ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights a few issues about empathic processes that are emerging from recent ethnographic research. The ethnographic approach demonstrates the extent to which empathic processes are always deeply embedded in their social, cultural, and political contexts, being influenced by those contexts, but also influencing them. Specific cultural and historical settings may and usually do at times indirectly structure altruistically oriented empathy, whether marked or unmarked, by encouraging interpersonal engagements of a complementary type. The focused and explicit study of empathy across cultures has a relatively short history, despite the fact that anthropologists have long used participant observation and face-to-face communication as key tools in generating knowledge and understanding of other people. Many researchers influenced by evolutionary models of behavior have suggested that empathy is an essentially altruistic impulse or response leading to prosocial and moral behavior unless or until it is suppressed or inhibited in some way.
