Especially since the discovery of mirror neurons, scholars in a variety of disciplines have made empathy a central focus of research. Yet despite this recent flurry of interest and activity, the cross-cultural study of empathy in context, as part of ongoing, naturally occurring behavior, remains in its infancy. In the present article, I review some of this recent work on the ethnography of empathy. I focus especially on the new issues and questions about empathy that the ethnographic approach raises and (...) the implication of these for the study of empathy more generally. (shrink)

This article addresses care as a socially, culturally, historically, and politically constituted ‘process’ and relates to ethnographic data gained during long-term anthropological fieldwork in Daiden, a place in the Lower Ramu River area of Papua New Guinea. It focuses in particular on the situation of elderly people as well as on intergenerational shifts. Analytically, the four dimensions of care (caring about, taking care of, care-giving, care-receiving) and their related values (attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness), as developed within the ‘ethics of care’ (...) framework by feminist scholars are applied in order to delineate the remaking of local ethics of care in the face of wider contemporary societal transformations. By means of a ‘life-course perspective’ the article aims to shed light on the ways in which such a remaking has been perceived and evaluated in Daiden, thus augmenting the idea of care as a process rather than as a natural and/or atemporal disposition. The article also tackles pressing social welfare issues in contemporary Papua New Guinea in a more general way. (shrink)