Empathy, Affect, and Intersubjectivity

Anthropology and Psychology in Dialogue

　　Following in the footsteps of Symposium on the Character of the Chinese, edited by Yih-yuan Li and Kuo-shu Yang and published in 1972—the first interdisciplinary collaboration in examining cultural phenomena—this book is the first in forty years to convene scholars from anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy to discuss how culture and psychology mutually elaborate one another. Based on theoretical contemplation and ethnographic investigation, the authors in this edited volume explore concepts of empathy, affect, and intersubjectivity involved in the process of understanding other cultures, means of knowledge transmission, selves or consciousnesses. We also unfold the challenges involved in understanding others as a dialogic process: the theory of mind, the position of le non-savoir (not knowing), possible observation bias, the art of listening and silence, the contextualization of narration, the negotiation/transformation of multiple selves and consciousness, the performative power of emotion, the representation of the Other, knowledge as an apparatus of discriminatory power, and the commensurability between different systems of concepts. This book is also a tribute to Yih-yuan Li, Kuo-shu Yang, and other anthropologists and psychologists who pioneered interdisciplinary dialogue in Taiwan.