Kagwahiv Mourning

Abstract

It is sometimes averred that empathic understanding cannot be gained of the inner experience of a person of a culture very different from one’s own, at least not deep enough to make possible depth-interviewing of a psychoanalytic sort, either because the terms in which people in some other cultures conceive and talk about their inner life are so different from ours or because empathy and mutual understanding are too difficult across the barrier of radical cultural difference. Rodney Needham, in one recent phase of his thought, has perhaps espoused this point of view most strongly of recent anthropological writers, arguing that “If individual ideation is in part contingent on changeable cultural convention—there can be no prior guarantees that it will be comprehensible to men whose representations are framed by other cultural traditions” (1972:158).