Douglas Hollan

Emerging Issues in the Cross-Cultural Study of Empathy

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.

Self Systems, Cultural Idioms of Distress, and the Psycho-Bodily Consequences of Childhood Suffering

In this article, I examine the effects of childhood suffering in two cases – one from my anthropological fieldwork in the central highlands of Sulawesi in Indonesia and one from my psychotherapeutic practice in Los Angeles. I argue that although people will always carry with them the psycho-bodily signature of their past social experience, these signatures are affected by the cultural idioms of distress into which they are woven and from which psycho-bodily attention is channeled and given meaning (or not). However, I also suggest that past social experiences are related to life trajectories in very complicated ways. For example, while the enactment of a cultural idiom of distress may help to resolve or give meaning to a form of illness or distress, it also may cause or exacerbate other forms of suffering – depending on how it is used and articulated by any given individual.

The Relevance of Person-Centered Ethnography to Cross-Cultural Psychiatry

In this article the relevance of person-centered ethnography to cross-cultural psychiatry is discussed. The term person-centered ethnography is first defined, the historical development of this line of anthropological research is traced, and how and why it might be used in cross-cultural psychiatry is examined. Following this introduction current developments in person-centered ethnography are reviewed, while focusing especially on the strengths and limitations of different styles and approaches. General trends and new directions in the field are addressed, rather than examining or referring to details of particular studies.

Culture and Dissociation in Toraja

This article examines the extent to which some psychoanalytic ideas about dissociation and its correlates are useful in helping us to understand possession behavior and related phenomena in places such as Toraja, Indonesia. Although some of these ideas can be useful to us, data from Toraja challenge us to modify some key psychoanalytic assumptions about dissociation. The article demonstrates how cross-cultural data can be used to broaden our perspectives on the construction and breakdown of human consciousness.

Indignant suicide in the Pacific: an example from the Toraja Highlands of Indonesia.

This paper describes and analyzes a type of Toraja (South Sulawesi, Indonesia) suicide in which a person kills him or herself after having been slighted or offended, usually by a close family member. Comparing and contrasting such suicides to similar types found elsewhere in Austronesia-speaking Oceania, the paper argues that self-inflicted deaths of this nature are not so much ‘anomic,’ as suggested by some analysts, as ‘indignant’; they are committed by persons who feel that they have been severely mistreated or abused according to traditional notions of reciprocity, mutual aid, and the dangers of frustrated desire. The paper concludes by suggesting that Durkheim may have underestimated the frequency and importance of ‘indignant’ suicide in ‘traditional’ societies and that, conversely, contemporary analysts may be underestimating the importance of traditional norms and values in accounting for the high rates of suicide found in many parts of the Pacific today.

Sleeping, dreaming, and health in rural Indonesia and the urban U.S.: a cultural and experiential approach.

Sleeping, dreaming, and health or well-being are all closely related phenomena from an experiential and cultural point of view, and yet all three are often studied in isolation from one another. In this paper, I use an ethnographic and clinical lens to compare and contrast patterns of sleeping and dreaming and their relationship to health in a rural Indonesian society and among urban middle class people in the US. I demonstrate how culturally shaped patterns of sleeping and dreaming become linked through social practice and the implication of these practices for health and well being. I underscore, in particular, the seamless connection between waking and non-waking life, how daytime activities affect patterns of sleeping and dreaming, but also how the emotional and behavioral residues of the night affect daytime life and experience. Data for the Indonesia case were collected during extended fieldwork in 1981-1983, while the U.S. data come from my ongoing part-time private practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.

Coping in plain sight: Work as a local response to event-related emotional distress in contemporary U.S. society

This article examines how middle-class psychotherapy clients in Southern California use work as a coping strategy in the aftermath of distressing life events. It begins by arguing why all such distress in the aftermath of unbidden and unanticipated events are “local” distresses, embedded in particular social and interpersonal contexts, and then discusses the various ways in which people may use cultural resources, including ordinary, mundane, everyday routines and practices, such as work, to express and cope with emotional distress. Three case studies are used to illustrate how work can be used to avoid emotional distress, to conceal it, and also to acknowledge and heal it.

The Influence of Culture on the Experience and Interpretation of Disturbing Dreams

The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com This issue is devoted to an analysis of the relationship between trauma and dreams. With the exception of Deirdre Barrett’s 1996 edited volume, this is a relatively understudied subject. Barrett (p. 2) suggests that the lack of attention has come about for two reasons. (i) Until recently many dream researchers—whether or not interested in nightmares and disturbing dreams—following Freud and his theory that dreams are disguised wish fulfillments, have been intent on tracing out the metaphoric and symbolic meanings of dreams rather than investigating what they might be expressing more literally about social and personal experience. (ii) Many trauma researchers, on the other hand, have focused on nightmares and repetitive, intrusive memories and flashbacks more as symptoms of PTSD or other psychiatric disorders, rather than as psychological phenomena worthy of study in themselves. The lack of attention may also have to do with the fact that there is still considerable ambiguity about what should be considered ‘‘trauma.’’ This is reflected in Barrett’s own organization of chapters: dreams following very severe and disturbing events such as war, incest, rape and firestorms are separated from those following the ‘‘Traumas of Normal Living,’’ which range from divorce to bereavement to becoming the recipient of a transplant. The latter types of experiences may surely be quite disturbing for people, but are they ‘‘traumatic’’ in the way we typically use that term?

Cultures and Their Discontents: On the Cultural Mediation of Shame and Guilt

In various parts of Civilizations and Its Discontents, Freud (1930) raises the very important and interesting question of whether social, cultural, and historical contingencies may affect how the process of renunciation and the development of guilt unfolds, but then leaves the question dangling. This article argues that rather than leave Freuds anthropological question dangling, we should take it seriously by examining more closely the phenomenology of human subjectivity in other times and places. The article uses person-centered data and interviews from 1960s Tahiti and 1980s Toraja to suggest that the quality and intensity of shame and guilt in small, face-to-face communities may differ considerably from that described by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents. The paper concludes by arguing that it is to Freuds focus on the experiential dimension of human life to which we should turn when examining discontentment and unhappiness from a cross-cultural point of view. When we do, we return with renewed interest and appreciation to the profound anthropological and sociological questions Freud raised but never answered in Civilization and Its Discontents.

Author reply: The Definition and Morality of Empathy

I respond to two basic questions raised by my commentators: (a) What is the proper definition of empathy?; (b) What is the morality of empathy?