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The Dark Side of Empathy: Mimesis, Deception, and the Magic of Alterity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2015

Nils Bubandt  and
Rane Willerslev
Nils Bubandt*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, Aarhus Research Center on the Anthropocene, Aarhus University
Rane Willerslev*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, Arctic Research Center, Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University
*
bubandt@cas.au.dk; rawi@aias.au.dk
bubandt@cas.au.dk; rawi@aias.au.dk
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Abstract

This article challenges the tendency, both academic and popular, to assign empathy the status of a virtue. The widespread inclination to associate empathy with the morally and socially “good”—with compassion, understanding, cultural bonding, and non-violent sociality—ignores what we propose to call the “dark side of empathy”: that is, the multiple ways in which empathy is routinely deployed to manipulate, seduce, deceive, and dehumanize others by means of vicariousness. Two diverse ethnographic cases, of hunting in Siberia and political violence in Indonesia, provide the empirical background for a discussion of the complex relationship of empathy to mimesis, deception, violence, and sociality.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 5 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2014 

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