Empathetic Perception and Imagination among the Asabano: Lessons for Anthropology (original) (raw)

Empathetic Perception and Imagination among the Asabano: Lessons for Anthropology

2011, The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies

From p. 113: "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 daily stake our lives on the conviction that we have approximate 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, bridges the gaps between the minds that make up a society like neurotransmitters bridge the synapses between neurons in a nervous system. Empathy, imprecise as it is, conveys cultural information across the macro-synapses 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."