A Case for an Ethnography of Empathy

    Recently, Tom Ridge, former governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and inaugural Secretary of the Department Homeland Security, was invited to the New School to talk to students during a morning session.  The event did not go as planned.  Some students chose to disrupt the event.  Despite such disruptions, Ridge and three other speakers finished their respective presentations, a first question from the audience was posed, and then university president Bob Kerry, acting as moderator, called an end to the event.

    Thereafter, members of the University Student Senate (USS) began discussing, by e-mail, a potential response by the USS to the events surrounding Ridge's visit to the university.  This issue was taken up at the subsequent meeting of the USS¹ , where two Lang undergraduate students appeared with a prepared statement.  One of these two, as it turns out, was the individual who asked the question of Ridge.  As he tells the story, the claim by university administration, that the event was ended due to continued student disruption, was a misrepresentation:  the disruptions had been earlier during the event, and the true reason for stopping the event was so that his question, critical of the former governor, would not need to be answered.  Another student, who had also been present at the event, vouches that the student who posed the first question had not been among those disrupting the event--but also asserts, twice during the course of the discussion, that she had been unable to hear the question asked, due to disruption created others.  

    A letter is read from 9 students of Milano, who expressed displeasure at having gotten up early in the day to ask questions at the event, only to have other students's behavior lead to it ending early.  Another letter is read casting the event in terms of majority populism keeping a minority from speaking.  Counterarguments are heard:  that non-Milano students were not acknowledged or allowed to pose questions² ; that leftist radicals are the true subordinated position, rather than the majority; and that Kerry, not the disruptive students, was responsible and to be held accountable for ending the event.  The question of tolerance (for the policies Ridge represents) is raised.  Excerpts read from an anonymous e-mail purportedly from students claiming responsibility for the disruption characterize the termination of the event as a victory.  A statement from the administrator who arranged for Ridge's visit to the university is read:  some 20 Milano students and others remained after the event, and had a long, fruitful conversation with Ridge, despite the official ending.  

    It was a true Rashomon moment, complete with a mix of direct and mediated³  testimony.  University of South Carolina psychological anthropologist Karl G. Heider invokes such a moment under the heading "Rashomon effect"⁴ , but where Heider speaks to disagreements in tellings as between ethnographers, the USS meeting exemplifies a recurrent theme in our course readings in Anthropology as a History of the Present:  different tellings by participants within the same history.  

    My arguments in reading responses thus far this semester has been that such tellings articulate different genres of experience, and that all such genres are embodied.  Koselleck opens this door in his argument that temporalities (at least, the temporality of modernity) are inherently spatial.  Even the transition from premodern to modern experience can be characterized as movement.  With Ferguson, we open this spatiality of time, this placement of narrative, as the temporalities of the Zambian Copperbelt are explored:  not only the post-boom progressive decline ("down, down, down") as told by the Zambian townsfolk, but also in the tellings of white settlers and anthropologists struggling to understand Zambian households that are not recognizable as "family".⁵   

    What is happening here is often articulated as narrative, but story is but a superficial expression of embodied genre experience.  The challenge of understanding the living arrangements encountered in the Copperbelt was not the mismatch of Wolf's "imaginary norm" or "fiction" with world as encountered⁶ , but rather that, as Annemarie Mol might say, the white migrants and Zambian townsfolk do family differently.  Such performative expression appears in our Westinghouse refrigerator,⁷   and also in the emerging European relationship to glass at the close of the 19th century.⁸   White migrants in Zambia's Copperbelt, Egyptians caught by the European gaze, Enlightenment scholars interpreting Bildungsroman, each find themselves entering a space unfamiliar, and largely invisible to them.  The Players perform, embody a genre of experience in their act, and all (but for those few familiar with the lived experience of that genre), see nothing.⁹ 

    With Malkii and Amin, the problem of casting experience, historical or otherwise, entirely in narrative terms becomes all the more apparent.  Narrative is an important feature of how embodied genres are articulated, yet narrative is always situated¹⁰ , always voiced from some place, a place of embodiment. What's more, in taking up narrative as the object of ethnography, narrative assumes a position of mediation¹¹ , and with such mediation, the Rashomon effect is unleashed, not merely as between ethnographers, but between parties within a broader population, whether that population be national or institutional.  That under some situated conditions a coherent single narrative becomes apparent (e.g., in the case of white migrant characterizations of nuclear family, Mishamo camp's mythico-history, or the three New York theater groups studied by Carol Feldman¹² ) speaks to the power of shared genre; yet such embodied genres, shared or otherwise, express an orientation on a world.  Whether Hutu refugee or Indian pensioner, Lang critic or New School administrator, each experiences a genre-world reflective of their situatedness, their experiential spatiality and temporality.

    That we each orient of our own phenomenological experience is a universal.  Yet, even as each our embodied genre of experience may or may not be shared with any given other, there are basic human needs, for connection and physical-well being, honesty and play, peace, meaning, and autonomy¹³ , that we may also speak of as universals.  How such universal needs are expressed within any given embodied genre of experience may differ, yet no matter how alien the genre-embodied landscape of other may be, the universality of these needs, needs that one can imagine any human being at any point in history, any place in the world, at some moment experiencing¹⁴ , can not be in doubt.  Thus we have two planes of universals:  firstly, situatedness within genre-embodiment, shared potentially with some, but not all, others; and secondly, basic human needs, commonly experienced, but differentially expressed across embodied genres of experience.

    Within the practice of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), as set forth by Marshal Rosenberg¹⁵ , among others, everything any person does in life constitutes a strategy to meet basic human needs.  Every act, every thought, and yes, every narration and situation of self, expresses basic human needs.  Where conflict emerges, whether between the accounts given by a dead samauri and a passing woodcutter in the story of Rashomon, or between different attendees at an event held early in the day on the New School campus, or between different actors in an unfolding moment of cultural history, whether in Egypt or Tanzania, Zambia or India, such conflict operates at the encounter between differently situated doings of strategies to meet needs, as distinct from needs in-and-of themselves.

    The challenge for the ethnographer, then, in taking up narratives as a route to explicating a deeper understanding of being human, is that such narratives--whether the singular narrative as set forth by a given ethnographer or the multiple narratives mediated by way of a work of ethnography--are themselves but strategies employed in expression of needs, yet such needs are rarely, if ever, directly examined when the focus of the ethnographer's gaze is upon narrative.  Thus, rather than asking how universal needs are being expressed by a given genre-embodiment, here articulated in narrative form, we instead face the question of how to go about reconciling conflicting narratives, conflicting histories, conflicting genre-embodiments.¹⁶  The challenge emerges from looking to the universality of being situated, without addressing ourselves to the doing of situatedness as an expression of deeper universalities. 

    What is called for, then, is an ethnography of empathy¹⁷ , to supplement ethnography of narrative.  By an ethnography of empathy,  I do not intend just any such, but rather an ethnography employing a particular methodology of empathy.  A non-exhaustive list of such methodologies might include the aphoristic injunction to "walk a mile in another man's moccasins"¹⁸ , psychoanalysis, and NVC.  

    The "moccasins method"¹⁹  suffers most clearly from disparities in genre-embodiment. A dramatic failure of the moccasins method can be seen in Laura Bohannan's attempt to relate the story of Hamlet to an audience of Tiv²⁰ :  the listeners were simply not situated such that they might try on the footware of a protagonist seen at worst as evil, at best as a madman.  If our prince of Denmark is merely mad (and not simply cracking under the strain of an unjustice done by his uncle, but--as the Tiv would have it--clearly delusional for perceiving an injustice in the first place), then he at least may be deserving of our sympathy, but sympathy is not empathy.  The moccasins method demands that we take the place of our subject, position ourselves within their life, their history, their narrative.  If differential genre-embodiment presents issues in reconciling the experiences of others, how much more challenging must it be to attempt to inhabit the genre-embodied narrative of another!

    Psychoanalysis, by comparison, does not require that we assume the position of other.  Rather, from the psychoanalytic mode, we assert that the position of other comports to a universal genre of strategic narratives.  The psychoanalytic method begins with an understanding encompassing certain universal strategies, described as emerging of embodied developmental experience:  both primal strategies, that all individuals necessarily desire to implement, and developmental strategies, by which such primal desires a counteracted within each individual.  Unfortunately, the appeal to a universal genre of primal and developmental strategies (whatever claims may be made to embodied experience) to understand, let alone account for, the differentially situated genre-embodiments seen both within and between populations, is unsatisfactory:  even if the explanatory narratives of psychoanalysis held across cultures--and there is sufficient criticism to cast doubt that they do--the question would still remain as to why these narratives necessarily account for all other narratives.²¹   Meanwhile, the ease with which psychoanalysis renders numerous strategies within its universal genre as pathology fails to free us from sympathy-rather-than-empathy problem encountered with the moccasins method.

    NVC, by contrast, does not operate from an agenda of diagnosis.  Rather, in NVC, one starts with an observation²² , and orienting to said observation, asks what feelings²³  are present.  A hypothesis may be offered at this point:  "When you hear this said, I might guess that you would be confused, or perhaps worried?"  The invitation is made for the subject²⁴  to determine if the hypothesis reflects their emotional orientation toward the observation, and if not, to correct and/or elaborate upon the hypothesis.  Once such feelings have been clearly identified to the satisfaction of the subject, a further question is posed:  what needs do those feelings speak to?  Again, a hypothesis²⁵  might be offered.  "Would it be that your needs for trust and communication were not being met?"²⁶   Our subject again is given space to determine if the needs suggested are those most present in the observation-feeling context, and to articulate other needs more salient in that moment, as appropriate.  Subsequent observations may then be pursued in the same manner, both with the same individual, and with others, thereby fleshing out the situated genre-embodiments that give form and power to the narratives encountered.

    It is my argument that employment of a methodology of empathy, such as NVC, would provide richly informative data for more deeply and fully understanding the corpus of narrative produced within and between groups, both in terms of the coherence of such narratives within a given cultural context, and in relation to the narratives put forward by other actors.  In drawing upon a common language of needs, comparisons could then be drawn between genre-embodiments that might not be apparent when only considering conflicting narratives.  Likewise, where actors that might otherwise be considered within a single category are shown to employ different strategies of embodiment, having a clearly described account of operative needs, as reported by those actors, would better inform our understanding of how such differences emerge and are maintained.

notes

¹ My gratitude to Chris Crews, USS Vice President, for his assistance aiding my recall of the relevant events of that meeting.

² Note that this contrasts with the claim that the first question asked was the impetus for ending the event.

³ In Akira Kurosawa's film, multiple accounts of a rape and a murder (or alternatively, a suicide) are described by individuals involved, including the dead man, who testifies by way of a spirit medium.  The film itself operates as a frame story, the accounts themselves offered as recollections of what was said by others--with the exception of yet another account offered by one character in recanting his previous version.

⁴ Heider, K. The Rashomon Effect: When Ethnographers Disagree, American Anthropologist, 90(1), 73-81.

⁵ The appearance of the nuclear family, as an ontological category of phenomenal perceptibility, from the vantage of accelerated modernity, is more fully developed  Week 2 paper, "Movements of Modern Experience".

⁶ A fuller critique of Wolf is likewise found in the previously cited Wk. 2 paper.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Wk. 3, "History as Through a Glass Starkly"

⁹ Wk. 4, "Formative Genre Informative"

¹⁰ Wk. 5, "History Cosmologically Situated".

¹¹ Wk. 6, "Tellings, Doings, and Feelings:  The Problem of Narrative"

¹² In class presentation on Bakhtin & Dumont.  Available on my blog (as are all of cited reading responses), under title "Genre and Worldmaking".  http://espacement.blogspot.com/

¹³ The remainder of this paper develops concepts from the practice of Nonviolent Communication, from which these broad categories of basic human needs are drawn.

¹⁴ By this formulation, we expressly distinguish universal human needs from "needs" that emerge as situated strategies.  Thus, to say one "needs a job" is not to invoke a universal human need--one can imagine people in times and places for whom "a job" was never a "need".  Thus, a job can be recognized as a strategy for meeting certain universal needs, such as stability, food, ease, contribution, etc.

¹⁵ Rosenberg, M. Nonviolent Communication:  A Language of Life.  2003.  Encinitas, CA:  Puddle Dancer Press.

¹⁶ If, indeed, we admit to their being any possibility of reconciliation at all.  An alternative position, that of relativism, would abandon such an endeavor as blocked by biases inherent to any and all observers.  This is not the strategy advocated here.

¹⁷ There may be recognized three modalities under the concept empathy:  empathizing, empathism, and empathalizing.
    Empathizing, as that term is developed by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, refers to neurotypical comportment to social affect, without emerging as conscious awareness.  (Indeed, for empathizing to become salient to awareness is to indicate a breakdown.)
    Empathism points to a sensitivity to the affective conditions within a group, what might variously be termed atmosphere or mood, without attention to particularities of affect in individuals.
    Empathalizing (from empathy-rationalizing), here then, identifies any rationally articulated method, or practice, for accessing or producing an awareness of affect.  It is this last case that is meant in our discussion.

¹⁸ Arguably, the methodology of empathy most often employed, at least implicitly, by those ethnographers who conceive of their work as witnessing or otherwise drawing attention to situated challenges faced by a population for whom they have a personal concern.

¹⁹ That our aphorism, even in its American context, is variously glossed as involving "shoes" or "sandals" is our first sign that something might be amiss: before even being put into practice, this method struggles to situate itself culturally.

²⁰ Bohannan, L. Shakespeare in the Bush. Natural History, Aug-Sep 1966.

²¹ No claim is made here regarding psychoanalytic-derived models applied to broader cultural phenomena (e.g., Jungian archetypes with respect to the study of myth, or Deleuze & Guattari's schizophrenic conception of capitalism).  Rather, the limitations addressed in this paper are only with respect to psychoanalysis as a methodology of empathy.

²² An observation, within the NVC framework, is a specific statement that points to a discrete event or events, without evaluation, interpretation, or judgment.  e.g., "I am told that a Tanzanian official arrived at camp at 2 in the morning, and was taken to each village before sunrise."

²³ In a fieldwork setting, this would necessitate a familiarity with the lexicon of feelings available in the local language(s), including terms not often drawn on by native speakers.  Where NVC methods are studied among English speakers, lists of feeling words are typically provided, so as to facilitate more nuanced responses from speakers unaccustomed to using a rich vocabulary to distinguish emotional content.

²⁴ Who may be either another person or the person offering the observation themselves.  Self-empathy is an important component of NVC, and a comparison of self-empathy to the psychoanalytic mechanism of counter-transference might be considered in exploring these methodologies further.

²⁵ The importance of hypothesis in NVC can not be overstated.  There is no claim made to privileged knowledge concerning the feelings of needs of the subject, even in introspective self-empathy.  All guesses are offered as openings to reflection and intuitive validation.

²⁶ The example given notwithstanding, NVC does not focus exclusively on "bad" or "unpleasant" affect.  Were an observation to lead to an articulation of such feelings as joy, satisfaction, or warmth, the second hypothetical would query as to what needs were being met.  More complex emotional configurations, where some needs are and other need are not addressed, are also possible.