Loving Fathers and Deferential Sons: Hermeneutic Respect and the Controversies of Empathy in Nepal

ABSTRACT

Because of a dream, my elderly friend Laxmi Narayan was convinced that his son Prithivi was the reincarnation of his late father. Their apparent contentment in not knowing the other’s ‘inner state’ challenges the assumption that coexistence is achieved through empathic approximations. Rather than strive to bridge the gap through a quasi-first-person perspective, this story suggests that Selves and Others can readily do without empathy in their encounters. Both ‘empathy’ and ‘sympathy’ envisage a very specific way of approaching the other, one which requires otherness to disappear, albeit in different ways. However, the respectful relationships of otherness described in these pages suggest that being-of-the-same-kind is not an essential precondition for being-with-others. This insight undergirds the theorisation of a form of hermeneutic respect crucial to appreciate the articulation of inter-personal and inter-generational relationships in the rapidly changing context of contemporary Nepal.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• sympathy
• respect
• hermeneutics
• otherness
• Nepal

Acknowledgements

This article is dedicated to the memory of Laxmi Narayan Upadhyay, whose kind glance is still very much alive in me, and whose wise words, along with those of his son Prithivi, contributed so much to the articulation of my thought. I wish to express my deep gratitude to Dimitri Tsintjilonis, Diego Malara, Hanna Rauber, Giovanna Gioli, Tracy Ghale, Jeevan Sharma, Emily Yeh, the editors of Ethnos, and three anonymous reviewers for their generous comments and criticisms on earlier drafts of this essay. I also wish to thank for their welcome the graduate community at the University of Colorado Boulder that organised the Himalayan Studies Conference V, where I presented a preliminary version of this essay in the summer of 2017.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This recalls what Roger Lohmann defined as ‘soul travel theory’ (2010: 231), of which there are plenty of ethnographic examples (e.g. Groark 2013: 285; Herdt 1992; Hollan 1989).

2 The ‘top-down approach’ envisaged by Jason Throop to highlight the relevance of empathy even where this is difficult to claim, as in Yap, offers an axiomatic example of such a tendency (2008; also Hollan & Throop 2008: 395).

3 After all, even the so-called Ontological Turn, despite its celebration of the incommensurability of radical alterity, has shown the capacity of understanding others, although in a rather specific way (see Graeber 2015).

4 Jean-Paul Sartre, who described the very presence of an Other as an essential threat to one’s freedom due to the constraints that the agencies of others impose to one’s own, is a famous example (1956: 263).

5 As Ina Zharkevich suggested (2017), the particular temporality of wartime was of paramount importance for the initial acceptance of habits that have later become the norm.

Additional information

Funding

I am sincerely grateful to the following bodies for financial help: The University of Edinburgh (SSPS scholarship; SSPS Ph.D. Fieldwork Fund 2015; SSPS Ph.D. Conference Fund 2015, 2017, 2018; The Tweedie Exploration Fellowship Fund; The Janggen-Pöhn Foundation; The RHW Foundation; The Fondazione Felix Leemann.