We need to talk about Empathy.
Empathy has become a widely popular word nowadays. It is easy to know why.
Empathy is a concept related to an elusive and mysterious feeling. The capacity to walk in another’s shoes. To see the world from a different point of view. Most of all, to feel what another person feels. Almost seems like having a superpower: “I’m an Empath, I see It all. I feel it all. I can see inside your head. Nothing escapes my sight” — I’m sure you’ve seen something on those lines before on some self-help account on Instagram.
Empathy has become a valuable skill especially in professional fields that depend on public perception and acceptance such as design, public policy, marketing.
Foreseeing how a product will most likely perform in a particular market, how a campaign can be more effective considering a specific demographic or even how a brand should communicate its promise is big business. That kind of knowledge could be achieved with the right method of research like ethnography or a wide range of qualitative methodologies. So, we are starting to see more and more companies interested in hiring Anthropologists or even training staff to become more empathetic.
In Anthropology we don’t use empathy as a concept aside from considering it a native category of analysis. However, it is safe to say that empathy is part of our daily training as researchers. Empathy is a predominant aspect of the experience of being on the field and it is a turning point in becoming an Anthropologist.
However, one thing we should have in mind is that, for ethnographers, empathy is a method. Empathy is the starting point, not the finishing line.
I’ll talk about this later. First things first: Let’s talk about the limits of empathy.
In Anthropological Theory there is the notion of cultural relativism. Relativism is not something created by Anthropology. The concept goes back to the foundation of Western Philosophy. Ethical Relativism states that there are no absolute truths in ethics and that what is morally right or wrong varies from person to person or from society to society.
That concept started to become more popular in the 16th century. [If you like to get into that, I suggest you read When I Am Playing with my Cat, How Do I know She is not Playing with me by Saul Frampton. It is a delightful reading on Michel de Montaigne, French philosopher responsible by bringing this concept to modern philosophy.]
Franz Boas, one of the founding fathers of the discipline, was the one who introduced cultural relativism as a cornerstone of anthropological thinking alongside historical particularism. Cultural Relativism is an axiom that states that cultural differences should not be judged by absolute standards.
That implies two things. The first is that humans create a thing called “culture” and it is multiple. There are many cultures each with a specific social structure of morality, rationality, and symbolism. The second is that, by means of research, an Anthropologist must consider cultures as equivalents and in their integrity.
Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.
That passage was part of the forefront Franz Boas wrote for Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), a classic reading in Anthropology. That way of thinking about the human experience helped shape ethnography as a method.
To understand a specific culture, ethnographers should now be exposed to alien customs for long periods of time so they can reflect on their ways of living in their own terms, that is, seeking explanations within that particular frame of thought. In the process, they must suspend their own morality, habit, judgment and force themselves to live just like their research subjects.
There is a kind of wisdom that comes when we live like somebody else.
First, we feel the cultural shock. We start to see their idiosyncrasies, their weirdness, their strange habits. All of a sudden we start to see beauty. Kindness. Logic. We start questioning why we think what we think, why we feel what we feel, why we live how we live.
That is the foundation of Anthropological thinking: to consider human relations a primal site of knowledge. Without bodily experience, that sort of understanding is out of reach. We start thinking as ethnographers when we are able to surpass cultural shock by obtaining a certain degree of “understanding” or “empathy” with foreign norms and tastes.
Empathy is not given. To achieve that state is hard work — a terrible experience at times.
Ethnographers have to come to terms with a constant sense of drifting without the comforts of being among their own and not really understanding what is happening around them. You are the stranger in a strange land.
All that to say: I have a problem with the concept of empathy.
First of all, empathy is a feeling. The way we conceptualise feelings is very abstract and sensorial. Traditionally in the history of Western Philosophy, the realm of sentiment was considered very distant from reason.
This notion was already widely debated and questioned, but there is one aspect of that particular concept of feeling that persists especially due to the popularity of psychological discourse in contemporary urban culture: that feelings are contained within the individual mind and cannot be accessed by anybody else.
How many times have you heard someone during a conversation resort to some sort of emotional justification for their actions? “Oh, but that’s how I feel” most of the times is code for “End of conversation” or “I don’t want to admit that I’m wrong”. How can one argue with feelings?
Resort to sentiments can be a tactic to avoid dialogue and escape from having to put your own self into question.
Feelings relate to the individual and the intimate life of fleeting sensations, thoughts, and sentiments. We can’t always trust our most spontaneous reactions. Perceptions can be misleading, wise people always say.
Unreflective thinking can leave us vulnerable to preconceived notions that populate our minds without us knowing really why and that is easy to do when you don’t really expose yourself to a different kind of life. If we are talking in cultural terms, that is ethnocentrism: the incapacity of imagining another kind of life different from one’s own and by consequence diminishing or even completely disregarding others.
We cannot establish real empathy just by considering another’s feelings.
Recognising one’s feelings does not lead to concrete change, just make us feeling foolishly proud of our capacity to identify emotional responses as if that was a real challenge — well, for some people that could be true.
To identify emotional response is different from empathising with another human being. Real empathy stems from an active effort to understand another’s reason to act. Their moral compass. What kind of values inform their decision-making process.
We can only feel what another person feels if we are able to place ourselves in their particular context considering their choices against their background — not ours. Without this effort, empathy is just another name for projection or ethnocentrism.
That leads to an individualist approach to empathy.
“I understand how you feel” can also serve as a patronising way to not take arguments or individual demands into real consideration. It not enough to ask someone how they feel about something or what they think: we have to do our homework.
We have to consider where that person comes from, their past experiences, their social background, their most intimate values. We also need to suspend judgment and take what that person says in its integrity, not comparing to our personal background but to the possibilities they had at hand.
Empathy is not a gift. It is unsettling. It is challenging. It doesn’t mean that you will agree with everything other people say. At times, you’ll find out that you are unable to empathise. It’s okay. It’s supposed to be like that.
As Anthropologists, we have to acknowledge and respect the limits of our empathy at the risk of doing bad research. That’s why the first step of any good Ethnography is self-reflection. Sometimes, we don’t have the luxury to choose or create our own research. That’s when we need to hold tightly to those guiding principles of cultural relativism.
The beauty of empathy is that it challenges cynicism.
Establishing an empathic connection with another not only expands our world view and what we thought to be possible but also make us see ourselves for what we really are: incomplete beings always in-the-making polished by circumstance.
Such realisation is powerful. Opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Maybe the most powerful outcome of all is that morality is shaped by empathy.
