Comparative Studies in Society and History 2015;57(1):534.

0010-4175/14 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2014
doi:10.1017/S0010417514000589

The Dark Side of Empathy: Mimesis,

Deception, and the Magic of Alterity
N I L S B U B AN D T
Anthropology, Aarhus Research Center on the Anthropocene, Aarhus
University

R A NE W I LL E RS LE V
Anthropology, Arctic Research Center, Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus
University
INTRODUCTION

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of comparative analysis is the realization

that some events, practices, or phenomena, while so utterly separated in
space that it appears they could not be connected, seem nevertheless to
exhibit a certain kind of qualitative resemblance. Indeed, this potential for
finding similarities across cultural divides is the great forte of comparative analysis. It renders possible rare insights into what it means to be a human being per
se. Our field research in Siberia and Indonesia on two seemingly unrelated
social phenomenahunting and political violence, respectivelyhas highlighted one such similarity, namely how people in both cases vicariously
take up the viewpoints of others in order to trick them. Discussing our ethnographic material, it struck us that what is usually referred to as empathythe
first-person imaginative projection, at once emotional and cognitive, of oneself
into the perspective or situation of another (Hollan and Throop 2011; Wisp
1986)is in both ethnographic instances closely linked to a deceptive ambition. This link between empathy and deception has been given scant treatment
in the recent and burgeoning literature on empathy, whether within the fields of
philosophy (Kgler and Stueber 2000; 2006; Zahavi 2001), neuroscience
(Baron-Cohen 2012; Decety and Ickes 2009; Gallese 2003; Stueber 2012), primatology (Preston and de Waal 2002; de Waal 2009b), psychology (Eisenberg
and Strayer 1987; Farrow and Woodruff 2007; Halpern 2001), political science
(Rifkin 2009), or anthropology (Hollan 2012; Hollan and Throop 2008; 2011;
but see Bubandt 2009 and Willerslev 2004; 2006; 2007). While the renewed
interest in empathy promises a fresh look at the conditions of possibility of
sociality itself, we argue that this potential can only be realized if we give up
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the implicit idea that empathy is always a moral virtue and instead embrace a
broader approach that also encompasses its darker, but no less social side.
Our proposition is simple (and perhaps because of its simplicity it has been
almost entirely overlooked): quite frequently, empathic identifications with
others do not have as their goal mutual understanding, altruism, consolation,
intersubjective compassion, care, or social cohesiongoals conventionally regarded as the sine qua non of empathy. Instead, the empathic faculty is used for
deceptive and ultimately violent purposes. Our focus on these instances where
empathy and deception are linked with aggressive intent is not to deny that
empathy is frequently associated with some or all of its conventional virtues,
but we think that there is more to its nature. We are interested in those instances
when the empathetic incorporation of an alien perspective contains, and in fact
is motivated by, seduction, deception, manipulation, and violent intent. We call
this tactical empathy.
T A C T I C A L E M PAT H Y: T W O C A S E S

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 mooses smooth leg-skin so as to sound like the
animal when it moves in the snowall 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

T H E D A R K S I D E O F E M PAT H Y

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 otherwhether the other is a Christian
or a moosethat 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 ones vicariousness. As Anna
Freud reportedly quipped, empathy requires the ability to step into someone
elses shoes, and then to step out again (Qvortrup 2003: 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 ones own identity, a feeling into the other, as it
were. As Lauren Wisp 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 (Wisp 1986: 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 ones 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 others 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,

NILS BUBANDT AND RANE WILLERSLEV

which lies at the heart of not only mimicry (Taussig 1993) 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.
E M P A T H Y, D E C E P T I O N , A N D S O C I A L I T Y

Inspired by the discovery of mirror-neurons and the theory of mind debate

(Baron-Cohen 1997; Frith and Wolpert 2004; Iacoboni 2008), 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 1962; Zahavi
2001) and asks whether intersubjectivity may itself be biologically grounded
in the empathic capacity that humans share with their primate relatives
(Gallese 2003). 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 (2009a: 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, prelinguistic, 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 anothers 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 (2008). 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 (2009b: 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

T H E D A R K S I D E O F E M PAT H Y

understand and help: taking anothers perspective is a neutral capacity. It can

serve both constructive and destructive ends (ibid.: 211). And yet de Waal
insistsand this is the key point for usthat 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 (2009a; 2009b). 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 (1992: 90). Similarly, lowranking 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 1992: 615). Deception of this kindthe projection, to
ones 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 (OConnell
1995). Both may be crucially involved in the evolutionary processes that
enabled human sociality (Decety 2012: 29), and deception may have
evolved as an evolutionary adaptive strategy of the empathic faculty of
perspective-taking in social groups (Janovic et al. 2003: 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
(1959), Pierre Bourdieu (1984), and Kirsten Hastrup (2004: 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 2009; Miller 2003).
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
(1994: 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

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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.
E M PAT H Y A N D V I R T U E

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 (Wisp
1986; Coplan and Goldie 2011), 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 2004), but also stops existing violence and
creates third-party intervention (Wisp 1991: 16971; see also Hollan and
Throop 2008: 397). In fact, empathy has been correlated to low levels of domestic violence (Ickes 2009), to altruism (Batson 1991; de Waal 2008), and
to care (Noddings 1984). Empathy has also been described as having a curative
effect in psychotherapy (Kohut 1984; Rogers 1959), highlighted as an effective
tool in communal conflict mediation (Zembylas 2007), and lauded as the great
corrective for all forms of war-promoting misperception in international relations (White 1984: 84; McNamara and Blight 2001).
We can trace this conception of the empathic facultyas a human virtue
that enables us to act ethically toward other peopleback 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
2011). 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

T H E D A R K S I D E O F E M PAT H Y

11

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 1996; Kohut 1984; Wikan 1992). 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 2002), 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
2010: 106).
The idea of empathy as the methodological basis for participantobservation 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 (1983: 126; see Hollan 2008:
477). Projection, it seems, always lies concealed at the heart of empathy.
Geertzs critique, however, had two effects. It sidelined empathy as a direct
object of study (Hollan and Throop 2011), 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
thingdespite 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 (2008: 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 2006), a
link that has only recently come under critique (Battaly 2011; Prinz 2011).
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 Wisp has written, Uncritical use of the concept of empathy has
ignored the possibility that empathy is not always a positive force in interpersonal relationships (1986: 319). Wisp 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

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between empathy and hostilityto 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 2011: 295; Prinz 2011: 212). It is this spacebetween an
automatic, non-reflective response and a moral capacitywhich our ethnographic cases may help to broaden.
De Waals Russian doll model of empathy (2009b: 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 2011: 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 (2009b: 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).
E M PAT H Y A N D C U LT U R A L D I F F E R E N C E

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 (2008: 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

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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 (2008: 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 mimicrypkostit (to play dirty tricks) in Yukaghir,
and tiru (to pretend, copy, or mimic) in Indonesianto 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 empathythe emotional and cognitive projection of oneself into the perspective or situation of another for deceptive purposesnot 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.
S I B E R I A : W H E N S Y M PAT H Y W I T H A N I M A L P R E Y I S B A D

In the great catalog of Siberian Yukaghir myths, one stands out. It was first recorded by Waldemar Jochelson (1926: 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 mooses
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 mooses face and looked at it, she presumed that the animal had suffered from her brothers 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

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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 2009), 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 girls 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.
M I M E T I C E M PAT H Y

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 1975; Veverios
de Castro 1992; Fausto 2007; Brightman 1993; Holbraad and Willerslev 2007;
Willerslev 2001; Veverios de Castro 1998). 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 1926: 154; Spiridonov 1996 [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 (1998). 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-humansanimals,
spirits, even inanimate objectsthus 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 1926: 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 2012; Willerslev 2011: 513).

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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 2007: 10010; 2012: 10412). The giant cannibals, for example, are said to turn themselves into beautiful young women and
seduce the human hunters (Willerslev 2007: 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 2001). 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 2004: 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 hunters sexual attention must be directed toward
the animals 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 2001).
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 1993; Kwon 1997; Willerslev 2012: 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: Lets go hunting for moose, but use coded phrases such as:
Lets take a look at the big one, or I am going for a walk. During the hunters
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 2004: 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: otdatsya.) to them (Willerslev 2007: 102).
Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf have noted that seduction, operates on
the imagination of the object of seduction the seducers 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 (1995:

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NILS BUBANDT AND RANE WILLERSLEV

21213). 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 hunters imitation of the moose therefore accomplishes more than simply doubling the externalities of the animals 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 spirits own self-image (Willerslev 2007: 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 preys 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 1926:
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 1993:
18889). 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
mooses 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
animals 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.
S Y M PAT H E T I C M A G I C

Within anthropology, the imitation of human and non-human others has customarily been discussed under the rubric of sympathetic magic, a term famously

T H E D A R K S I D E O F E M PAT H Y

17

introduced by James Frazer (1959 [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 2011:
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
hunters possession the animal itself will follow soon (Lissner 1961: 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
(1993) 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 Taussigs coupling of sympathetic magic with mimesis is that he shows
how mimicrys 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 2012: 475). We saw this distorted
feature in the hunters 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 animals own infrahuman perspective. So the hunters
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.
E M PAT H E T I C M A G I C

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 (1903), who

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was concerned with conceptions of art and the aesthetic, introduced the notion
of Einfhlung, a term that Edward Titchener (1909) translated into English as
empathy. Einfhlung 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 (Wisp 1986: 19). The (wild) animism of Lipps theory of
empathy does resonate in important ways with Frazers 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 2007: 46; Willerslev
2012: 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 2006).
Lipps early theory of Einfhlung 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. Einfhlung, Lipps said, is very different
from Mitfhlung, or sympathy. Empathy is a feeling into an imagined and
emotional projection of ones self, something that, as Titchener later stressed,
had a thoroughly kinesthetic or embodied foundation (1909). Empathy has
both an emotional and a cognitive variant, and both are clearly embodied
forms of knowing.1 However, the emotional nature of empathyand this is
1
There is within the philosophical and psychological study of empathy a great deal of definitional debate about whether empathy is primarily cognitive, emotional, or visceral (Preston and
de Waal 2002; Stueber 2006; Wisp 1986). Our anthropological knee-jerk reaction is to bet on

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19

crucialis not sentimental, as sympathy is. Wisp 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 (1991:
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 pkostit) 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 pkostit.
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 pkostit entail not only similarity
but, importantly, also difference. The hunters 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 1993: 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 2006). 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 empathys condition of being both
inside and outsidepart of, yet also detached from the object imitated
that makes this kind of magic effective in controlling the surrounding world.

all horses and suggest that empathy needs to be seen as simultaneously cognitive, emotional, and
corporeal. The attempt to delimit empathys ultimate cause might be philosophically pleasing but is
likely to undermine the effort to understand it ethnographically. See also Hollan and Throop 2011:
18.

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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 anothers suffering for their own (Wisp 1986: 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 spirits imagination, causing it to desire its own illusory self-image.
From the hunters cleansing of his body in the sauna, through his actual imitation of the animals 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 makebelieve 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 2013: 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 2013: 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

T H E D A R K S I D E O F E M PAT H Y

21

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.
I N D O N E S I A : E M PAT H Y W I T H Y O U R E N E M Y

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 2000: 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
malama 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 letters 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

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NILS BUBANDT AND RANE WILLERSLEV

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 2005; 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 2000: 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 2000). 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 2008; 2009; Hefner 2002; Klinken 2007).
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 peoplea
quarter of the regions populationwere internally displaced (International
Crisis Group 2002: 18).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.

For detailed analyses of the letter and the conflict, see Bubandt 2008 and 2009.

T H E D A R K S I D E O F E M PAT H Y

23

One can argue that the manipulation involved in forgeries like the North
Malukan letter is more sophisticated than the Yukaghir hunters 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 ones
mimicry than at a third party, namely the members of ones 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.
V I O L E N C E A N D V I C A R I O U S I M A G I N AT I O N

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 2009). 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
2005). 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 2000). 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 Suhartos fall in 1998 (Vickers 2005:
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 (1996: 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

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mobilized and legitimated. Appadurais hypothesis of treachery is that brutal

violence becomes a way of dealing with the uncertainties of intimacy and selfidentity in a global world where the political stakes of identity are exceedingly
high, but identity categories also increasingly abstract (ibid., 155; 1998). 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 1996: 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 1999), 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 1998: 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 1947; Connelly 2004; Holt 2004), but the role that empathy might
play in hostile deception and violence is still poorly understood.
The North Malukan letter supports Appadurais 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 2004; Stoler 2009). 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 (2009: 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.
D E H U M A N I Z I N G E M PAT H Y

Applying de Waals 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 others
well-being switched off. In the fake letter from North Maluku and other
letters like it, dehumanization is achieved not by rational objectification but

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25

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 1990; Kelman 1973; Kuper 1982). 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
1989). 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 Throops otherwise excellent introduction to a volume full of intriguing accounts of empathys 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 (2008: 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 empathys partial presence in violence, rather than by assuming that violence takes place only in those moments when empathy is completely
absent.
E M PAT H I C I N A C C U R A C Y A N D P O L I T I C A L I N A U T H E N T I C I T Y

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

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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.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 2000: 67).
The ambivalence of the perspective-taking involved in tactical empathy is
also evident in the letters 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 selfdescription 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 1989: 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 peoples mind well to social success, and empathic inaccuracy to

3
In the Indonesian original, the phrases are Bangkitkan Misi muliah Sang Gembala mendamaikan dunia dalam kasih Tuhan Yesus Kristus, and Salam Oikumene, respectively.

T H E D A R K S I D E O F E M PAT H Y

27

pathological violence (Ickes 1997; 2003; 2009). 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 ones 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 (1993: 1112). 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 mimesisthe magic of sliding symbolically
between photographic fidelity and fantasy, between iconicity and arbitrariness, between wholeness and fragmentation (ibid.: 17)that makes empathic
deception effective.

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NILS BUBANDT AND RANE WILLERSLEV

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 (1998: 55), but during the New Order (19661998) forgery
had, as numerous scholars have described (Bubandt 2008; Heryanto 2006;
Spyer 2006; Strassler 2000), 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 2006). 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
(1999). In a situation of political uncertainty in Indonesian political history,
where truth was at a premium (Bubandt 2014), the very emotional ambivalence
that is built into tactical empathythe 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.
C O N C L U S I O N : T O WA R D A C O M PA R AT I V E S T U D Y O F E M PAT H Y

Violence, far from being the opposite of sociality, is thoroughly social, a visceral kind of language (Das et al. 2000). Violence is a world-making just as
much as it is a world-unmaking through the sadistic potential of language
(Scarry 1985: 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 trickeryto 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

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29

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 2011; Robbins and Rumsey 2008). At the same time, empathy is
not simply culturally relative. We found the same basic and universal mechanisms of empathythe oscillation between stepping into and stepping out of
the perspective of the otherat 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.
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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 goodwith compassion, understanding,
cultural bonding, and non-violent socialityignores 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.