TACTICAL EMPATHY: TWO CASES

Scene One: A Moose Hunt in Siberia: Watching the Yukaghir hunter rocking his body back and forth, Willerslev is puzzled whether the figure he sees before him is man or moose. The moose-hide coat, worn with its hair outward, the headgear with its characteristic protruding ears, and the skis covered underneath with a moose's smooth leg-skin so as to sound like the animal when it moves in the snow—all make the hunter a moose. And yet the lower part of his face below the hat, with its human eyes, nose, and mouth, along with the loaded rifle in his hands, make him a man. Thus it is not that he has stopped being human. Rather, he is not a moose, and yet he is also not not a moose…. A female moose appears from among the bushes with a young calf. At first the animals freeze in their tracks, the mother lifting and lowering her huge head in bewilderment, seemingly unable to solve the puzzle in front of her. But as the hunter moves closer, she is captured by his mimetic performance, suspending her disbelief, and begins to walk slowly toward him with the large-legged calf tottering behind her. At that point the hunter lifts his rifle, and in quick succession shoots both dead.

Scene Two: A Riot in Eastern Indonesia: Under the cover of darkness one evening in 1999, copies of a pamphlet are dropped from motorbikes in the predominantly Muslim towns of Ternate and Soa Sio. The pamphlet, likely written by two Muslim bureaucrats and politicians in the regional administration, is a forgery. It purports to be an internal letter from the Christian Church of Maluku informing its local parishes in Halmahera about plans for an impending Christian attack on the Muslim majority population in North Maluku. The letter details the logistics for a Christian campaign of sadism and terror that aims to evict all Muslims from North Maluku so as to establish a separate Christian nation in eastern Indonesia. Within a few days the letter, written by Muslims convincingly pretending to be diabolical Christians, has sparked violent riots that eventually extend to most areas of North Maluku. Ironically, many of the people who were provoked into violence by the letter later reported to Bubandt that they suspected all along that the letter was a fake.

Although these two scenes come from very different cultural and political contexts, they involve similar forms of deception by vicarious means. The Siberian hunter and the Indonesian letter-writer are both using empathy to identify with the particular bodily states and experiences of a significant other in order to mimic, with varying degrees of fidelity, the senses and sensibilities of that other. Yet both turn the empathic faculty violently against that other. Empathic identification coalesces in both cases with devious mimicry and deception. Somehow, and in ways that this article seeks to disentangle, it is in the very act of empathically mimicking the other—whether the other is a Christian or a moose—that that other is constructed as “other.” The two ethnographic cases suggest the startling possibility that the alterity of the other is not minimized, but rather sometimes radicalized through empathy.

Empathy, in other words, does not have to presuppose the other. Rather, it may help to fashion it, and in turn to legitimize its destruction. This form of tactical empathy, which creates an Other through an empathic identification driven by the ambition to ultimately destroy the other, is fraught with paradox. Both cases demonstrate that a certain danger dwells at the heart of tactical empathy, one that requires a firm limit to one's vicariousness. As Anna Freud reportedly quipped, empathy requires the ability to step into someone else's shoes, and then to step out again (Qvortrup Reference Qvortrup2003: 31). Here, empathy differs from sympathy, although the two are often confused. Our ethnographies will show that the difference is crucial. If sympathy is about communion, about feeling with the other person; then empathy is about understanding the other vicariously without losing one's own identity, a feeling into the other, as it were. As Lauren Wispé puts it, “In empathy, we substitute ourselves for the others. In sympathy, we substitute others for ourselves. To know what it would be like if I were the other person is empathy. To know what it would be like to be that other person is sympathy” (Wispé Reference Wispé1986: 318).

Sympathy, one might say, gives purchase on identity to achieve compassionate communion. Empathy, meanwhile, is a form of vicarious insight into the other that insists on one's own identity. Empathy involves, therefore, a double movement of the imagination: a stepping into and a stepping back from the perspective of the other, at once an identification with an other and a determined insistence on the other's alterity. This insistence on alterity as an integral part of empathic identification is visible in both of our ethnographic cases. The Siberian hunter has to maintain a difference from the moose he mimics in order to kill it, while the Indonesian authors of the forged letter hold in tension their empathic mimicry of a human enemy with their attempt to demonize that enemy. This paradox, we propose, speaks directly to the broader issue of the magic of alterity, the play of identification and Othering, which lies at the heart of not only mimicry (Taussig Reference Taussig1993) but also the empathic faculty.

One need not travel to Siberia or Indonesia to encounter the link between empathy and alterity, and mimesis and deception. Poker players, police profilers, military strategists, con artists, Internet scammers, method actors, and everyday romantic Casanovas engage in similar forms of tactical empathy when they attempt to assume the perspective and affective stance of an avowed opponent, victim, portrayed figure, or desired subject, and base their future actions on some form of mimicry that allows them to win the game, gain a strategic advantage, capture, fool, portray, or seduce someone else. Once one starts to look for it, one finds tactical empathy in many forms of human practice. We make the case here that an insistence on alterity lies at the heart of the empathetic imagination. In this sense, the dark side of empathy is not so much “dark” as it is fundamentally social, and the link between empathy and deception that we seek to highlight speaks directly to the evolution and constitution of sociality itself.

EMPATHY, DECEPTION, AND SOCIALITY

Inspired by the discovery of mirror-neurons and the “theory of mind” debate (Baron-Cohen Reference Baron-Cohen1997; Frith and Wolpert Reference Frith and Wolpert2004; Iacoboni Reference Iacoboni2008), cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists have started to explore the idea that social behavior itself might be based on empathy. This new research agenda turns the tables on the phenomenological suspicion and critique of empathy as secondary to the ontology of human intersubjectivity (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1962; Zahavi Reference Zahavi2001) and asks whether intersubjectivity may itself be biologically grounded in the empathic capacity that humans share with their primate relatives (Gallese Reference Gallese2003). The primatologist Frans de Waal writes, “Empathy is the original, pre-linguistic form of inter-individual linkage that only secondarily has come under the influence of language and culture” (Reference de Waal2009a: 24). Even though the empathetic ability to “read” intentions into messages has tended to be seen as tied to language, empathy is actually, according to de Waal, pre-linguistic, and therefore the link between empathy and language is in evolutionary terms a derived relation. Empathy, de Waal asserts, emerged from the capacity to match another's emotional state, a capacity that enabled the kind of emotional contagion that is the basis for sociality. When flocks of birds take off simultaneously or macaques respond frenetically to the emotional outburst of one member of the group, these are prototypical instances of emotional contagion (Reference de Waal2008). De Waal proposes that empathy may be likened to a Russian doll, with state-matching or emotional contagion at its core and higher, more sophisticated capacities such as “perspective-taking” and the ability to feel sympathy or concern for others patched onto this primitive core (Reference de Waal2009b: 204).

We find this model convincing because it does not link empathy to morality and because it decouples the core of empathy from the moral impulse to understand and help: “taking another's perspective is a neutral capacity. It can serve both constructive and destructive ends” (ibid.: 211). And yet de Waal insists—and this is the key point for us—that empathy is foundational for sociality. It is the innate compulsion in humans and many other animals to respond emotionally and viscerally to the state of others that creates the evolutionary basis, inevitability even, of sociality (Reference de Waal2009a; Reference de Waal2009b). While empathy among humans and other primates frequently takes the form of helping, reciprocal altruism, and consolation, the work of de Waal and others also highlights that this is not the only form that it takes. In fact, there is a close evolutionary link between empathy and deception in primates. Low-ranking chimpanzees will, for instance, purposely ignore their own hidden sources of food when in the company of others, seemingly aware that other chimpanzees “are very quick to notice the eye movements of their fellows” (Reference de Waal1992: 90). Similarly, low-ranking chimpazees will sometimes cover their erect penis with their hand so as to make it invisible to high-ranking males but still visible to fertile females (Byrne and Whiten Reference Byrne and Whiten1992: 615). Deception of this kind—“the projection, to one's own advantage, of an inaccurate or false image” into others (ibid.: 86)—requires some basic form of empathy or ability to imagine how others see and experience the world. Studies such as these suggest that similar kinds of perspective-taking are at stake in deception and in empathy (O'Connell Reference O'Connell1995). Both may be crucially involved in the evolutionary processes that enabled human sociality (Decety Reference Decety2012: 29), and deception may have “evolved as an evolutionary adaptive strategy” of the empathic faculty of perspective-taking in social groups (Janovic et al. Reference Janovic, Ivkovi, Nazor, Grammer and Jovanovi2003: 809).

The nexus between empathy, sociality, and deception that ethological and evolutionary biology are discovering overlaps with similar insights from anthropology and sociology. Thus what we call “tactical empathy” appears to us to underlie much of the everyday forms of fakery that Erving Goffman (Reference Goffman1959), Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1984), and Kirsten Hastrup (Reference Hastrup2004: 46) have described so well. “Faking it” is thus a part of much of social life, of how we maintain social dignity by pretense and by everyday forms of impression management, all of which require finely tuned forms of empathic deception in order to work (Harrington Reference Harrington2009; Miller Reference Miller2003).

At the same time, these forms of deception have to be actively silenced for them to do their social work. As Bourdieu notes, everyday forms of deceit and pretense require public concealment in order to function socially. The social hypocrisy of exchange, for instance, can never be articulated if exchange is to run smoothly. What Bourdieu calls “pious hypocrisies” are central to sociality in general and to reciprocity in particular: “I know that you know that, when I give you a gift, I know that you will reciprocate, etc. But making the open secret explicit is taboo. It must remain implicit” (Reference Bourdieu1994: 141, 97). One cannot “call” the many bluffs that go into reciprocity and still play the game. If we articulate the demand that is implicit in the gift we give, the articulation will ruin the obligation. The point is that sociality relies on a complex set of interactions between empathy and deception that cannot be articulated, not in all of sociality all of the time, but certainly in some instances and some of the time. This article seeks to highlight the role of empathy in these social instances.

EMPATHY AND VIRTUE

At this point, the reader may object that our use of the word “empathy” is misguided, and that the term is inappropriate in cases such as those in this article where vicariousness aims to construct, deceive, and then destroy a radicalized other. After all, is empathy not precisely founded on understanding, a desire to commune with the feelings of the other, and ultimately to help rather than harm? Moreover, is empathy not about accurate images of the other that the other will recognize as genuine, rather than false ones? In short, are we not describing instances of “projection” rather than “empathy”? Our response is a counter-question: Are police profilers who put themselves in the shoes of serial killers “projecting” merely because their understanding is aimed at catching the culprits and because the suspects themselves vehemently reject the profilers’ description? Our argument is that many uses of the empathic faculty imply neither mutual understanding nor recognized accuracy, and studying these uses of the empathic faculty entails a break with the implicit moral economy invested in the concept of empathy.

Although “empathy” is recognized as a notoriously tricky term (Wispé Reference Wispé1986; Coplan and Goldie Reference Coplan, Goldie, Coplan and Goldie2011), the assumption that empathy does the work of the social and moral good has for some time now informed the bulk of empathy studies across the disciplines. Empathy is conventionally described as a powerful counteracting force that not only prevents the outbreak of violence (Halpern and Weinstein Reference Halpern and M. Weinstein2004), but also stops existing violence and creates third-party intervention (Wispé Reference Wispé1991: 169–71; see also Hollan and Throop Reference Hollan and Throop2008: 397). In fact, empathy has been correlated to low levels of domestic violence (Ickes Reference Ickes, Decety and Ickes2009), to altruism (Batson Reference Batson1991; de Waal Reference de Waal2008), and to care (Noddings Reference Noddings1984). Empathy has also been described as having a curative effect in psychotherapy (Kohut Reference Kohut1984; Rogers Reference Rogers and Koch1959), highlighted as an effective tool in communal conflict mediation (Zembylas Reference Zembylas2007), and lauded as “the great corrective for all forms of war-promoting misperception” in international relations (White Reference White1984: 84; McNamara and Blight Reference McNamara and Blight2001).

We can trace this conception of the empathic faculty—as a human virtue that enables us to act ethically toward other people—back to the liberal theories of David Hume and Adam Smith. Both found in the broadest definitions of the human complex of sympathy and empathy a link between their ideas about human nature and their politics of a “good society” (Coplan and Goldie Reference Coplan, Goldie, Coplan and Goldie2011). As a result, empathy has come to be seen as an anathema to violence, trickery, and deception, and as a virtuous human emotion that promotes understanding, trust, and compassion. In anthropology and psychotherapy, for instance, this “virtuous approach” can be traced in the way empathy has been elevated to a central methodological tool that ensures trusted access to the individual or cultural other (Behar Reference Behar1996; Kohut Reference Kohut1984; Wikan Reference Wikan1992). At its most romantic, in anthropological fieldwork empathy almost became a methodological guarantee of social communion. Glossing over the many forms of deceit and lies that fieldwork can also entail (Metcalf Reference Metcalf2002), empathy in the field appeared to be “a celebration of a genuine mutual understanding between anthropologists and the people they come to know, based on the anthropologists’ struggle to grasp what informants really mean in their own terms” (Lorimer Reference Lorimer, Davies and Spencer2010: 106).

The idea of empathy as the methodological basis for participant-observation was severely challenged by, for instance, Clifford Geertz, who argued forcefully that anthropological claims to empathy were really a poorly disguised form of Western projection (Reference Geertz1983: 126; see Hollan Reference Hollan2008: 477). Projection, it seems, always lies concealed at the heart of empathy. Geertz's critique, however, had two effects. It sidelined empathy as a direct object of study (Hollan and Throop Reference Hollan, Throop, Hollan and Throop2011), but kept it intact as an ideal type of authentic understanding and mutual goodwill. Only recently has a more complex conception of empathy begun to emerge in anthropology. As Douglas Hollan and Jason Throop phrase it: “One thing that is clear from the limited anthropological literature currently available is that first-person-like knowledge of others … is rarely, if ever, considered an unambiguously good thing—despite the many positive connotations empathy has in the North American context. Although such knowledge may be used to help others and to interact with them more effectively, it may also be used to hurt or embarrass them” (Reference Hollan and Throop2008: 389).

Anthropology is not alone in its historical tendency to concentrate on the “brighter side” of empathy. Empathy is strongly linked to understanding and compassion in philosophy and folk psychology in the West (Stueber Reference Stueber2006), a link that has only recently come under critique (Battaly Reference Battaly, Coplan and Goldie2011; Prinz Reference Prinz, Coplan and Goldie2011). The dominant trend in the academic study of empathy across the disciplines has been, and remains, to see it not only as a human capacity, but also as a human virtue. As a result, it has been conceptualized as a universal good associated with care, altruism, and social bonding; the antithesis of deceit, aggression, and conflict. But this assumption leaves unquestioned those instances of social life where empathy is entangled with or even the basis for deception and violence. As Wispé has written, “Uncritical use of the concept of empathy has ignored the possibility that empathy is not always a positive force in interpersonal relationships” (Reference Wispé1986: 319). Wispé notes that Nazi military strategists installed howling devices on their diving bombs during the Second World War in an “accurate” but “abhorrent” use of empathy to create fear and panic, and argues that this example “raises the interesting question about the connection between empathy and hostility—to which future empathy research might profitably be directed” (ibid.).

We need to move in this direction and shift the analytical focus away from empathy as virtue. Empathy, as Heather Battaly argues, is a basic “capacity” or “skill,” and a moral “virtue” only under special circumstances. It is not in itself virtuous in the way it is regarded in Western folk knowledge. Jesse Prinz, like Battaly, proposes that empathy of a certain sort may be found between the automatic, unconscious type of basic empathy associated with emotional contagion and the higher-level forms of empathy associated with a moral concern for others (Battaly Reference Battaly, Coplan and Goldie2011: 295; Prinz Reference Prinz, Coplan and Goldie2011: 212). It is this space—between an automatic, non-reflective response and a moral capacity—which our ethnographic cases may help to broaden.

De Waal's Russian doll model of empathy (Reference de Waal2009b: 211) seems to us a useful template for thinking about those cases of empathy that are deeply social and involve complex forms of “emotional mimicry” (Prinz Reference Prinz, Coplan and Goldie2011: 212), yet do not entail a moral concern for the wellbeing of the other. Torture and various forms of psychopathy require, as de Waal observes, “an appreciation of what others feel” while the higher-level concern for the other has been “switched off” (Reference de Waal2009b: 211). But as we have pointed out, tactical empathy is not restricted to torture, psychopathy, or moral evil. Everyday life is full of instances where we empathize yet have concern for the other “switched off” as a matter of course. “What kind of life,” de Waal asks, “would we have if we shared in every form of suffering in the world? Empathy needs both a filter that makes us select what we react to, and a turn-off switch” (ibid.: 213).

EMPATHY AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE

Our two ethnographic cases alert us to the cultural ways in which the filters and “switch-off” modes of empathy enable the construction of various different kinds of alterity and community. They in that sense push us toward a broader, non-normative investigation of the uses and abuses of the empathic faculty. Anthropologists have recently begun this work of breaking apart the academic and Western folk assumption that empathy is necessarily tied to virtue and moral goodwill by showing how poorly the English term “empathy” travels. Joel Robbins and Alan Rumsey demonstrate that in many Pacific Island societies people assume that it is difficult, if not impossible to know what is in the hearts and minds of others. This “doctrine of the opacity of other minds” (Reference Robbins and Rumsey2008: 408) sets up cultural conditions for “perspective-taking” and for sociality as a whole in these societies that are very different from those in the therapeutic offices of the Global North. Ethnography therefore highlights, first, how empathy has various cultural filters that determine what kind of “empathetic” relationships to others it is thought possible to establish. Second, ethnographic research has demonstrated that what on the North Atlantic Rim goes under the name of “empathy” is in some parts of the world associated more with danger than with benign, mutual understanding. As Hollan and Throop note in their introductory overview to a series of ethnographic studies of empathy in the Pacific, Indonesia, South America, and the Arctic, “Many people fear how others will use intimate knowledge of them and may go to great length, consciously and less than consciously, to block such knowledge by others. In the extreme, they may fear others will use empathic-like knowledge to physically harm or kill…” (Reference Hollan and Throop2008: 392).

Our concern here is not to provide two more accounts of the culturally specific ways of perceiving or understanding empathy. In fact, neither the Yukaghir nor the people of North Maluku even have, as far as we know, a specific term for “empathy” in their local languages. Rather, we focus on forms of deliberately deceptive forms of mimicry—pákostit (“to play dirty tricks”) in Yukaghir, and tiru (“to pretend, copy, or mimic”) in Indonesian—to analyze how deception involves forms of empathic imaginings and mimicry that appear to work similarly across various cultural settings because, we argue, they are fundamental to the work of constructing alterity. We therefore propose to see the dark side of empathy—the emotional and cognitive projection of oneself into the perspective or situation of another for deceptive purposes—not as an exception to sociality but as a way of re-engaging analytically the magical quality of alterity that is at the basis of sociality itself. Divergent though they may be, we propose that these ethnographic examples of “tactical empathy” tell us something vital and socially universal about the entanglement of alterity with the empathic imagination.

SIBERIA: WHEN SYMPATHY WITH ANIMAL PREY IS BAD

In the great catalog of Siberian Yukaghir myths, one stands out. It was first recorded by Waldemar Jochelson (Reference Jochelson and Boas1926: 147) in his classic study of the Yukaghirs, but it still widely known. The myth tells of a girl who was called, as tradition prescribes, to cut up the carcass of a moose killed by her brother. When the girl reached the dead animal, she uncovered its head, which had been sealed off with snow by the hunter. The girl looked into the moose's eyes, and seeing their deep, dark blackness, she thought to herself, “When my older brother began to overtake you, you must have felt sick at heart, so that you started crying” (ibid.). From that time on, the myth recounts, the hunters in the community were unable to find any moose, and the group began to suffer hunger. The people approached their shaman to ask for advice. The shaman communicated with the spirits and explained to the people that when the girl uncovered the moose's face and looked at it, she presumed that the animal had suffered from her brother's weapon. This was why the animals no longer presented themselves. The people asked, “What to do now”? The shaman answered: “That girl you must hang. Then perhaps, things will be better.” The people strung up the girl and two dogs at her side. As Jochelson explains, “It is better that one girl should die than the entire clan.” The next day the brother went out hunting and killed a moose. “From that time on success again accompanied the hunt” (ibid.).

The story is extraordinary for several reasons. First, the Yukaghirs, unlike some of their neigbours, such as the Chukchi people (Willerslev Reference Willerslev2009), seem never to have practiced human sacrifice, and this is the only myth in which they ritually kill a fellow human, and one from their own clan at that. Moreover, whereas numerous Yukaghir myths recount the transgression of one taboo or another, resulting in punishment by the spirits, none is as extreme in its consequence as this story. Therefore the question arises: Why does the girl's pity for the animal give rise to such a brutal and unprecedented response? For we may ask: Is not the girl simply unveiling the obvious, namely that an animal will suffer when hunted and shot? These questions, as we shall see, go to the heart of the subject of empathy. But before we can get there, more needs to be said about the world of Yukaghir hunting.

MIMETIC EMPATHY

For the Yukaghirs, along with many other hunting peoples in Siberia and the Americas, all beings are subject to the same principle: they are at one and the same time both predator and prey to other beings (see Goldman Reference Goldman1975; Veverios de Castro Reference Viverios de Castro and Howard1992; Fausto Reference Fausto2007; Brightman Reference Brightman1993; Holbraad and Willerslev Reference Holbraad and Willerslev2007; Willerslev Reference Rane2001; Veverios de Castro Reference Viverios de Castro1998). The numerous Yukaghir stories about the so-called “Mythical Old People,” a tribe of giant cannibals (that have their equivalents across the circumpolar North) who long to rip human bodies to pieces in the frenzy of devouring them (see Jochelson Reference Jochelson and Boas1926: 154; Spiridonov Reference Spiridonov1996 [1930]), provide in many ways the ontological model on which the cosmos in its entirety is conceived. Predation is the universal condition of life, the basis of all inter-species interaction. Eduardo Veverios de Castro has called this predatory ontology “perspectivism” (Reference Viverios de Castro1998). Perspectivism implies that the subjectivity of humans and of non-humans is formally the same because they share the same kind of souls, and that this in turn gives both these categories a similar viewpoint on the world. Non-humans—animals, spirits, even inanimate objects—thus see the world as humans do, living in households and kin groups and considering themselves to be human hunters, hunting for their animal prey. However, what each category sees as prey differs depending on the physicality of the body. Human beings see the moose as prey, because all the human beings share a similar body. The moose, for their part, see themselves as human beings, whereas they see human hunters as monstrous cannibals. Likewise, the Mythical Old People, with their giant bodies, see humans as moose and are in turn seen by humans as terrible monsters whose faces are grotesquely distorted by their craving for human flesh (Jochelson Reference Jochelson and Boas1926: 154). In other words, it is bodies that enable a particular way of seeing: who you are and whom you perceive as prey and predator depends on the kind of body you have (Pedersen and Willerslev Reference Pedersen and Willerslev2012; Willerslev Reference Rane2011: 513).

In this perspectival cosmos, in which all living creatures see themselves as “humans” and all others are seen as either monsters or moose, hunting becomes a mimetic exercise in which the hunter seeks to transform his own body into an image of his prey (Willerslev Reference Rane2007: 100–10; Reference Rane2012: 104–12). The giant cannibals, for example, are said to turn themselves into beautiful young women and seduce the human hunters (Willerslev Reference Rane2007: 93), while the human hunter for his part transforms himself into an attractive moose in order to seduce it. This process of shape-shifting must be understood quite literally. The prospective human hunter will visit the sauna the evening before leaving for the forest, where instead of using soap he rubs himself with birch tree branches (Willerslev Reference Rane2001). The Yukaghir say that the moose recognizes the smell of birch, which it finds attractive. Therefore it does not flee, but will rather approach the hunter. The smell essentially sets up a seductive relation between hunter and prey (Willerslev Reference Rane2004: 642). It is also for this reason that, at least one day before undertaking a hunting trip, the hunter abstains from sex altogether. This is not only because the hunter's sexual attention must be directed toward the animal's spirit, but also because sexual intercourse leaves an unmistakable human odor. The hunters say that only those who do not smell of human fluids will attract prey (Willerslev Reference Rane2001).

Like many other circumpolar hunters, the Yukaghir conceptualize hunting as essentially non-violent, involving only positive, non-coercive means of attraction and seduction (see Brightman Reference Brightman1993; Kwon Reference Kwon1997; Willerslev Reference Rane2012: 109). This view is also reflected in the rhetoric of the hunters, which effectively screens out the reality of being a human predator. The moose, for example, is referred to as “the big one,” whereas the bear is called the “barefooted one.” Likewise, the gun is addressed as the “stick” and the “knife” is called the “spoon.” Similarly, hunters do not say: “Let's go hunting for moose,” but use coded phrases such as: “Let's take a look at the big one,” or “I am going for a walk.” During the hunter's nightly dreams, his soul (ayibii, or “shadow”) leaves his body and wanders freely. The animal spirits call to it, inviting it into their forest home to have sexual intercourse. The feelings of lust and sexual excitement which the ayibii arouses in the animal spirits is then extended to their physical counterpart, the moose, which the next morning is said to run toward the hunter in the expectation of experiencing a sexual climax (Willerslev Reference Rane2004: 643). For this reason, hunters’ fur clothing has to be carefully and beautifully made with extensive decorations of bands and beadwork. Hunters say that the moose will be so attracted by what it sees that it “gives itself up” (Russian: otdat'sya.) to them (Willerslev Reference Rane2007: 102).

Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf have noted that seduction, “operates on the imagination of the object of seduction … the seducer's weapon is an image…. It represents the object of desire, but not as she is or as she sees herself. It is a phantasy image.… As soon as the object of seduction becomes fascinated by this … image she falls under the power of the seducer…. Only because the object of seduction desires herself does she let herself be seduced” (Reference Gebauer and Wulf1995: 212–13). The same could be said for the hunter who seduces his prey. His success rests upon producing an image of similarity in the moose, or perhaps in its associated spiritual being. This image, though, is not an exact copy of how the animal spirit sees itself. Rather, it is an ideal representation, a fantasy image of what the spirit wants to become or, better, wants to become one with. The hunter's imitation of the moose therefore accomplishes more than simply doubling the externalities of the animal's physical nature. Rather, the hunter aims to beautify and improve his self-image. Seduction here is not about making an accurate image of the other, but rather about making an image that is ideal, and narcissistic. It is rooted in the mimetic exaltation of the animal spirit's own self-image (Willerslev Reference Rane2007: 101). The hunter manages to create this ideal mirage of resemblance by exposing his soul, ayibii, which he has in common with the moose. As a result, what the animal comes to see in the hunter is not a monstrous cannibal, but its own inflated self-image, its own idealized “humanness” (ibid.: 190). Captivated by this fantasy image, the moose cannot withstand the hunter, who represents anything but what it naturally is; it thus draws closer to him, and eventually throws itself at him.

We can say that the hunter, in taking on his prey's identity and creating an idealized image of its being, establishes a relation of “mimetic empathy” with it (ibid.: 104), something which we consider one particular form of “tactical empathy.” The term “mimetic empathy” echoes the Yukaghirs’ saying, “Only if the elk [moose] likes the hunter will he be able to kill it” (Jochelson Reference Jochelson and Boas1926: 146). However, this should not be mistaken as a relationship of mutual affection or even love, as implying that the prey allows itself to be killed by the hunter out of deep-felt care for him. Ethnographic accounts of hunting in the circumpolar North often bear a “strong resemblance to images in Western food industry advertising, which represent animals as being eager to become food or as participating actively in the cooking process” (Brightman Reference Brightman1993: 188–89). Nothing could be further from the truth. The Yukaghirs are very much aware that the interests of prey not only differ from their own, but actually conflict with them. This is clearly expressed when people say that from the moose's point of view, they are the ones who are humans, while they see human hunters as monstrous man-eaters. In other words, animals do not willingly give themselves up as food for humans. Rather, they must be seduced into doing so through acts of mimetic empathy through which the hunter transforms the animal's perception of reality into a manipulated fiction of limitless sexual desire. What Yukaghirs have in mind when they say that a hunter will be able to kill the moose if it likes him is not the hunter as human predator, but the hunter in his animal disguise, playing his deceitful role of enticing lover.

SYMPATHETIC MAGIC

Within anthropology, the imitation of human and non-human others has customarily been discussed under the rubric of “sympathetic magic,” a term famously introduced by James Frazer (Reference Frazer1959 [1911]: 52). Sympathetic magic is based on the principle that “like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause. [So] the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it” (ibid.). We find evidence of the use of this type of imitative magic far back in the prehistoric period. In the famous Paleolithic caves of southern France and northwest Spain, the oldest of which dates back some thirty thousand years, the many depictions of Ice Age mammals exhibit indentations from arrows and spears, revealing that hunters had shot at these images (Willerslev Reference Rane2011: 520). It was thought that what the hunter does to the image of the animal will, sooner or later, also happen to the real physical animal. Likewise, many Siberian peoples carve figures of prey “on the principle that if the pictorial soul is in the hunter's possession the animal itself will follow soon” (Lissner Reference Lissner1961: 245).

What is it about the resemblance of the image and the animal depicted that should grant the hunter powers over it? Frazer was unable to explain this connection, so he simply assigned sympathetic magic to a mistaken form of causal thinking. However, in his book on the “mimetic faculty,” Michael Taussig (Reference Taussig1993) advances a different interpretation: that the basis of sympathetic magic is not a tragic misunderstanding of the laws of causality, but a particular way of perceiving things, animals, and people. To mimic somebody or something is to be sensuously filled with that which is imitated, yielding to it, mirroring it bodily. It is, Taussig claims, a powerful way of comprehending, representing, and above all controlling the surrounding world. What is valuable about Taussig's coupling of sympathetic magic with mimesis is that he shows how mimicry's magical powers reside in its capacity to incorporate otherness while, in a profound sense, remaining the same.

Frazer was therefore wrong when he asserted that for sympathetic magic to work it must resemble the original as closely as possible. On the contrary, there are good reasons why magical objects the world over are generally marked by a lack of realism, being either abstracted or distorted versions of real things (Pedersen and Willerslev Reference Pedersen and Willerslev2012: 475). We saw this distorted feature in the hunter's imitation of the moose: what the animal recognizes in the hunter, and what makes it “give itself up” to him, is not that he mirrors its physical being in an exact replica, but rather that the hunter creates a fantasy image, exposing as “exterior” or visible what is in reality “interior” or invisible: the animal's own infrahuman perspective. So the hunter's magical power over the moose lies in him being at once the same and otherwise, similar yet different from the moose. Without this crucial element of difference, the hunter would collapse into the animal, would become one with it, making any exercise of power impossible.

EMPATHETIC MAGIC

With these observations in mind, let us now return to the central issue that interests us here: the nature of empathy. Long ago, Theodor Lipps (Reference Lipps1903), who was concerned with conceptions of art and the aesthetic, introduced the notion of Einfühlung, a term that Edward Titchener (Reference Titchener1909) translated into English as “empathy.” Einfühlung was for Lipps the tendency of perceivers to project themselves into the objects of their perception, and to mimic in their minds and with their bodies the image that was being portrayed. This aesthetic desire was, for Lipps, a desire of the self for itself, a willingness to be itself, but paradoxically, this same self risked disappearing or “falling into the thing” (ibid.)—an interpretation that made Lipps’ critics accuse him of “wild animism” (Wispé Reference Wispé1986: 19). The (wild) animism of Lipps’ theory of empathy does resonate in important ways with Frazer's notion of sympathetic magic. Yet unlike Frazer, who erroneously thought that the magician was incapable of differentiating self from other and reality from imagination, Lipps was aware that the empathic imitator of art moves in between identities.

This, as we have seen, is true of the Yukaghir hunter, who is both himself and the moose he imitates, and who is forced to steer a complicated course between the ability to transcend difference and the necessity to maintain identity. In the context of Yukaghir hunting, this seductive game of mimetic empathy goes both ways, in that hunting is not only the predation of animals by humans; the animal and its associated spiritual being are also engaged in predatory acts against the human hunter. The animal spirit, Yukaghirs say, will seek to kill the human hunter out of sexual desire for him, so as to drag his ayibii back to its household as its “spouse” (Willerslev Reference Rane2007: 46; Willerslev Reference Rane2012: 109). The moose spirit attempts this by tricking the hunter into believing that what he sees is not a moose, but a young beautiful woman of humankind. When this succeeds, the hunter becomes so absorbed in the moose that he forgets to kill it. Failure of this kind is explained as the hunter “falling in love” with his prey. Consumed by this love, he can think about nothing else, stops eating, and soon dies. His ayibii, hunters say, then goes to live with the animal prey. For the hunter, therefore, killing prey is not only a matter of getting meat, but also a hazardous struggle to secure boundaries and to preserve his self-identity as a human hunter (Willerslev Reference Willerslev and Grasseni2006).

Lipps’ early theory of Einfühlung involved the same acute awareness of the play of identity and alterity: of holding onto and at the same time abandoning a sense of self in empathy. Einfühlung, Lipps said, is very different from Mitfühlung, or sympathy. Empathy is “a feeling into” an imagined and emotional projection of one's self, something that, as Titchener later stressed, had a thoroughly kinesthetic or embodied foundation (Reference Titchener1909). Empathy has both an emotional and a cognitive variant, and both are clearly embodied forms of knowing.Footnote ¹ However, the emotional nature of empathy—and this is crucial—is not sentimental, as sympathy is. Wispé makes this point by emphasizing, “In empathy the self is the vehicle for understanding, and never loses its identity. Sympathy, on the other hand, is concerned with communion rather than accuracy, and self-awareness is reduced rather than enhanced” (Reference Wispé1991: 79, our emphasis).

The Yukaghirs, of course, do not employ the terms “empathy” and “sympathy,” and thus they do not frame human-animal relations in terms of this particular Western distinction. Instead, they use the contradistinction between “playing dirty tricks” (what in Yukaghir is called pákostit) and “love” (which is called anurE). There is a clear correspondence between the lethal effects of sorcery on human victims and the use of imitative hunting magic to kill animals in that both are based on the creation of “false images” of others through vicariousness. Both are also referred to as acts of pákostit.

This may at first appear to be very different from our Western notion of empathy. And yet the key meaning of the Yukaghir contraries, “playing dirty tricks” and “love,” signifies in important ways our distinction between empathy and sympathy: both “empathy” and pákostit entail not only similarity but, importantly, also difference. The hunter's feelings of empathy arise in the mimicking of the moose precisely because his experiences are not really that of the animal, because the two are different beings after all, which, in the face of their dissimilarity, come to possess access to shared bodily and sensory experiences. This recognition of difference as something that is indispensable and deliberately maintained rather than something completely dissolved is, as we have seen, what allows the hunter to kill his prey, but it is also, as Lipps pointed out, what distinguishes empathy from sympathy, and even from feelings of love. There is an important sense in which the very acts of imitation enforce this crucial necessary delineation: by its very nature mimesis always implies an element of “copiedness” or incomplete correspondence with the original (Taussig Reference Taussig1993: 51). This has the effect of constantly forcing the imitator to “turn back” on himself, thus preventing him from achieving unity with the object imitated (Willerslev Reference Willerslev and Grasseni2006). Mimetic empathy is therefore situated in and defined by difference as much as by similarity, and it is this necessary difference which distinguishes it from other related forms: sympathy, love, or metamorphosis. What Frazer called “sympathetic magic” should therefore be renamed “empathetic magic,” since it is empathy's condition of being both “inside” and “outside”—part of, yet also detached from the object imitated—that makes this kind of magic effective in controlling the surrounding world.

EXPOSING THE TRUTH OF HUNTING

We are now in a position to explain the meaning of the Yukaghir story about the girl, who was executed by her own kin because she expressed pity for the dead moose. Quite clearly, the girl establishes a relation of sympathy with the animal. Sympathy comes from the Greek word sympatheia, meaning literally “with” (syn) “suffering” (pathos), which implies that the sympathizer substitutes another's suffering for their own (Wispé Reference Wispé1986: 318). But why is this feeling of sympathy for the moose so intolerable that the girl has to pay for it with her life? Every hunter knows, after all, that animals suffer when they are chased, shot at, and killed.

Now, when the hunter relates to the moose by means of mimetic empathy, he is, as we have seen, a hyper-reflexive pretender, who by withholding his own identity as predator maximizes the seductive force of his deceptive enactment of the animal and its associated spiritual being. Step by step, he captures the animal spirit's imagination, causing it to desire its own illusory self-image. From the hunter's cleansing of his body in the sauna, through his actual imitation of the animal's movements, through the final seconds before he kills it, the animal spirit is engrossed ever more deeply in the fantasy image produced by the hunter. In the end, the spirit gets so excited, blinded by senseless desire, that it runs toward him and he can kill it.

When the girl in the story starts sympathizing with the killed moose, she brings an altogether different version of hunting into awareness. The entire complex of make-believe is exposed, unmasking the truth that although love between humans and prey is skillfully enacted by hunters, it is never actually allowed to unfold. The repressed truth of hunter-prey relationships is that they are based not in love, but in predation: all beings are subject to the same cosmic rule, of being both eater of and eaten by other beings. Everyone needs to kill in order to live, and this is done by means of shape-shifting, mimesis, and trickery. Hunting is the antithesis of love. For empathic mimesis to be efficacious in hunting it is critical that its mechanisms of make-believe are not exposed. This is not because the parties involved do not know the truth. Both hunters and spirits are all too astute to believe in their own seductive rhetoric of love and non-violence (Willerslev Reference Willerslev2013: 52). They are not hapless victims of some sort of false consciousness. Rather, hunters play the game of lovemaking and behave as though they did not know that they are following an illusion on the simple ground that it works, that it brings them life-giving meat on the table (Willerslev Reference Willerslev2013: 54). The animals and their spirits, for their part, continue to let themselves be seduced by hunters because of the pleasure it gives them. Thus, the truth exposed by the girl is not shocking because it reveals an ignorance of what is really going on but instead because it exposes the hunters’ cynicism of seduction and the spirits’ narcissistic pleasure in being seduced. When the truth of hunting is exposed in this way, the magic of seduction is lost. No longer potential lovers, hunter and prey become antagonists. The girl must therefore die, and with her the obvious yet unbearable truth about the “dark side” of mimetic empathy, which can once again be hidden from view.

INDONESIA: EMPATHY WITH YOUR ENEMY

“Prosperous greetings in the name and love of Jesus Christ. We have received your letter, and we and the group consider the situation to be very serious” (Nanere Reference Nanere2000: 72, our translation). Thus begins a letter, copies of which were distributed throughout the eastern Indonesian and predominantly Muslim towns of Ternate and Soa Sio in November 1999. Written in Indonesian, the letter goes on to detail a devious plan by its apparent author, the Christian church in Ambon some 500 kilometers to the south, where brutal fighting between groups increasingly identified as Muslim and Christian had raged for most of that year. Addressing itself to the leadership of the minority Christian church in Ternate, the letter orders a targeted campaign of terror against the Makian, one of several ethnic Muslim groups in the area. The Makian distinguish themselves by their educational zeal and keen political skills, and they are therefore often accused of political dominance within regional politics and regional administration. For this reason they made excellent scapegoats. “Evict them from Halmahera,” the letter intones, “or kill them on the spot in the most sadistic way imaginable to cause mental depression and war trauma” (ibid.: 73).

The letter orders all ablebodied Christian men to gather their spears and machetes and fan out from the local churches to set up roadblocks. They are instructed to focus on Makian people while leaving members of other ethnic Muslim groups unharmed, “so that ethnic divisions [among Muslims] occurs which may be utilized in the upcoming battle” (ibid.). The letter implies that plans are already far advanced: funds have been collected, political bargains have been struck, boats lie moored, and bomb experts are on standby. To anyone reading the letter, it seems clear that an imminent and diabolical conspiracy has been revealed.

Picked up from the street by people out for an evening stroll (beronda malam—a common practice of meet-and-greet in Indonesian social life), the letter must have come as a shock, an unexpected and alarming insight into the devious inner workings of the minds of their Christian neighbors and acquaintances. Inconsistent as the plan was with long experience of interfaith sociality in North Maluku, the letter's description of a Christian conspiracy squared only too well with recent ethnic riots in Halmahera, the main but sparsely populated island of North Maluku, only months before. Clashes between Makian and local Halmaherans had erupted in August and October, sparked by anxieties over access to land and future political control following the announcement that a new district was to be established for Makian migrants on Halmahera. At least one hundred people were killed and thousands of Makian refugees sought sanctuary on the Muslim islands of Ternate and Tidore (Duncan Reference Duncan2005; International Crisis Group 2000: 6).

In the eyes of these refugees as well as many of their Muslim hosts, the letter provided new, terrifying evidence of premeditated aggression behind the violence. It suggested that ethnic clashes between the Makian and local Halmaherans (many of whom were Christian) were actually a smokescreen for what was now revealed as the initial stages of a religious war, an imminent and premeditated Christian takeover of all of eastern Indonesia. The letter continues, “A new giant will emerge out of this process. It will have the ethnic face of the originally Halmaheran people but through it will flow the blood of Jesus The Savior who will come at the Third Millennium to complete the golden triangle of Maluku, North Sulawesi, and Irian Jaya, which has always been the goal of the church program” (Nanere Reference Nanere2000: 73, our translation).

This idea of a plan to establish a “Christian Eastern Indonesia” fit only too well with the paranoid political literature that had emerged in Indonesia since the early 1990s. Rumors of Christian conspiracies served to ostracize the old and often Christian business allies of President Suharto, as he increasingly began to depend on conservative Islamic groups in a desperate bid to remain in power (Hefner Reference Hefner2000). National and local conspiracy theories increasingly became entangled as local elites in eastern Indonesia began to vie for control in the volatile political atmosphere following the May 1998 collapse of the New Order regime (Bubandt Reference Bubandt2008; Reference Bubandt2009; Hefner Reference Hefner2002; Klinken Reference Klinken2007).

As a result, the letter ignited a tinderbox of hostile prejudice and political suspicion. Within a few days of its distribution, it set in train a series of preventive attacks by Muslims on the supposedly conspiring Christians. As violence spread over the next eighteen months to the rest of North Maluku, some two thousand people were killed and more than two hundred thousand people—a quarter of the region's population—were internally displaced (International Crisis Group 2002: 18).Footnote ²

The letter was a forgery (tiruan); a fake (palsu). According to the available evidence, it was fashioned by Makian members of the regional bureaucratic elite who had access to equipment like typewriters, photocopying machines, and motorbikes, and who were eager to create a common Muslim cause at a critical political juncture. In addition to these technical aids, the Makian writers also relied on access to the minds of the Christian other that the letter sought to vilify. The forgery was convincing because it successfully mimicked the rhetorical style, the millenarian dreams, and the religious metaphors of the Christian enemy. In short, the forger had to vicariously take the perspective of the Christian other in order to mimic and demonize him.

One can argue that the manipulation involved in forgeries like the North Malukan letter is more sophisticated than the Yukaghir hunter's deception. The letter vicariously empathized with the Christian other in order to portray the Christian as evil and thus to successfully trick segments of the Muslim community into a preventive strike. The pretense to being someone else through mimicry was, in other words, here directed less at the subject of one's mimicry than at a third party, namely the members of one's own constituency. Yet despite their differences, the Siberian hunter and the Indonesian political instigator are in some ways mirrored images of one another. The Yukaghir hunter establishes a human-like seduction scenario with a moose by mimicking it, but does so knowing that moose see humans as demons. The men who forged the North Malukan letter, meanwhile, mimic a human other in order to demonize him in the eyes of fellow Muslims.

VIOLENCE AND VICARIOUS IMAGINATION

In an Indonesian context, the North Malukan letter is not unique. Rather it is an instance of an incendiary kind of politics pursued through forms of deceptive mimicry that are well known in Indonesian political history. This type of forgery (tiruan), allegedly revealing a hidden conspiracy, established itself as a common political weapon during the 1990s in late- and post-Suharto Indonesia, where it helped to produce its own kind of politically paranoid reality (Bubandt Reference Bubandt2009). Nor is the forged letter unique in a global context. Perhaps the most infamous instance of this genre of forgery mimicking a demonized other is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Allegedly the minutes from a congress of “the Twelve Tribes of Zion” planning world domination, the document was fashioned in the first years of the twentieth century by the secret police of Tsar Alexander from a patchwork of books and other fictional sources (Cohn Reference Cohn2005). Rejected at the time as a forgery, only to be rediscovered over and again as an “authentic” document, the letter has taken on a long and stubborn life of its own in anti-Semitic writings in Nazi Germany, Europe, the United States, and the contemporary Arab world (Bronner Reference Bronner2000). In fact, an Indonesian translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was produced in the late 1990s, and quickly became part of the political paranoia that was promoted by conservative and radical Muslims after Suharto's fall in 1998 (Vickers Reference Vickers2005: 218).

The North Malukan letter shows that vicariousness may play a central, but also perverse role in the kinds of politics of suspicion and paranoia that operate on the border between alterity and violence in a global world. Most episodes of contemporary ethnic and religious violence, as Arjun Appadurai observes, are “shot through with the language of the impostor, the secret agent, and the counterfeit person” (Reference Appadurai1996: 155). In a global age, so Appadurai argues, communal conflicts increasingly hinge on the work of the imagination. Social imaginaries of betrayal are central to an understanding of how collective violence is mobilized and legitimated. Appadurai's “hypothesis of treachery” is that brutal violence becomes a way of dealing with the uncertainties of intimacy and self-identity in a global world where the political stakes of identity are exceedingly high, but identity categories also increasingly abstract (ibid., 155; Reference Appadurai1998). A sense of treachery erupts when “the school teacher turns out to be sympathetic to the Hutu [or] when your best friend turns out to be Muslim rather than a Serb” (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1996: 154). In an attempt to explain the brutal and excessive forms of violence that often characterize the “new wars” that emerged in the 1990s (Kaldor Reference Kaldor1999), Appadurai puts forward the idea that the decapitation, dismemberment, and physical mutilation of the body of the imagined other is an attempt to dissect the truth, as it were, about the other.

The viscerality of ethnocidal violence is, to put it differently, a desperate, even perverse attempt to recreate a kind of intimacy on the body of the impostor who used to pose as a friend, but now has seemingly revealed himself to be an ethnic or religious other. Within global imaginaries of betrayal, visceral violence becomes a perverse form of intimacy that tries to reclaim the truth about the abstract other in “a twisted version of Popperian norms for verification in science” (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1998: 922). While Appadurai proposes that ideas of intimacy may be employed perversely in an attempt to divine an imagined deception, the North Malukan letter indicates that vicarious forms of intimacy may be at the heart of deception itself. It is well known that lies, propaganda, and deceit are among the most powerful weapons in conflict and war (Allport and Postman Reference Allport and Postman1947; Connelly Reference Connelly2004; Holt Reference Holt2004), but the role that empathy might play in hostile deception and violence is still poorly understood.

The North Malukan letter supports Appadurai's point that vicarious intimacy and violence may in some cases, and perhaps increasingly in a global world, be closely connected. The letter raises the possibility that the empathic faculty may be employed tactically to faithfully mimic another, only to demonize or dehumanize that other. Here, recent interest in the affectivity of power may lead to a reappraisal of the complex links between power, violence, and vicariousness (Ahmad Reference Ahmad2004; Stoler Reference Stoler2009). For instance, in an intriguing study of Dutch colonialism in West Papua, Danilyn Rutherford has written of the close link between vicariousness and colonial rule. She shows how sympathy in a colonial setting “can spawn hostility as easily as love” (Reference Rutherford2009: 4). The North Malukan letter illustrates how empathy, in an already politically tense situation, may be deployed not to console but rather to provoke violence.

DEHUMANIZING EMPATHY

Applying de Waal's Russian doll approach to empathy, one might say that the North Malukan letter illustrates how the empathic imaginative leap of oneself into the perspective of the other may operate with moral concern for the other's well-being “switched off.” In the fake letter from North Maluku and other letters like it, dehumanization is achieved not by rational objectification but rather by passionate impersonation. This form of dehumanization through acts of ambivalent empathy demands a different analytical approach than that adopted to explain the rationalized forms of dehumanization associated with the violence of high modernity. The assumption that violence erupts only when empathy ceases is based on the study of large-scale violence and genocide, of which the Holocaust has become paradigmatic. Here the consensus is that brutal violence on a large scale entails a prior dehumanization of the victims (Chalk and Jonassohn Reference Chalk and Jonassohn1990; Kelman Reference Kelman1973; Kuper Reference Kuper1982). Dehumanization, in turn, is generally seen to be achieved by bureaucratic means that serve to reduce humans to stereotypical caricatures or to objects by making them numbers on a ledger, figures on a graph, or weight to be freighted (Bauman Reference Bauman1989). Through such objectifying or stereotyping maneuvers, it is said, violence is made legitimate and the emergence of empathy allegedly prevented.

We argue, by contrast, that the investigation of instances where empathy and violence, sociality and deception are linked rather than opposed offers a better vantage point from which to study human social life (and human conflict) than are approaches that insist on seeing empathy and violence as anathema, and conflict as anti-social. Hollan and Throop's otherwise excellent introduction to a volume full of intriguing accounts of empathy's both aggressive and consoling dimensions is a case in point. It falls back on a conventional approach to empathy when they in their conclusion ask: “Finally, how do we account for those moments in which empathy seems to be completely absent?… How do we understand the psychological, cultural, political, and economic contexts in which human capacities for empathy can become so stilled that individuals can engage in acts of collective violence, torture and genocide?… Understanding the problem of empathy in the face of such violence is perhaps one of the most important tasks we have as students of human social life” (Reference Hollan and Throop2008: 397).

What we have called the “virtuous” approach to empathy is arguably reiterated when individuals are said to engage in violence, torture, and genocide because their “human capacities for empathy are stilled.” The North Malukan letter highlights how violence can also be produced by vicarious forms of empathy. Sometimes, and perhaps more often than we are accustomed to realizing, individuals are jolted into violent action by tactical acts of empathy. As such, the letter points to the need to recalibrate the undoubtedly important task of “understanding the problem of empathy in the face of such violence” by exploring empathy's partial presence in violence, rather than by assuming that violence takes place only in those moments when empathy is “completely absent.”

EMPATHIC INACCURACY AND POLITICAL INAUTHENTICITY

The authors of the North Malukan letter faced a peculiar dilemma. For the forged letter to be at least potentially believable as an authentic letter written within the Christian Church, the Muslim forger had to empathize, impossibly, with a “demonic other” that he despised. The difficulty of empathizing with a demonic other suffuses the language of the letter. In many respects the language almost passes as Christian. Phrases like “Resurrect the magnificent Mission of The Shepherd to bring peace to the world in the love of Jesus Christ,” or “ecumenical greetings,” indicate an intimate knowledge of Christian rhetoric and Christian millenarianism.Footnote ³ This knowledge was of the sort that neighbors of different religious backgrounds could only acquire through regular interactions. It could have been picked up either from everyday communication, from Bibles and the psalm books that were available in bookstores in Ternate, or by listening to church services in one of the seven Protestant or four Catholic churches that were centrally placed in Ternate.

But the Christian rhetoric and millenarian hopes for the Second Coming of Christ are in the letter turned into the basis for a diabolical conspiracy about a rising giant “who will come at the Third Millennium” to take over eastern Indonesia. In order to turn Christian millenarianism into political conspiracy, the letter had to be more than a mere copy of Christian rhetoric. It had to be a creative elaboration of this rhetoric in an empathetic, but also thoroughly ambivalent fashion. Christian commentators thus noted that the phrase “ecumenical greetings” was not used in official correspondence and that the otherwise required title of “minister” (Pendeta, usually abbreviated to Pdt) after the name was omitted at the end of the letter (Nanere Reference Nanere2000: 67).

The ambivalence of the perspective-taking involved in tactical empathy is also evident in the letter's passages of self-description. For instance, the Makian people are described as “highly brutal, clever/wily [pintar], hard-working, brave, and fanatically Muslim” (ibid.: 72). Assuming still that the author(s) of the letter were Makian instigators (and given the murkiness of recent Indonesian politics, this may never be definitively established), their self-description swings awkwardly between self-denigration (‘brutal” and “fanatically Muslim”) and self-glorification (“clever,” “hard-working,” and “brave”). The word pintar teeters on this positive/negative divide, because it means “clever” but also has connotations of “crafty” or “wily” (Echols and Shadily Reference Echols and Shadily1989: 430). The use of an ambivalent word like pintar is evidence of the difficulty of this kind of empathy. The result is a kind of intersubjectivity, in which the stereotypical construction of a demonic other also entails the construction of a stereotypical self-identity.

How might one account for this double stereotyping? Psychologists have for some time been interested in empathic accuracy, linking the ability to read other people's mind “well” to social success, and empathic inaccuracy to pathological violence (Ickes Reference Ickes1997; Reference Ickes2003; Reference Ickes, Decety and Ickes2009). Empathy, convention has it, is accurate, while projection is inaccurate. We assert that the empathetic space between these ideal types needs to be explored. The North Malukan letter is too inaccurate to be empathetic in the conventional (and utopian) sense, and too effective to be mere projection (the ascription of one's own perspective onto the other), and it thereby opens up space for a kind of empathy founded upon an insistence on alterity and difference.

We propose that the empathetic inaccuracy involved in the North Malukan letter is not accidental, but has its own magic. In his study of mimesis and alterity, Taussig notes that the carved turtle figures used by the South American Cuna Indians in magic were more “accurate” than the carved turtles used as decoys in hunting (Reference Taussig1993: 11–12). This suggests the tantalizing possibility that deceptive decoys may employ inaccuracy in order to work. The tactical empathy involved in both the North Malukan letter and in Siberian hunting is clearly built on the maintenance of a certain inaccuracy and distance. Such distance is perhaps part of the dynamic of all empathy, which after all implies that one steps into the perspective of another and then steps out again. It is arguably by pretending to be “another-with-a-difference” that identity may be maintained. Alterity, even alterity of a stereotypical sort, as in our cases, is thereby produced in a fundamentally intersubjective way. Thus the Siberian hunter did not make an exact copy of the moose. In the same way, the Muslim version of the Christian letter was shoddy at best. As a result, many Muslims suspected it was a fake. And yet, and this is crucial, the letter was convincing: those who partook in the violence sparked by the letter did so even though they suspected it was phony. Dissimulation, believing in something one knows to be fake, appears to be the obverse side of deception, its necessary condition of possibility (ibid.: xvii). It is our contention that dissimulation, belief in a shared public secret, is possible, and indeed attractive, because of the magic that clings to the empathic faculty.

The “empathetic magic” involved in both our Siberian and Indonesian cases did not seem to work because it achieved a total unity with what is being mimicked. Rather, the power of the empathic deception turns on the magic of discrepancies. It is a striking irony that most people in North Maluku who read the letter, including many of those who thought it revealed a real conspiracy and were sufficiently provoked by it to participate in the ensuing violence, claimed afterwards that they knew the letter was fake. The slanderous “stereotypicality” of the Christian portrayed in the letter was inaccurate enough to be unbelievable, and yet somehow this unbelievable portrayal was still convincing enough to start a riot. We suggest that it is this “almost-but-not-quite-ness” of mimesis—the magic of sliding symbolically “between photographic fidelity and fantasy, between iconicity and arbitrariness, between wholeness and fragmentation” (ibid.: 17)—that makes empathic deception effective.

The paradox that an obviously bogus letter could nevertheless be ultimately believable sprang from the political context in which it emerged. In a paranoid political universe, even an inaccurate and slanderous form of mimicry can be convincing. The empathic inaccuracies of the letter, which made both Christians and Makian people such obvious stereotypes, spoke to a political context in Indonesia in the late 1990s within which political inaccuracy had for some time been a social fact. Falsity “pervades the Indonesian world,” as James Siegel writes (Reference Siegel1998: 55), but during the New Order (1966–1998) forgery had, as numerous scholars have described (Bubandt Reference Bubandt2008; Heryanto Reference Heryanto2006; Spyer Reference Spyer, Comaroff and Comaroff2006; Strassler Reference Strassler2000), become part of the way in which political reality was constructed and power ambivalently maintained. By the late 1990s and in the shadow of economic crisis and the collapse of the New Order regime, the inauthenticity of the state, and the corrupt nature of the political economy upon which it was built, had become acute (Bubandt Reference Bubandt2006). In this setting, the empathic inaccuracy of the North Malukan letter, driven by the impossible attempt to mimic an imagined diabolical other, ended up being supremely effective, even as most people suspected the letter was forged. As Umberto Eco has pointed out, sometimes falsehood has a force of its own (Reference Eco1999). In a situation of political uncertainty in Indonesian political history, where truth was at a premium (Bubandt Reference Bubandt2014), the very emotional ambivalence that is built into “tactical empathy”—the ultimately impossible feat of faithfully putting oneself in the perspective of an “other” that one fears and abhors—ended up being paradoxically and tragically believable.

CONCLUSION: TOWARD A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF EMPATHY

Violence, far from being the opposite of sociality, is thoroughly social, a visceral kind of language (Das et al. Reference Das, Kleinman, Ramphele and Reynolds2000). Violence is a “world-making” just as much as it is a “world-unmaking” through the “sadistic potential of language” (Scarry Reference Scarry1985: 27). This article has contended that empathy is intimately involved in the social language and world-making of violence. Empathy, biologically hard-wired into humans and many other animals, is crucial, we assert, not only to social forms of bonding and understanding but also to social forms of seduction and trickery—to both the social hypocrisy that maintains “normal” sociality and the hostile deception that is frequently involved in violence. Tactical empathy, as our examples show, plays a role in the vicarious forms of deception upon which both sociality and violence rely, on very different scales, and with very different ontologies.

The Siberian hunter employs empathy within an animist ontology. In this animist universe, where humans believe that animals conceive of themselves as humans, the hunter must steer a difficult course between transcending difference and maintaining identity through mimetic empathy. Sympathy with the animal killed must be avoided, on pain of death. The Indonesian forger faces a similar dilemma, but within a different ontology. In order for the forgery to work and do its political magic of demonization, the writer has to empathize with a human other that he sets out to dehumanize. This dilemma of empathic proximity combined with distance exists within a political ontology in which inauthenticity has become the norm.

The two ethnographic cases support the proposition that empathy is shaped and delimited by the cultural ontology within which it exists (Hollan and Throop Reference Hollan, Throop, Hollan and Throop2011; Robbins and Rumsey Reference Robbins and Rumsey2008). At the same time, empathy is not simply culturally relative. We found the same basic and universal mechanisms of empathy—the oscillation between stepping into and stepping out of the perspective of the other—at work in both of our cases. Crucially, this oscillation entails an inescapable ambivalence: empathy strives toward identification, yet does so while (re-)producing radical alterity. This play of identification and Othering is fundamentally intersubjective and social. In that sense, empathy, even of the tactical kind that has interested us here, is not an inherent property of a subject. It is constituted in an intersubjective field of relations, whether with humans or non-humans. The ambivalence of empathy, which suffuses both its dark and bright sides, is therefore really the magic of sociality itself.