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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 phenomena--hunting and political violence, respectively--has 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 "empathy"--the first-person imaginative projection, at once emotional and cognitive, of oneself into the perspective or situation of another (Hollan and Throop 2011; Wispé 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 (Kögler 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 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 cohesion--goals 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...