 51, 57, 61n3 Spirit Possession, 7 Spirits, 15, 44, 45, 58, 61n7, 61n10 Anutan relationships with, 160, 161 Status, 15, 16, 126, 132, 134, 135, 142 Stein, Edith, 2 Stern, Daniel, 219, 220 Story Telling, 17 Stueber, Karl, 4 Suffering, 11, 140, 142–143 “Suffering-For” 140 Surfaces and Depths, 132 Sympathy, 5, 103, 210 Tabinaw, 140 Taboo, 46 Tannen, Deborah, 83 Taro Patches, 134 Teasing, 127 Telepathy, 100, 105 Theory of Mind, 1, 96–97 Theory Theory, 4 Thought, 132 Throop, C. Jason, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 25, 26, 31, 37, 43, 60, 76, 81, 88, 89, 98, 112, 120, 155, 162, 163, 169, 172, 173, 177, 178, 179, 181, 187, 209, 211, 212, 217 Tikopia religious practices, 160 song, 154 voyage to, 155–156 Tomasello, Michael, 219 Toraja Highlanders, 196–197, 216, 217, 220 Torture, 107 Transculturation, 28–29, 36, 37n5 Trevarthen, Colwyn, 219, 220 Troubles talk, 83

Index

Trust, 123–124 Truth, 123, 125–126, 131, 146 n4 importance of on Anuta, 156 Uncertainty, 126, 128–129 Valuables, 132 Value, 130 Vanatinai Islanders, 43–59, 217, 221 Verbal Art, 126 Virtue, 140 Visible and Invisible, 132 Visibility, 132 Violence, 8 and Anutan oral traditions, 161 Voice, 132

233

Vitebsky, Piers, 55, 61–62n10 von Poser, Anita, 10, 12, 16, 38, 77, 89, 100, 151, 164, 165, 169, 199, 210, 216, 220, 222 Vygotsky, Lev, 220 Wallace, Anthony, 6, 196 Walleser, Sixtus, 124 War, 132 Wellenkamp, Jane C. 197, 198, 206, 208 Winnicott, D.W., 71 Witchcraft, 47, 48, 51–52, 61n3 Work, 12, 13, 133, 143 Worry, 104 Yap, 12, 14, 15, 16