Exploring the role of empathy in a variety of Pacific societies, this
book is at the forefront of the latest anthropological research on
empathy. It presents distinct articulations of many assumptions of
contemporary philosophical, neurobiological, and social scientific
treatments of the topic. The variations described in this book do not
necessarily preclude the possibility of shared existential, biological,
and social influences that give empathy a distinctly human cast, but
they do provide an important ethnographic lens through which to examine
the possibilities and limits of empathy in any given community of
practice.